Today we talk about mental health, burnout, therapy, productivity, relationships, and the big topics that make a life worth living.
Everything to do with software and nothing to do with software.
What is the point of being productive if we lose ourselves and hurt our relationships in the process? Sascha takes us through his journey from burnt-out software developer to a balanced life.
From his website: "Sascha Wolf is a Software Developer at 7mind. He is also a loving husband, father and avid roleplayer. He reads a lot, loves a good science fiction movie and likes to engage in thought-provoking conversations from game design to system architecture or the meaning of life."
Join us for out most heartwarming episode as of yet.
Links
Psychological Safety
Brené Brown
Team Topologies
Sascha Wolf Website
Sascha's Twitter
Dockyard Academy
---
Want to learn more about LiveView Native? Take my CodeBeam America Workshop on March 6, 2024.
For the latest updates on DockYard Academy, join our Newsletter.
Today we talk about mental health, burnout, therapy, productivity, relationships, and the big topics that make a life worth living.
Everything to do with software and nothing to do with software.
What is the point of being productive if we lose ourselves and hurt our relationships in the process? Sascha takes us through his journey from burnt-out software developer to a balanced life.
From his website: "Sascha Wolf is a Software Developer at 7mind. He is also a loving husband, father and avid roleplayer. He reads a lot, loves a good science fiction movie and likes to engage in thought-provoking conversations from game design to system architecture or the meaning of life."
Join us for out most heartwarming episode as of yet.
Links
Psychological Safety
Brené Brown
Team Topologies
Sascha Wolf Website
Sascha's Twitter
Dockyard Academy
---
Want to learn more about LiveView Native? Take my CodeBeam America Workshop on March 6, 2024.
For the latest updates on DockYard Academy, join our Newsletter.
Hello everyone, my name is Brooklyn Myers and I am an Elixir newbie. My goal is to help people adopt Elixir and grow as developers while doing the same myself. I do that by documenting and sharing my own experience in the Elixir industry. It's been an incredible journey so far and I look forward to taking the next step with you. So let's jump in to the Elixir newbie podcast. Hello everyone, welcome to the Elixir newbie podcast. Today I am joined by Sasha Wolfe, who is one of the hosts of the Elixir Mix podcast, which was one of the podcasts that inspired me to get into podcasting and also to explore more about Elixir. He is also the author of the Konega library, which is an opinionated way of dealing with behaviors. Sasha, I want to thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2:It's a pleasure to be here. I mean, we had you recently on Elixir Mix, so I am just returning the favor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like I have been circling around the podcast. We had Adi over here, and then you all had me over, and now we are having you over, and I think this is just what we are going to do now. Let's set up a rotating schedule or something. Actually, if you want, you can host my podcast I will host yours for one, we can do it for three.
Speaker 1:It will be great. Last podcast, you and I got to talking about TTRPGs and realized very quickly that we could probably just talk forever, regardless of the topic because we were just having such a good time. So I hope folks go over there and check out that episode if they want to see what this is like in reverse. And so I was really excited to have you on and get to talk more about programming. Maybe we will talk more about Dungeons and Dragons, because if I can warm that into a conversation, I always will. And yeah, I'm really curious to hear kind of your story of how you got into Elixir. I'd love to know where did that begin?
Speaker 2:I'm going to start with where Elixir story begins, but I'm also going to take a step back from that to kind of talk about where, in general, my whole career went through, because I feel that it's interesting and also maybe a bit exciting with you interesting for some folks out there. My journey with Elixir began when I started at an agency and they don't like the word agency, they don't like to describe themselves as an agency, but they were an agency and it was an IoT, more heavy agency and they were using Elixir. Nowadays they actually aren't anymore because of hiring reasons but back then Elixir was the weapon of choice and I started as like mid-level, barely out of junior-ish back-end engineer there and we had a whole slew of colleagues that were a lot more experienced with Elixir. And that was back then. I don't remember the version number, but it was before the format existed, so it's been a few years. And, yeah, I worked there for like two-ish years and this particular company I wasn't even working on an IT project.
