Author Archives: stephboisvert

Why I haven’t been writing much

As I mentioned, I haven’t been writing much recently. The problem with the essence of a blog is that it’s allegedly an online diary. Now that works well and fine if you’re on livejournal as ZergMaster69 and no one has a fucken clue who you are. But the problem is that on a blog you’re exposed((that’s from 2015, but I said basically the same thing in 2017 and 2018 and 2018 again, and 2020 as well)) (you can hover over the footnote number to see the footnote inline). In real life you basically have a few set of archetypes you present yourself to the world with.

Take for example who reads this blog, there’s 4 general category:

  • Family((Mostly my aunts [Hi!]))
  • Co-workers / former co-workers((There’s a bias here to former coworkers who worked at Automattic who potentially followed my blog vs current co-workers who mostly have no clue I have a blog))
  • Friends((Current “real” friends))
  • Random acquaintances((Folks from twitter, high school, university, politics))

Now the problem here is that these people usually get wildly different archetypes and perception on who I am.

Let’s take my most popular post((Now there’s a longer story to that since I thought my parents knew, since I told my dad before we got married and asked him to tell my mom. He clearly forgot, so, you know, they learned from family members who use social media, I’m sure that was a fun time all around)) by far, I think part of it is folks love gossip, and that shit is ripe for gossip. I can only imagine family members((again, probably mostly my aunts)) sharing that via their chat group((potentially via fax machines)). That post breaks the whole archetype I presented to family, (most) co-workers and (most) random acquaintances. I’m sure basically 0% of them would of guessed it.

I’ve mostly not mentioned anything related to poly since because well, again the whole archetype stuff. Unlike Facebook where I can pick and choose who sees updates((and I probably will do that to be honest)) on a blog, well, it’s all public. And let’s be honest, I don’t really want random family members to ask follow up questions on my recent heartbreak, then again, I don’t think anyone really wants to talk about heartbreak with family members no matter the circumstances….

Anyway, all that to say, fair warning you might have to endure some sappy emo shit on this blog for a bit.

I Love Hasan Minhaj

If there’s one person that I think is currently undervalued in the public discourse it’s Hasan Minhaj. He has so many amazing pieces and he isn’t scared to go for the tough questions with people and he isn’t scared of saying it like it is. Here’s a few of his more recent ones.

(His Netflix special is also really really good.)

“Intermediary” programmers

I’ve started running more and more into what one could call “Hype” programmers.

It’s these folks (actually, it’s men, it’s always men) who have read all of hacker news, know all the greatest buzzwords and why you should use tech X over tech Y but have never actually shipped real things.

I should use this deployment strategy or this container orchestration software, but when you dig below the surface, they can’t tell you why.

I think the biggest indicator of someone’s degree of knowledge relating to technology is how many buzzwords they throw at you. The higher the number, the less they actually know.

On No Longer Being The Best

I’m currently working on a Django app (written in the Python programming language). It’s my first time doing any real work with Python or Django and it is painful. It’s painful because it reminds me of when I started doing WordPress work. I did everything all wrong, I was hacking core, I was doing these clusterfuckeries that would be shameful to show now.

The thing is, I got good at WordPress. To the point where I think it wouldn’t be ridiculous to say that I was one of the top hundred most knowledgeable people on WordPress performance at scale. As for Python and Django, I’m currently in the bottom few hundreds.

And yes, it will pass, I will learn and understand the patterns Django uses, start to understand the magic that goes on behind the scenes and know if the random code sample I’m reading on Stack Overflow is correct or should be burned in the fire of the sun.

But right now, it’s painful. Another part of it is I think the fact that the code is publicly viewable by everyone, something that is great in terms of transparency for the Canadian public but it’s tough to show the flaws of my work so publicly. Part of me isn’t sure if it’s my inadequacies or just that they will be public that I’m worried about.

If I’m truly concerned about the quality of the work that will help the healthcare professionals, that’s one thing. But it being because my ego doesn’t want to show how little I know about a certain topic… that’s less great.

Perhaps I’ll just listen to the wisdom of this song which I believe is a ballad about becoming at peace with one’s own limitations and understanding that growth comes at a cost of pain and feeling uncomfortable.

Anyway, that’s my interpretation of the song….

More flowers

I love perennials and they are 95% of the flowers I plant. It’s just so great to have them come back year after year and you can work on creating new beds of flowers instead of just putting them in every year.

This bed actually started with absolutely nothing, but this is the earliest picture I have

And voila 2 months later!

I need to transplant one of the bleeding hearts, they are getting out of control

Here’s another few flowers that came along:

There are also a few “not ready yet” flowers that are coming soon:

Radishes & the right environment for growth

A friend made a really good comment and observation and it highlighted that my post wasn’t as clear as it could of been.

Sometimes mediocrity happens when greatness isn’t given the conditions it needs to thrive.

AD

While I mentioned in passing of sense of reflection on why this happened and taking responsibility for it. I don’t think it was clear that just because someone is not performing as expected or is not a right fit for the organization at this current point in time it implies they are not a great person and that in a different set of circumstances they would be great.

I’ve been that person that was not at the right place at the right time, just as others have. It’s tough in the moment, but it’s better for you in the long run.

Thinning the herd, in the garden and the office

Many vegetable seed packages tell you how far apart you should space, but also when you should “thin” the crops. It’s something I’ve always been bad at. I see a whole bunch of radish tops and I get excited and I don’t want to thin them out. I mean, firstly, mother nature doesn’t thin them out, so I clearly don’t need to.

Also, the idea is that really all I care about is the total amount of radish right? Not exactly that each individual radish is as big as possible, right?

You get this problem in the office as well, and I’ve been guilty of this in the past. The thinking goes that It’s okay to have some low performing folks as long as your total output is higher. It’s okay to tolerate mediocrity because the pain and the work and the impact on morale of going thru firing someone or going thru telling someone their performance isn’t up to par might not be worth it.

The problem is, when I had many radishes growing in close proximity none of them really matured, they were just some weird radish-like monstrosities.

And I’m sure you can figure out with the foreshadowing here, my thesis here is that the same happens in an office. When you start to accept mediocrity, you end up having more and more mediocrity.

It’s really tough and really challenging to have all the hard conversations about performance. It’s tough to take the time to reflect on why you hired these people, what influenced your decisions that proved to be wrong, what mistakes you made, how you could of better set them up for success. It’s really tough to accept that you made a mistake and you need to address it, that you need to then follow thru on firing those people (performance improvement plans rarely, if ever, fix the situation).

I haven’t always been able to do that hard work, and it’s always easier to see problems when it’s not you who has to deal with them, but hiring and firing is the most important thing to an org. It’s the one thing you should devote the most resources to.

Who you have on your team is more important than your team’s mission or it’s strategy. It’s more important than how you do things, it’s more important than the right leadership. Having the right people will let you improve your strategy, it’ll help you tweak your mission. Having the best strategy doesn’t matter if you don’t have the right people. So start pulling out the bad radishes as soon as possible.