Pairing is Caring notes

PAIRING PREFLIGHT CHECKLIST

Personal Checkin
How are you feeling today?
Are there things in your life that may affect your working together?
Take the time to connect personally with your pair.

Always start with this.
Will help each person know where they're at, emotionally. 
Potentially save hours of grief if you know this beforehand.
Makes you feel closer.

Work Approach Checkin
How do you like to work?
How do you approach a challenge?
Let your pair know your preferences so you can collaborate optimally.

Pseudocode first? Just jump right in?
Have a discussion first to decide beforehand and avoid unnecessary problems.

Driver or Navigator?
What is a driver?
What is a navigator?
These terms may mean something different to each pair.

Explain what you mean for these terms. Rarely mean the same thing to both people.

Feedback notes

Why is feedback important?

Learning is soliciting, receiving, and integrating feedback.

Toddlers learn by receiving feedback. Run into walls, bump your head, get burned by something hot. Seek feedback from adults to see if they're doing well.
We're not that different from toddlers.

We sometimes don't behave appropriately in situations because of a long feedback loop.
Health and environment are such long feedback loops that we don't moderate our reactions quickly enough.
DBC wants to give lots of feedback in leadership, teammates, and programmer.

Become Feedback Ninja

Qualities of a feedback ninja:

• People love getting feedback from me.
• People love giving me feedback.
• I love getting feedback from other people.

Requires four skills:

• Soliciting feedback.
• Receiving feedback.
• Giving feedback.
• Integrating feedback.

Request vs Demand.

• Either one elicits very different responses.
• You must be able to say no to requests without feeling like you'll be punished for it.
• You also be must able to not emotionally punish someone else for saying no to your request.
• That's completely OK to say you're not ready to hear feedback or that you're not ready to give feedback.

Receiving feedback
Compass of shame.
We all fall somewhere on the diagram

Withdrawal

• Behavior
• When an emotionally stressful or difficult situation happens, you need to extricate yourself. 
• Walk out or leave the room.
• Need to be alone.
• Emotionally check out.
• Positives.
• Know they need to take things slow.
• To get away from the trigger.

Avoidance

• Behavior.
• Avoid shame by getting into something else.
• Sex, drugs, food, work, etc.
• Need to immediately get caught up in an activity.
• Positives
• They get a lot of things done.
• Funnest people to party with.

Attack self

• Behavior.
• If someone gives me negative feedback and believe it.
• Compound it.
• If someone calls me boring, then my mind will blow it out of proportion and think I'm terribly boring.
• Positives.
• Will never hurt others and can be very loving.
• May even defend others.

Attack others

• Behavior.
• Most socially unacceptable.
• Positives.
• They don't take crap from others.

These are strategies we learned to cope with stress when we were young.

Do not let the strategy own you.

• If your strategy is coming out when receiving feedback, don't compound the shame.
• Take the impulse, notice it, and choose not to completely give into it.
• In the middle of your coping mechanism coming out, just tell the person to hold on a sec and redo.

How to give good feedback

• Actionable
• Specific
• Kind

Actionable is something I can do something about.

• It's not advice.
• Don't critique things that there's nothing that can be done about it.

Specific is self-explanatory.

• Talk about one particular thing.

Kind is not the same as nice.

• Truth is kind.
• Be honest about the impact that person's actions have on you.

DON'TS

Don't give advice unless asked.

• You can point out a problem without needing to give a solution.
• Just because you point out a problem does not mean you have to give the solution right there.
• Giving advice robs opportunity of the person to receive and process that feedback.

Sh*t sandwich.

• If you're going to say something constructive or critical, you have to say two nice things, too.
• It's disrespectful to the person's ability to receive critical feedback.
• Dilutes your positive feedback because I know you'll fake it again.

Rate or compare.

• It aids this inner structure of positioning themselves externally to some other standard.
• "It's so much pairing with you than with that other person."
• "You explain things so much better than this other person."

Barriers to giving feedback

Fearlict.

• Maybe you pair with someone who is an "attack other". You can choose not to confront, but don't live life that way.
• DBC is a safe environment, so you can practice confronting.

Mistrusting our own seeing.

• You don't trust your own intuition.
• Trust your seeing.
• Speak your truth in kindness, accurately, specifically.
• No big deal if someone disagrees with it.

Our seeing doesn't matter.

• You might pair with someone who's better than you and then you shy away from giving feedback because you think you don't have anything worth to say to that better person.
• Speak up.

Integrating feedback

Making it useful to you.

• People will still give you messy feedback. 
• People's emotions might still leak through in the feedback like saying "You were mean." 
• Parse through most of what they say and understand where it's coming from.
• Integrate the feedback and take what's useful to you.

EQ: Emotional Intelligence notes

INTRODUCTION:

Most software projects fail because of human error, not technical knowledge.

Must approach emotions and body.
Yoga
Mindfulness

EXPECTATIONS:

• Should be opinionated about things.
• You are now part of the community and conversation. 
• Stay in the conversation with the community. 
• Be engaged.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
What is it?

• Self-awareness
• Self-regulation
• Empathy
• Social skills

Why is it important?
IQ and analytical skills valued in the past. Google found 6 reasons for good engineers.

• Strong achievement drive and high achievement standards
• Ability to influence
• Conceptual thinking
• Analytical ability
• Initiative in taking on challenges
• Self-confidence

4 of the 6 reasons relate to emotional intelligence rather than intelligence.

Top 2 of the 6 have to do with EQ.

DBC cares about developing the emotional intelligence.

In addition to teaching code, it's to build beautiful things for the world and be happy.

Fallacies

IQ determines success. EQ had a stronger correlation to success in life than IQ did.

"You either have it or you don't". EQ is trainable.

APPROACH

• Approaching competencies, not your behavior.
• Not trying to teach you how to simply play nice. 
• Develop ability to engage emotions and control yourself and regulate.

COMPETENCIES

• Awareness
• Empathy
• Intuition

Awareness is ability to pay attention to your emotions and your physical body.

• Emotions affect your body.
• Develop high resolution of awareness of emotions as they arise. Own your emotions before they own you.
• Slow them down and help you engage with it and help respond appropriately in a situation.

Empathy is same as awareness, but awareness of others emotions. 

• Understand what's happening to a person besides what they're saying to you.
• Leadership is inspiration, empowerment, and compassion.
• Best Navy commanders were the ones who were most emotionally intelligent.
• Leadership is a fluid interactive quality that happens, not a role or job position.
• Ask vs. Need
• What people are asking for may not be what they actually need, deep down.
• If a person is stubbornly telling you to use a while loop in the code, it may not be because the while loop is necessary, rather, they just feel like they're not being listened to. In their insecurity, they just want to contribute.
• Need to be able to listen.

Intuition is your body responding to that awareness.

• Sensation in your body of what's the right direction.

Last day of WebMD

I can't believe this is my last day at work. I tend to express myself better when someone asks me things.

(9:28:20 AM) Eric Han: so how does it feel to be done with webmd
(9:29:00 AM) rob.yang@gmail.com/2581D9C9: disbelief
(9:29:18 AM) rob.yang@gmail.com/2581D9C9: i'm leaving job security, stableness, good boss, accustommed team dynamic
(9:29:38 AM) rob.yang@gmail.com/2581D9C9: i know how to interact with most of the relevant departments here
(9:29:44 AM) rob.yang@gmail.com/2581D9C9: who excatly to get what from
(9:29:54 AM) rob.yang@gmail.com/2581D9C9: and now i'm throwing myself out into newbiness all over again

Just very weird to be leaving behind such a good thing I've built up.

I had a hard time trying to leave my workstation, knowing this would be the last time I'd ever be sitting at this desk with all the mess of things I have surrounding it. Last time I touch this laptop, last time I ever touch any of the ExactTarget setups that I worked so hard to implement or refine.

All of it would be over, as soon as I walk out of the building, the same walk I take every single day without a second thought. Now, that walk would be my last. So weird... it still feels like the same walk I take everyday, the same mundane walk that I take to work, knowing I'm going to be spending another 8 hours of my life there. Or walking out, knowing that I'm going to be back again the next day.

So hard to accept that it's all over. I still feel like I have to get ready for work again for Monday. I have to get my meeting notes ready on Monday morning to talk about what needs to be done or corrected. All those emotions and routines are still engrained.

Gosh, I just can't believe I walked away from 6.25 years at WebMD.

Will probably have more to say in future weeks, as the denial subsides.

Pre Phase 0 exercises - still doing things the hard way

I became a little more acquainted with using the "each" method. I was stumbling over this one in my own self-study before, but now I've got the hang of it.

It runs through each and every element in the array, but the absolute value signs give me some freedom to work with each element it cycles through. Unfortunately, it doesn't natively have anyway of keeping track of which index you're on.

I also learned from other people's solutions that I've been programming things the hard way, writing out copies of arrays and extra variables, unnecessarily.

There are so many simpler ways of doing things, like just sticking everything on the same line as "return", or finding the method for the array that does exactly what I want. I'm reinventing the wheel.

array.min will give you the minimum value stored wherever in your array. No need to rearrange it yourself and try to analyze it. Ruby's got a method for that already.

int vs float

If you divide two ints that should have a quotient of a float, Ruby will just truncate the decimal position. You must recast one or both as floats.

I dislike blogging and writing to myself

Today, I begin a new blog. I've made several in the past, all of which are now dead. I have no driving motivation to keep them going, so they die. But in this case, Dev Bootcamp tells me to keep a blog, so that I can learn the things better.

I will now keep a blog.