Last Friday in my 1:1 with my boss, I came in quite frustrated as a result of a code change that I had to roll back that morning. He rightly observed a few facts. 1) I have only been at my new job for 2 months, so I am still new to the code so I needed to cut myself some slack, but more importantly 2) he has observed that I feel that I have failed if something does not work well the first time I deploy it. While related to 1, it speaks to a good observation about myself and also another subtle learning I have to make about my new role.
The less interesting point is that I am a perfectionist and I need to work on being more forgiving with myself. Noted.
The more interesting point I think is to expand on his statement “I expect that my code will work properly when I release it the first time.” I thought about that a lot over the weekend and I actually think there is an addition to that statement that explains my frustration better. “I expect that my code will work properly when I release it if I expect my code to work properly.” This is a weird circular statement; let me explain.
When I work on a code change, I have an internal sense of how I want the code to work, how risky I think the change I am making is, and the areas where I think there could be problems. A lot of this is intuition. And I do not propose to release my code until I have reached a certain comfort level that I understand the “shape” of the code and its impact on the system when it is released. The frustration came from my intuition of the risk of what I was releasing being way off base.
This intuition will only come with time so for now all I can do is be kinder to myself until it gets more accurate.
(Apologies for the bad title. For whatever reason I couldn’t get past mixing Great Expectations with The Wrong Trousers.)