Last week I participated in a panel discussion for SFELC Conf2020: an engineering leadership conference. The topic of discussion was How To Influence Others As A Senior IC.
Will Larson asked me a thought-provoking question that inspired me to write this post!
The Question
What are the anti-patterns of influencing? What are the approaches to influencing that folks should try to steer away from?
I gave the following presentation at INSPIRE: Mentorship Day March 26, 2016 at the Intrepid Museum.
This event was part of GOALS (Greater Opportunities Advancing Leadership and Science) for Girls. This program aims to increase the presence of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.
For more info about this program: http://www.intrepidmuseum.org/GOALSforGirls
Or view directly in the embed below:
Keynote – Jacob Kaplan-Moss – Pycon 2015
Keynote – Gabriella Coleman – PyCon 2015
Julia Evans – Systems programming as a swiss army knife – PyCon 2015
David Beazley – Python Concurrency From the Ground Up: LIVE! – PyCon 2015
Allison Kaptur – Exploring is never boring: understanding CPython without reading the code
Type Hints – Guido van Rossum – PyCon 2015
Curtis Lassam – Hash Functions and You: Partners in Freedom – PyCon 2015
Sasha Laundy – Your Brain’s API: Giving and Getting Technical Help – PyCon 2015
Brandon Rhodes – Pandas From The Ground Up – PyCon 2015
Kate Heddleston – How our engineering environments are killing diversity (and how we can fix it).
Amy Hanlon – Investigating Python Wats – PyCon 2015
Raymond Hettinger – Beyond PEP 8 — Best practices for beautiful intelligible code – PyCon 2015
Brett Slatkin – How to Be More Effective with Functions – PyCon 2015
the truth of x == y does not imply that x != y is false […] Mind == blown and mind != blown.
pro tip: when defining ‘__eq__’ also define ‘__ne__’ its reflection method
operators like ‘<‘ have reflection properties to handle ‘>’ when overridden
right-side reflection for left-side method
how much of life is wasted by not reading documentation first?
python has a NotImplemented error. singleton constant
MRO –> method resolution order –> use the more specific class’s methods, regardless on which side of comparison
this is the reason to use mix-ins as opposed to normal inheritance
test ALL the things
import operator module to test all the cases for bitwise and arithmetic operators
eq, ne, lt, le, gt, ge – check for existence, return the thing or NotImplemented
@functools.total_ordering – may drastically reduce the code
comparison methods are well documented. fairly robust methodology to learn which method to use on right/left side. complex so need to test.
comparison methods do not need to return bools, so you can do whatever you want. harness asymmetrical and non-boolean comparisons… useful for lazy-loaded filtering, iteration
As soon as you feel a strong sense of accomplishment or failure, switch tasks.
After finding a job and some reflecting, I felt compelled to write this post. Why? Because almost everyone I know stresses out during the interview process.
dilbert.com
My greatest weakness is that I don’t know how many ropes you need to burn to make manhole covers square.
Rocksmith 2014 is my new favorite video game
Learning a new skill takes dedication and practice. This is hard work and can be a slow, frustrating process. Last month, I hooked up a bass guitar to Rocksmith 2014. Not one of those plastic toy guitars that comes with other video games, but a REAL bass. Why a bass not a standard guitar? Because basses are badass.
TL;DR: To get better at something, practice. To form a habit, commit to do it often.
This is a story about challenging myself to get into a good habit. About a hundred days and a week ago, I started Hacker School. The first day there, I learned how to use GitHub. That same day I decided to commit to committing, as part of my quest to become a drastically better programmer.
i think everyone spending a day learning to github would make a bigger impact on the world than spending a day learning to code
— Aidan Feldman (@aidanfeldman) January 15, 2014
A week later, I realized that I messed up my streak, by forgetting to commit over the weekend. Doh!
At the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat
-Roosevelt
motivation
punkrockpolly 