Skip to main content

Summer is over and it's time to get back in business

Now that summer is over and summer vacation is just a faint memory in the past it's time to get back in business. This time I'm writing about boring work days and how I'm going to try to overcome that troubling feeling I'm getting.

Background

For the past four weeks in work the days have been repeating themselves. Every day has been like a repeat from the day before but a bit slower. When this happens it means that work tasks are also repeating the same pattern again and again.

For me this is a bad situation!

I know from the past that this is a situation where I'm getting bored and losing my motivation more and more every day. When I'm losing my motivation at work I know I'm also losing my motivation to do anything useful at my free time.

I knew I had to do something so I wouldn't lose interest to everything and one day I would wake up realizing that I've spent six months browsing netflix.

First step

Probably not the first thing I did but one of the firsts anyway. I told my colleagues that I'm having trouble keeping my motivation up so they know that I'm not at my best performance because I've lost my interest and my thoughts are wandering.

Second step

I decided that I'm going to reverse the situation. By reversing I mean that I'm going get my daily or weekly motivation during my free time and hopefully that will also spike up my work motivation. 

The reverse part one

Just this week I signed up for a online course about scala programming. Few of my colleagues attended this same course a year ago and they all said it was a good course so I decided to give it a try. Learning scala, more than I know now, has been on my todo-list for a long time so this seems like a win-win situation.

The reverse part two

The second part of the reverse was to get back to my blog that got on a good start during the first half of the year. Now that I have started writing again let's just hope I can keep this as a habit.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Simple code: Readability

Readability, understandability, two key incredients of great code. Easier said than done, right? What one person finds easy to read and understand another one finds incomprehensible. This is especially true when programmers have different levels of understanding on various subjects e.g. object oriented vs. functional or Node.js vs. Java. Even though there are obvious differences between paradigms and programming ecosystems there are some common conventions and ways to lower the barrier. Different approaches It's natural that in programming things happen sequentally e.g. you can have a list of objects and you need to do various things to the list like filter some values out and count a sum of the remaining objects based on some property. With the given list const stories = [   {name: "authentication", points: 43},   {name: "profile page", points: 11},   {name: "shopping cart", points: 24},   {name: "shopping history", points: 15},   {name: &qu
Read more

Sharing to help myself

It's been a while since my last post but I have a good excuse. I've been in a new customer project (well new for me) for two months now and have absorbed a lot of new information on the technology stack and the project itself. This time I'll be sharing a short post about sharing code and how it can help the one who's sharing the code. I'll be giving a real life example of how it happened to me. My story Back when I was implementing first version of my simple-todo REST-service I used Scala and Play framework for the service and specs2 for testing the implementation. Since then I've done a few other implementations of the service but I've continued to use specs2 as a testing framework. I wrote about my implementation and shared the post through various services and as a result someone forked my work and gave me some pointers on how I could improve my tests. That someone was Eric Torreborre  the man behind specs2 framework. I didn't take his ref
Read more

Simple code: Immutability

Immutability is a special thing that in my mind deserves a short explanation and praise. If you're familiar with functional programming you surely recognice the concept of immutability because it's a key ingredient of the paradigm. In the world of object oriented programming it's not as used and as easy to use approach but there are ways to incorporate immutability to parts of the code and I strongly suggest you to do so. Quick intro to immutablity The basic idea of immutability is unchangeable data.  Lets take a example. We have a need to modify a object's property but because the object is immutable we can't just change value but instead we make a copy of the object and while making the copy we provide the new value for the copy. In code it looks something like this. val pencil = Product(name = "Pencil", category = "Office supply") val blackMarker = pencil.copy(name = "Black marker") The same idea can be applied in functions and metho
Read more