Get comfortable with being uncomfortable is a saying that I hear a lot when I’m around tech people, and particularly non-technical people working in tech. I get the feeling when hearing this saying repeated aloud, that my understanding of this it is quite different to the understanding of the people I hear repeating it. In a team-based environment, it is important to voice discomfort at the earliest available opportunity. Whether that discomfort is a result of dynamics in the team, gaps in knowledge and understanding, unrealistic expectations, or any number of other things.

This year one of my goals is to improve my writing skills, and one of the ways I’m working towards that goal is to make sure I write something every day. January was not terribly successful, but February has been a lot better. Initially I was having a lot of trouble getting started, though that has been mitigated by my efforts to consistently write something every day, even if what I start remains incomplete.

At some point over the last two weeks I came across a subreddit about ’non zero days’. As far as I can tell, the community on Reddit sprung up in response to a comment made by ryans01: Rule numero uno - There are no more zero days. What’s a zero day? A zero day is when you don’t do a single fucking thing towards whatever dream or goal or want or whatever that you got going on.

Working in the technology sector as a consultant means that I sometimes find myself working with public figures in the tech community. I can’t think of many points in my life where I have found myself working with people whose talks I have watched on YouTube or whose writings I have read in various publications on a regular basis. Naturally the process of following public figures primarily through the lens of the persona that they expose to the world results in expectations being formed which are rooted in the images that those people aim to project of themselves.

I remember content consumption being quite a simple process before I owned a smartphone. I had some preferred RSS feeds that I subscribed to with a reader of my choice, which I would go through on my laptop whenever I had time and save articles that I was interested in reading later. In the years since I first started using smartphones I’ve gone through a few different mobile-first apps such as Flipboard and Pocket, trying to augment/improve my content consumption workflow, but as of last week it seems I’ve come back around largely to my pre-smartphone habits.

Since the start of the year I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to write more. I realise that many of my biggest hurdles at the moment can be traced a lack of regularity and discipline, but there has been one thing in particular which has caught my attention recently when I’ve been going over topics I’d like to write about: length. I seem to convince myself that if I cannot (or don’t think I can) write about a certain topic up to a certain arbitrary length, it is not worth even trying to put together a post on that topic.

The past month has seen me think a lot about portability in development teams and across environments. The first real development project I worked on last year made use of a utility script which provided a unified development environment interface for all of the developers, a go script. This was something of a revelation, as it really helped with my onboarding and environment setup, and allowed me to be a productive contributor right away.

I went through a period last year where I was listening to a lot of podcasts on the Nerdist network. The stand-up comedians who often feature on various Nerdist podcasts will every so often talk about career progression and recognition in the world of stand-up. A point that has been brought up in those podcasts which continues to resonate with me is to ‘just kill’ (write good material, perform it well, listen to the crowd’s feedback, make adjustments and get a better reaction next time).

Making time is getting harder as the years stack up. The things that I wish I could make more time for are not particularly extravagant. Reading. Exercising. Preparing lunches and dinners in advance. Writing music. Studying foreign languages. Revisiting video games from my childhood. Diving into the history of cinema. Listening to lengthy post rock records without interruption. I had a routine that I really liked towards the end of this summer.