This week was a short one for me as I spontaneously took Friday off - it’s important to take some time for yourself every now and again and I’d been feeling like I needed a long weekend for a little while. It’s Friday as I’m writing this, but I enjoy contributing to my blog so don’t worry, I don’t see this as work! Let’s get into my learnings from this week.

🛑 Knowing when to quit is a good thing

No, I didn’t quit my job, don’t worry! I was just working on a pretty annoying bug this week and last. It was one of those bugs that seemed like a quick fix, but ballooned into something bigger. We’ve been adding logging into our codebase (see last week’s post for the importance of monitoring) and uncovered an issue. I merged a fix that improved our error messaging and made the journey more consistent for our customers, hooray! The error rate went down, but not to zero. Confusing. I spent a frustrating week adding more and more logs to our code to see whether I could figure out where the issue was happening. I could not. In the end I had to admit defeat for a while because other priorities came up and the journey was vastly improved so at least users knew what to do when this error occurred. I still made a ticket for me or someone else to look into this again later though. On a related note, I found out that Datadog notebooks are fantastic for this kind of debugging work - you can copy and paste your widgets right into them, which allows you to build up a picture for anyone who’s interested in the context (and the detail) of your debugging. I might write a separate post about this at some point showing how I would write a document like this. Anyway, not figuring out the bug sucked and it’s going to be bugging me for ages, but perhaps letting it percolate in the background while I do other things and get to know the code better will help me figure it out later down the line.

🙌 AI is a godsend (but always check its work!)

I got asked to put together a report at pretty short notice this week, for something we needed estimates for the next day. I must admit I panicked - I’m still new enough in this role (though coming up to my six month probation!) that I don’t know the codebase all that well and I understood about 70% of the conversation the team and I had in the kick off meeting. I did what I always do in these situations: start writing. I wrote down what the ask was, what outstanding questions I had and what unknowns there were. Then I started filling out the document and I found AI extremely helpful for this. Our documentation is all in Notion, so I asked Notion AI to help me find further documentation to help explain the project we were working on - it found a really helpful document but it was super long so I asked it to summarise for me. Within minutes, I understood the context and was able to write a succinct problem statement. We had a proposed API response to work from, so I fed it into Claude and asked it to figure out how our code would be able to deal with this change - it told me our code was built very resiliently so there was very little we had to do from our side. I went through and checked what it was telling me with my own human eyeballs (because you should always do this - it is frequently wrong in my experience!) and yes, it looked like it was correct. Instead of spending a couple of painful hours agonising over this task and not getting very far, I had a report written for my manager by the end of the day. I admit I was a staunch AI skeptic when the AI craze first started, but I am really coming around.

😫 Isolation can be tough

I have come to realise something about myself in the last year or so, which is that much as I like my own space and love living alone, I actually find working from home all the time quite difficult. I need to fill up my social meter every now and again, a bit like a Sim, and if I don’t, I get quite cranky. I knew going into a fully remote job that this could be a problem and I must admit it has been difficult for me. However, I’m starting to find ways to cope with it. I go into the office twice a month and that seems to be the sweet spot for me - I get to see my colleagues in person regularly without it being a big strain on my energy levels or finances. I also co-work with a few friends who have remote tech jobs once a week - we go around each others’ houses and work in the same space. It means we’re able to fill up our social meters without needing to go into an office and it’s great for me because I get to hang out with an adorable cat (as well as some of my favourite humans)! If you’re struggling with the isolation of working from home, I think it’s super important to build community outside of work as well as in. Go and see your friends regularly, even if it’s just for a quick coffee and a chat. If you don’t have the ability to go into the office, maybe suggest something fun for your team to do that hasn’t got anything to do with work - like a game of skribbl.io, GeoGuessr or if you’re lucky enough to have a willing quizmaster, a weekly quiz (this was something we did at the Economist and I really miss it!). Above all, don’t keep quiet about it - talk to your manager at the very least because this kind of thing can be brutal for your mental health.