The Necessity of Balance

Posted December 10, 2018

Learning to code takes concentration and commitment, but all code and no context make Jill a dull developer.

As part of my PR chair duties for Kansas City Women in Technology, I wrote a newsletter article about member Jessica Kincaid, who's also a teacher and Resident Artist in the Charlotte Street Foundation Studios. Her works are on display at the Mobank Artboards on Southwest Boulevard through February 2019, and she's a great member spotlight candidate.

Our conversation touched on a couple of recurring themes I've considered blogging about lately, so I'm going to synergize them here. In no particular order, these are the questions I've been pondering that I think include "balance" in their answer:

• What do I bring to the team that no one else offers?
• Why are some mentors so poorly suited to the task?
• What — besides coding skills — makes a great developer?

My versatile, value-add skill set

In a World Cafe interview I recently heard, one of the musicians posed this question: "What do you bring to the band (or team, or role) that no one else can offer?" He was obviously talking about guitar styles or songwriting specialties, but after six months or so of interviewing, it's a question I'm surprised nobody has asked. When they do, I'll say something like this ...

What I bring to any team is a strong ability to learn that's tempered with the drive to fine-tune my existing development, content and functionality knowledge. You can count on me to display integrity — respect for deadlines, accountability, consistent best effort — but still have a sense of humor. I respect authority, but I'll also speak up to ensure we deliver the best possible product. And because I'm older and have evolved along with the Internet, I can balance and mentor younger developers with my life experience and soft skills.

The mystery of the myopic mentor

What can I say, I read a lot of Nancy Drew mysteries back in the day.

My mother the crossword-puzzle buff used "myopic" all the time, and although it's still kind of a logophile favorite, "lack of imagination and narrow-mindedness," a.k.a. myopic, perfectly describes why I think many well-meaning mentors fail at the task. They forget what it's like to hit walls at every turn. Mistake overwhelming confusion for laziness. And flat-out forget how to empathize.

If you want to help new developers, can I make a suggestion? Keep the buzzwords to a minimum and the empathy dialed to 11. If that balance is wildly reversed — as it was in a Meetup I'll never make the mistake of attending again — all you have is a roomful of confused newbies nodding their heads because they're afraid to ask questions for fear of being ridiculed. And it won't be long before you're mentoring a bunch of empty chairs.

Everyone needs time for dreaming

That subhead is a verbatim Jessica Kincaid quote, and I couldn't agree more. I've literally felt parts of my brain come back to life since I started learning JavaScript and its associated libraries and frameworks, like the word "chemise" popping into my head while I was folding shirts in my laundry. What other explanation could there be for decades-old French vocabulary showing up front and center in my hippocampus?

On the flip side of those memory rushes, I've also started dreaming in code again, just like I did when I first learned HTML. Jessica's wisdom about saving your brain's rest time for something other than recapping code makes sense. On one hand, you can't help it; the subconscious is gonna do its thing. But making room for other activities in your waking hours and consciously keeping your mind open to other topics, ideas and activities can give your brain a few more channels to choose from when it hits the "start" button during your REM cycle.

It's a crazy world out there, fellow developers, and it's easy to lose yourself in the quest to learn everything. But don't forget about the hobbies and pastimes (like Grandma-Macklemore mashups) that bring you happiness and make you an interesting person. And whatever you do, make time for (noncoding) dreams.