i know this was a self-serving post (god help anyone who actually read this),

but in an industry that spends a lot of time communicating that we're replaceable cogs, i think it's important to remind yourself of your worth

also like ... i don't myself too seriously

like yes, we have a job to do, but we're also humans

i believe we should be humorous and playful and make the time we spend together joyful

i'm also not afraid to ask questions or say that i don't understand things

because i speak up, my team gets answers they were too afraid to ask (this has been confirmed several times)

or my questions help people find flaws in their design logic

i also care deeply about service health - thanks to past traumatic oncalls - so i fix things when i know they're broken, or if i don't have the budget, i write a well documented ticket so others can pick up the task

second, i care about craftsmanship, not just because i want to go good work (and i do) but i want to make it easier for the person behind me to do good work too

if people look at my code and think "wait what is going on?" i've failed

unfortunately because this is hard to quantity in metrics, this also means this quality can be hard to find in other engineers as there are no incentives for being a good contributor to the knowledge bank

and i believe this quality won't get me any promos ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

this, unfortunately, is hard to quantity in metrics

but i know it's true because of the times people have referred to my previous slack posts, or when people ship my PRs quickly because everything is self-explanatory

if i solved a problem, others have the tools they need to build on top of my work

this means my presence on a team helps productivity

first, i'm a stickler for good communication - everything i do is a form of documentation: slack messages, jira tickets, pull requests, and ofc actual documentation

everything i do is in support of the knowledge bank

^ a natural consequence of my former career as a content writer

it soothes my soul

[insert obligatory pnw "brought the rain with me joke"]

*to listening to it

nice looking forward to it