currently at my second engineering clean-up week. This time, instead of assisting someone with the finance requirements, I’m actually assigned to fix some shit. v exciting. actually suprized how not intimidated I feel right now, given how absolutely drowning I definitely am. well, maybe not drowning, but definitely the slowest, least valuable person in the room and i understand about 50% of the idle chatter. and this is a gamified such that there’s teams and scoring for who can accomplish the most during the week. and it’s absolutely going to take me all week to do the one thing I assigned for myself.  and for some reason, I’m oddly at peace with that.

taking a break from digging to share a parallel I noticed between when I first moved to Seattle and learning programming.

During lunch today, I listened as people talked about some paper on consensus algorithms, the philosophy behind incremental version updates for Rails and a talk someone gave at a conference. I contributed literally nothing. Except that I did know the version of rails we use 🙂 But I silently made notes of all the things I was going to google later. And instead of feeling left out or overwhelmed, I was excited about all the new stuff I was gonna learn later.

I used to do the same thing when I first moved to Seattle only the subject was music, webcomics and all things meme. I remember being out with friends and they would talk about Band of Horses and XKCD and some song about George Washington. And I’d make lists upon lists. Then at night, I’d sit in front of my computer and experience the most incredible art and comedy. And I loved it.

And then I can pinpoint the day when I remember feeling “up to speed” and someone mentioned a band I hadn’t heard of. And I said “i’ve never heard of them?” and as is common in seattle, i got the hipster “seriously? you’ve never heard of them?” and I said no, and THEN got my explanation.

and afterward, a friend of mine texted me and said “i’ve never heard of them either :)”

and i remember very clearly thinking “i will approach every new culture like this. i will be silent and furious to learn and when i am ready I will never be afraid to ask questions.”

and maybe i’m not intimidated right now because i’m so excited about this entire new culture. there’s slang and  and slang and swag and elitism and it’s all so fucking exciting.

< digress >

it’s funny because most of the world approaches new relationships this way but wants to skip to the part where they fit into a new role. but i’m the opposite. totally comfortable being the new kid and love the honeymoon bubble of a new role, but hate that part of getting to know another human being. maybe it’s because i’m in control in one and not the other.

</ digress >

for fun- i’ll end by sharing today’s list of things to google:

1. Read the Raft Paper

2. what is a linter?

3. PCI’s role in eng

4. Spinal Tap (not the band)

5. What’s a trebuchet?

 

theeeeee end