📝 My User Manual

Hey there,

Welcome to my user manual! I’ve written it to help coworkers get to know how I work, and my quirks. This document is a work-in-progress (obviously) and things will be adjusted based on my current team.

Latest update 2024/07/26.

My role at #{your_organisation}

My official titles usually are “back-end developer”, “software engineer” or “fullstack developer”.

I’m here to translate business needs into code. This follows two main paths:

• Building new features.
• Consolidating the codebase: building test coverage, refactoring, YAGNI-ing your codebase.

What I value

• Calm environments: Clear processes over chaos, product clarity, deep focus over long hours, written documents over Slack conversations.
• A focus on creating useful features for users.
• Warm, kind, supportive colleagues in a high-trust environment.

My style

• Playing the long-game: I’ll often advocate for that extra refactoring or for taking the time to find the appropriate abstraction over rushing a half-assed feature to the finish line.
• Reducing complexity: This ties with the long-game. My goal, as a programmer, is to build applications that are robust, self-explanatory and with as little complexity as possible. Shameless-green code > cleverish-egotistical code.
• Explicit > Implicit: Implicit breeds misunderstandings. I will always try to be as explicit as possible.
• Autonomy: I favour autonomy and I like to create environments that empower people to be so: clear processes, clear channels of communications, etc.
• Laughing: I laugh often and super loud, please adjust the output settings of your headset. 😅

What I need to improve, work-wise

• Don’t overengineer it: a common default in my line of work.

Best way to communicate with me

I prefer asynchronous communication. Here’s a breakdown:

• For general communications: Slack messages.
• For urgent communications: Slack or videocalls.
• For technical communications (feature spec, postmortems): Notion/Linear/etc issues, Github pull requests.
• For administrative communications: emails.

If you send me something urgent there, please ping me on Slack.

Most notifications are muted on my machine. When I read your message, I’ll mark it with a “memo” emoji (📝) so you know I’m not ghosting you. If you need me urgently, please let me know so I can prioritize your request. Focus is my main priority, though.

Working hours

• I’m a 9 to 5-ish person.
• I currently don’t work Wednesday mornings.

How I give feedback

• Explicitly.
• Always striving to be fair and kind.
• On your pull requests: I try to stick to conventional comments.

How I like to receive feedback

• Explicitly.
• Always striving to be fair and kind.
• On my pull requests: I’d strongly encourage you to stick to conventional comments. This will help with points #1 and #2.
• I like getting 1:1 with my managers on a monthly basis.

What I have zero patience for

• Toxic behaviors: misoginy, racism, contradictory demands, harassment, ghosting, etc.
• Micro-management.

What people misunderstand about me

I believe in a job well done, in being nice to other people, etc.

What I don’t believe in are “grand mission” statements, motivational posters and the usual tech brouhaha.

I also have strong boundaries around work. This will sometimes pass as being not engaged enough but let me assure you:

Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano.

Topics I’m always happy to talk about

You won’t shut me up about hiking, climbing, cooking, raising kiddos, pour-over coffee nerdism.

I can also be quite a bore when it comes to art history - specifically stained-glass, medieval churches and Roman mosaics.

Other things you might want to know:

• Fruit on pizza? How dare you? Of course, fruit on pizza! You snob!
• My coffee order: I start every day with a V60 pour-over filled with Ethiopian beans, lightly roasted. Gee, now I want a coffee, wait for me.
• I don’t drink any alcohol. Kombucha I love, though.
• My favorite GIF: