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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.

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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.

Garden beds

I’m not sure if I did an update on the garden bed since the first one was built. We’ve now added 2 more. Only one more of them with the landscaping ties, the last one with fence board (we had more dirt and we didn’t want to really pay the extra for the landscaping ties on the last one. We’ll probably redo it in ~5 ish years if/when the wood starts to rot.

  • I feel like I should of adjusted the lighting on this picture….
  • This is a reverse angle shot of the second one (8 feet by 32ft)
  • The area under the mulch is not good dirt, we dug a bit lower on the sides and put the dirt there so we can walk in between the rows.
  • The second one is 8 feet by 32 feet
    The back row is mostly raspberries and asparagus
  • The “second one” (front) also has lettuce, cucumber, squash, watermelon, radishes, blackberries, beans and beats.
  • The back one has 5 Haskap plants
  • The last one is half flowers, half vegetables (and 10 blueberry bushes)

Garage

I love the re-store, it’s the habitat for humanity store where you can buy random building supplies. You never know what you’re going to find, but whatever it is, it’ll be a good deal and the money goes to habitat for humanity.

Anyway last year sometime I found these rocksolid garage floor coating for $50 a box (usually ~250). The reviews are a bit hit and miss, but most of them just mentioned that you’d need more than they said. So since I thought our garage was around 500sqft I bought 5 boxes which would allegedly do more than enough (625sqft).

Turns out our garage is more like 625sqft and putting just the right amount on was really not enough. You could see thru the coating to the floor.

It was a pain to get on and it took way longer to dry than they mention (they said 8-12h, but it wasn’t really ready even after 72h.

We got some more boxes after complaining to rustoleum and while it’s a bit better it’s still not great.

Anyway, here’s how it looked like:

We plan on adding another 3 boxes that we’re getting from rustoleum and we’re hoping it’ll be a bit smoother and less spotty. We’ll see. Either way, our garage is now ready to play ball hockey in.

Projects as a distraction

Recently I feel like I’ve been using projects as distractions. The Garden beds, the lawn, the garage, the lights, the trees, the posts, the deck. I’ll do individual posts on those because, why not, but I think it’s a bit of a response to the whole situation.

It seems so many people are looking at ways to get control over the situation. Sometimes it manifests itself as folks pretending everything is fine and they don’t need to do anything such as the protests against the stay at home orders in the US for example or folks going over the top and staying home 24/7 and using Lysol on everything that comes into the house.

It seems a natural thing for folks to want to have control over something when they don’t have it in other parts of their lives.

It makes me wonder what decisions or actions I’ve taken, not because I really wanted that outcome as much as to assert control over something. Maybe I didn’t need to eat those 4 frozen yogourt bars….