January

We’ve spent the whole of January in Tenerife with group of great friends (people) from the office. The coffee and pastries consumption was through the roof and apart from work we managed to squeeze in a lot of fun as well: night hike to Teide, paragliding, surfing, and plenty of dinners, walks, and deep talks. In short, I had fun, felt happy, and enjoyed the company. 32 days was admittedly a lot and the productivity was on decline in last 2 weeks so one consideration for next iteration of the Winter Berlin Escape would be to make it shorted or take more days of full time off.

This month Hashicorp released their RFC management tool called Hermes and we had a long discussion about the absence of a proper RFC process at SumUp. In my opinion this hinders cross-team collaboration, undermines enforceability of company-wide standards, and makes it hard for non-senior engineers to raise issues to higher ranks. The dream would be to have something like Oxide’s RFD 1 and a management system that would consolidate RFCs from all tools that we use right now (Confluence, Google Docs, GitHub) into single tool that would make it easier to discover, follow, and reference RFCs.¹

Reading

• Mike Acton’s Expectations of Professional Software Engineers.
• Iteration isn’t just for code: here are our latest API docs. Yet another reminder of how poor are we doing public APIs at SumUp.
• A Boat Fire Killed 34 People, and We May Never Know Why
• Why are you so busy? - you should ever be so busy only on purpose.
• It Hurts to Ask

  We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be an excuse, a refusal reveals that the person in need, or the relationship, is not valued very much. We show that a failure to ask can occur even when most helpers would help if told about the need, and that even though a greater need makes help both more valuable and more likely to be granted, it can reduce the propensity to ask. Furthermore, when potential helpers concerned about the recipient’s ask-shyness can make spontaneous offers, this can turn out to be a double-edged sword: offering reveals a more caring type and helps solve the failure-to-ask problem, but not offering reveals a not-so-caring one, and this itself deters asking. This discouragement effect can also generate a trap where those in need wait for an offer, while potential helpers wait for an ask, resulting in significant inefficiencies.

• The Great People Shortage is coming — and it’s going to cause global economic chaos

This month I learned

• Preparedness Paradox - The preparedness paradox is the proposition that if a society or individual acts effectively to mitigate a potential disaster such as a pandemic, natural disaster or other catastrophe so that it causes less harm, the avoided danger will be perceived as having been much less serious because of the limited damage actually caused. The paradox is the incorrect perception that there had been no need for careful preparation as there was little harm, although in reality the limitation of the harm was due to preparation. Several cognitive biases can consequently hamper proper preparation for future risks.

Watching

• Walmsley Part 3 Presented by Wahoo + HOKA - Jim Walmsleys 4th place on UTMB
• Suits rewatch in late evenings.

Listening