Speaker 2:It was a different thing, but honestly, it doesn't really matter and I had a very luxurious experience, a very privileged experience, of working with people that were a lot more familiar with Elixir than I am. So I could literally at any moment in time ask somebody which knew more than I did and that kind of kickstarted and supercharged, honestly, my knowledge and my productivity with Elixir. Because back then, while the community, while the tooling was pretty decent, there was still a lot more rough gadgets in the edges than there are nowadays. For example, like the config module didn't exist there, there was still the mix config and then you had the host to okay, how do you do runtime configurations? That was difficult. Releases were a lot more finicky, not part of mix yet, again, formatting. So we had a whole slew of discussions on how do you format this right. But the core of a language was already around and to be able to work with colleagues that had a lot more experience under that, that was a super valuable experience.
Speaker 1:There's a really huge learning jump you get when you start to get to work with other people. I think that most folks should really. If you haven't already had a tech job, focusing on getting that tech job makes a lot of sense as opposed to learning independently, because the pace that you learned when you're, say, solo learning is so much slower than when you get to learn in the context of real world problems, of having knowledgeable people seeing how they do things. There's certain advantages you get when doing that. I'm really curious, do you think? Because there's a certain advantage you get from getting into a language early, right, but there's also disadvantages that come with that. Do you think Elixir is easier to learn now or easier to learn back then? There's more features added to a language that increase what you have to learn, but there's also more resources. So I'm curious, how do you think that has changed since you got into it?
Speaker 2:I think the honest answer is the classic senior answer. It depends. If you come to Elixir with a clear idea okay, this is the kind of stuff I wanna build with it. For example, I wanna build a web API or I wanna build web applications in general, right, then I feel it's easier nowadays because also Phoenix is a lot more polished Again, the release pipeline, getting things into productions, a lot more polished. I think even Phoenix allows you to generate a Docker file nowadays.
Speaker 2:There was still a host who were finicky things back then. I remember wrestling and writing a whole bunch of Docker files myself and it was never easy. So if you have a clear idea of what kind of technological direction you wanna take inside of ecosystem at Elixir, I think it's easier now. But if you come to Elixir more and honestly I think that this is probably a very common experience when you start out as an engineer, where you don't really quite know yet what you want to do I think it can be harder because while it's super exciting to see all the different new domains Elixir is exploring, I mean among them machine learning, right. Also, nervs is really a sort of piece of engineering at this point, so you can do a whole slew of things with Elixir, but again, then there's a wide swath of topics you could in theory look into all, with a little idiosyncrasies, with a little differences, and I think that can feel overwhelming, honestly, at least I mean, for example, me at this point.
Speaker 2:I've been working with Elixir professionally for six years or longer and I still haven't dealt with all the machine learning stuff. Yet I have no clue. I also really haven't dealt that much with lifebooks, like I know. There are things I've played around with them one afternoon, that's about it. So even for me as somebody who has been in this ecosystem for quite a while, there are still topics I have no freaking clue about. And when you come to the ecosystem as an UB and you don't really have an idea yet what you want to do, I think that can be quite overwhelming to the same degree a similarly degree like how, coming to a JavaScript life, like okay, which web framework should I'm supposed to use? Which single-page thingy?
Speaker 1:Oh, all of these change so quickly right, there's a really common feeling I see early career devs experience which is that, the feeling that there's something that you should know. You don't know what it is, but you feel like everyone else knows it and yeah, I know exactly what you're saying. Yeah, I think that is just a common experience and, frankly, I don't even know how much that experience goes away. Like, I still feel like that all the time, right, and so it's. I see my students experience it, I see other developers experience it, and part of that, I think, stems from there is just so much to learn in terms of you know, programming is hard and there's so many different areas you can go to. So if you're not really concrete about what it is you want to learn, yeah, information overload is a very real thing.
Speaker 1:I would say I don't think it's, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. I don't think it's as bad in, let's say, elixir as it is in something like JavaScript, where if you want to pick web development, well, there's like five major frameworks that you can pick in that ecosystem and there'll be a new one next Friday, and so there's also just like the paralysis of choice in that ecosystem. I think with Elixir I don't see quite as much of that paralysis. It seems like we've, I think, done a better job of unifying for the most part, but there is still a huge mountain to learn. So you gave a really great talk and I'd love to hear more of your thoughts about. I think that the title was you Know Nothing. Is that right? Yeah, I think this was-.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it wasn't. You know nothing, or do you, or do you? That was a question following up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think this kind of relates to what I think was kind of the theme of that in some ways the experience of not knowing things and how I've also seen some messaging you put out around the like you are more than the sum of the knowledge that you have, and I see a lot of early career devs get kind of discouraged by companies and people who make them feel like that's what they are Like if you don't know the thing, you have no value, you have no worth, and there could be some, I think, very negative experiences, say in interviewing for example. So I'd love to hear what your thoughts are with regards to maintaining self-worth when not knowing things and just kind of dealing with that feeling of, okay, I don't know things, but that's okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is a very good question and, honestly, one which I feel is a lifelong journey working on. I'm not going to take the opportunity to do what I said earlier, to take a step back and from where I started with Elixir and, in general, talk about where I started with my career, because I feel that gives context to what you're asking. So I studied not really computer science, I studied scientific programming. It's called. It's like a dual studies course where you both have like a training and also studying and that is like a very math heavy. It's basically like computer science, but with more math, and I studied that. I started doing that in 2010, like right out of school, got a bit lucky with starting there because somebody else jumped off, so I got kind of a head start. But that was, all in all, pretty good for me because it was more of not a traditional university experience, but you actually had your day to day job there, right, but you also the university stuff was also on the same vicinity. So like some days you had university stuff, some days you had work, and for me that was pretty good, because I also mentioned that on Elixir makes and I've also mentioned it on Twitter. But I lived with ADHD and back then I didn't knew, so this kind of structured environment was very good for me. Yeah, I finished in 2013, with a lot of support also from my then girlfriend, now wife, writing my bachelor thesis. I probably would have never done that if it weren't for her.
Speaker 2:And then I started my first job at also again like some some IT agency house, and that was working as a software engineer with Java for Volkswagen. So I wasn't directly employed at Volkswagen, but like a subcontractor basically, and yeah, that was just an in house thing, building some software that was used for building, building builds between different departments not really exciting stuff and but that was my first job out of university, basically for two years, and I interesting tidbit while there was a host of technical legacy there and also really horrific technical legacy to this day, that was the team I've seen using scrum the most efficiently, which is kind of unintuitive, I would, you might think, because big cooperation, right, I think, large amount of people working together, but they really had scrum down to a T, so little tip that on that side. And afterwards, because there was more in the back end, engineering, I switched to a super small company, also closer to home where I honestly did pretty much everything that. We were like five engineers and they are mostly built mobile apps, but I also built some API and APIs. I even had some point doubled with embedded development and I had an opportunity to to check out a whole slew of different technologies.
Speaker 2:But the thing is there, I mean, like you asked earlier, right, like self worth. That was also super stressful because I mean, I was often the only engineer responsible for a certain part of a project and there was not a lot of guidance at that place, which on one at one one side is like kind of cool to try things out. But it's also like you kind of work and to avoid, so to speak, right, like, is this the thing you're doing? Does that even make sense? So I was, I work at, really stressed out of that place, like sometimes I even stayed at the until 10pm because a thing was not working and that was really really difficult on my mental health. And then I switched because that party.
Speaker 2:Because of that reason, I switched to that agency I mentioned earlier, right, where I then first picked up a Dixie because I realized, okay, this, super big companies not for me. Super small companies also not for me. I would like a thing in between and I for me personally, the sweet spot has been like 100 people ish, not more than that, and that was like the company also learning Lixie rat. That was like work life balance was a host to better, but it was still not perfect because I had the tendency to I always wanted to learn more. So I picked up try to pick up a certificate for because we were using as Azure's our cloud provider and the company was basically sponsoring Azure training and I tried to pick up that like the certificate, and they're sort of next to my work, next to being with my wife which we just got our first kid right, like I tried to juggle all of that at the same time and then I hit my first burnout and kind of went into therapy and all of that and that kind of really forced me to reevaluate what the fuck am I doing here, like why am I trying so hard to impress people? Why am I trying to do so much?
Speaker 2:And throughout therapy I worked out that, while the society we work in, we live in, is really much like a very performance driven society, I mean that just because you are my performer might not perform doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any level of self worth.
Speaker 2:And throughout my therapy, but also throughout the things I take away from that and like what's my life as a parent, you know, I realized that there is more to me than just the ability to write good code or just the ability to work with technology competently, but friends and family, they are a whole slew of different qualities about me that people value, and at that I mean at that agency, I also was very much involved in organizing meetups and like just being also a teacher for other folks.
Speaker 2:I'm pretty good at explaining stuff, so there's a whole slew of other things I could I could start to see as being valuable, even again reflect in the context of productivity.
Speaker 2:But beyond that, right like what people, people like to be around me in general.
Speaker 2:So, and that is not necessarily something that makes me write better code or I don't know, makes me wrangle of engine x better in one way or another, but that makes that, I feel, makes me an enjoyable human being to be around.
Speaker 2:And at the end of the day, that means you as humans are social creatures and that is what matters, I feel, like the connections and the relationships we make along the way, and not necessarily the amount of code we can write over quality of code we can write, and it's a bit sad that it took me basically a burnout, but I took that also as an opportunity to say maybe for example, I mean the talk you mentioned it's on my website maybe I can, I can talk about this and somebody else doesn't have to go through the same hardship that I did, if I, if I kind of, can come from an angle of an experienced engineer and tell people you know what, the technology you know, that is not really as important. There's some of everything like what kind of person you are and if you are, if you're enjoyable to be around, that is allows you more important than the level of technology and the level of competence you have.
Speaker 1:When having that, I think, internal strength, to feel that that kind of self worth. It really helps in the moments in career where maybe you feel like something is a struggle or you're having a hard time accomplishing a particular task. I completely agree. I think there is this societal pressure that your productivity is your worth. I have not resolved that problem for myself, to be completely honest. So we're very, very much pro therapy.
Speaker 1:On the election of the podcast, I take therapy as well and you know I don't think I've hit quite the same place of feeling resolved with it. I think I may be mid that journey in terms of still feeling that pressure to, you know, produce as much as possible, and I do think it at least comes from a place of. It's really not about like satisfying other people, but I do think there's an element of like pushing yourself harder than is healthy and things like that that I've been trying to work on lately, because I think I'm you know, burnout and me are familiar friends. Sorry to hear that. I think it's better to like be as open about these things as possible, because there are a lot of folks who experience these things, and I actually did a little bit of coaching with someone who had never even heard the term burnout and they genuinely thought, even though they were tired all the time, exhausted, unable to just like build up steam in their life, they just thought, oh well, I'm just lazy or there's something wrong with me. Or and we did a lot of conversation around like no, like it's not wrong of you to be exhausted because you have like three kids and financial struggles and have been going through these experiences at work, and like that's normal, that's a normal thing, there's nothing wrong with you for experiencing that.
Speaker 1:So that's part of what I hope to kind of normalize and I hope to hit a more stable place in career. Right now I'm not sure how to do that with the amount that I'm putting on my plate, but I do hope to kind of get to a place of a little bit more more balance there, because I see how it impacts the other aspects of life that do matter. And the thing is, if you put all of your energy into work or one thing, you don't have any energy left for the other things that matter, like you said, like being enjoyable to be around with your friends and spending time with the people that matter, and I think that's one of the benefits that can come with having a kid. From what I see from parents so I'm not a parent, but what I see from the people who I know are parents is that there's nothing that will force you to reprioritize your life more than a kid.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree 100%. I mean I have two kids I have. My son is seven years old and my daughter is three years old, and I mean you mentioned earlier that you are not quite there yet. In the same level of resolve this, honestly, I'm also not there.
