You cannot muster up enough motivation to perform well at a job that you do not enjoy.

Toolaholics Anonymous

Tate Barber 

twitter.com/tatemz

medium.com/@tatemz 

toolaholic: (noun) - A person who, rather than spending time building something awesome, opts to build awesome tools in order to make their dev or build process more awesome in order to build something that will never be as awesome.

An example

Your boss comes in and asks you to make a basic landing page website for a new company initiative on the subject of motivation.

"It is going to simply have a banner image, an informative video, Oooh! And add some of that Parallax! I hear it's kewl!"

You got it boss!

"This is gonna be some of the best code I have ever written! But what will I build it with?"

"I hear ReactJS is pretty cool these days."

rock star dev

The Plan

"Okay, boss! I've been researching a plan. We are gonna build this thing in React - It's kewl! Facebook uses it - and we're gonna use webpack for our build process. And we're gonna host it on AWS as a container inside of a Docker swarm cluster."

le boss

All for a landing page?

Kathy Sierra

Imposter Syndrome

https://davidwalsh.name/impostor-syndrome

I must be the first to know a tool in order to ensure that people don't see me as an imposter.
#devops #fullstackdev #jobsecurity

You might be a toolaholic if...

1. You spend more time tooling or setting up your workstation or dev environment than you do writing some awesome code.

2. You spend even more time scouring tech blogs in order to catch the hottest buzz words in tech.

3. Your coworkers and friends roll their eyes when you say, “Ermagurd! Have you guys heard about DOCKER?!”

4. You regularly are late or last-minute when turning in your projects because your latest tool of choice breaks your project the day before your project’s due date.

5. You regularly offer your opinions on the latest tech buzzword based on that one biased article that you read that one time at that one tech conference.

6. You try to hide the fact that you have only used said tool in a “Hello World” tutorial.

7. You regularly use a fresh and untested tool in production environments without any concerns for maintainability or security.

8. You basically think that everyone that is not using the same tools that you use is pretty much useless as a developer and will probably be fired from their job within the next year.

10. You speak at tech conferences on how to use your latest and greatest tool of choice and mid-presentation, you hit a snag and just end up saying, “Well, I’ll just post the code up on GitHub and you guys can go try it yourself at home.” Two weeks later you still haven’t posted your code because you are already on the next tool.

Recovery

Drop your bias.

Manage your time.

Don't judge.

Hack days

Be honest and humble.

Try it the hard way.

A Paradigm Shift

Your opinion on a tool is only valuable when you have tested it in a real production-viable scenario.

How many hours do you spend setting up your project compared to how long you actually code?

Do you pioneer innovative technologies in pursuit of more functionality and stability or simply for the cool factor?

Stories