Speaker 2:The big change for me back then was to realize that work is not as important as I made it out to be, because I was putting in a lot of extra hours and people would have liked to have put me even put me, let me put in even more hours right. And I realized that this, that work in general, is something you have. You have a contract and inside of your contract that probably states that you're employed for 30 hours, 40 hours a week, so on and so forth. And I kind of started, after the whole experience, to make a point of I'm gonna stick around for this time. I started to do time tracking for myself to kind of get an handle on like how much time do I spend at work? And if I spend like one week more which sometimes happens and it is okay then I spent less the next week and that kind of really got very religious about spending not too much time at work these days. Honestly, I still keep track of that. But also, if I spend a little less time at work one week, I'll still get my stuff done. Who cares right? So I'm really. I basically changed my perspective from okay I need to be a productive person back to I need to uphold the contractual obligations I have with my employer. That still means I try to do good work, but not more than that. You know, like there's more to life than work. Thing is, I mean. That is why I feel like I'm a pretty healthy place right now.
Speaker 2:But to kind of give a spoiler, I had a second burnout risk and that was not because of work or partially because of work. That was also because of my whole living situation and being a parent. Honestly, I'm at the current place I'm working at. I used to have a people leadership role the very first time in my career and that is a very personal experience. But I realized that this is not for me, because I need the structure that engineering work brings to your day to day. I mean, for example, I'm a very big fan of doing test-driven development and you have all of these very small, very tight feedback loops and I need that. And back then I realized already that this is something I'm missing and that, while I enjoy working with people and also teaching people and coaching people and mentoring people, I was really, really missing those feedback loops and I couldn't quite articulate why. And that is also then where I, at that point, I realized, oh wait, a moment, I live with ADHD, because I had the suspicions about my son for a while and then I looked into it and realized you know what that sounds like me exactly? So, yeah, and that explained a whole slew of things. But that also explained a whole slew of difficulties I had in my private life.
Speaker 2:And to cut this long story short, because otherwise the podcast would get way too long, but there is well, like I said earlier, that there is more to life than just work. Also, when it comes to self-worth and being able to let go of expectations, there comes, there's more to that than just work. Again, I'm struggling still and I'm still working on wrangling with expectations I have towards myself as a parent, as a partner, as somebody that wants to build a family, you know, because I realized that some of those expectations I cannot fulfill because I'm never a divergent, and that is something that kind of contributed towards the second level of burnout, because I was overwhelmed at work with this new role. I realized that I couldn't, that there's some things in my private life I couldn't fulfill and I really, really tried to and I didn't understand why. So, coming back to the very beginning and what I said, this is a lifelong journey. This is a lifelong journey where we, as people, need to, should be more compassionate towards one's self and realize that there might be some expectations we might hold and that, honestly, for good reasons, and we still think that as an ideal we would want to achieve.
Speaker 2:But sometimes life, life is different. You know, sometimes life is different and sometimes life tells you that this is not something you can achieve, at least not in that fashion, and that is not easy to deal with. And the only thing, honestly, the only thing that has helped me there is being compassionate with myself, like looking at what I've been achieving so far and career-wise I'm in a pretty good place. But also my kids, they love me, they enjoy spending time with me. I enjoy spending time with them. While there is a whole slew of little things I could beat myself up over, all in all, looking at the full picture, my life is pretty decent. There are still some big topics to work on and, again, I'm also still in therapy or rather, again in therapy but what I've realized is that it's very healthy to also not only challenge the expectations we have at work, but also to challenge the expectations we have towards ourselves beyond work. I think it makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate you sharing that story and I think that the pressure we put on ourselves to be the ideal can be crushing, right, and Shelfar seems to draw a lot of people who are not really in the right position to be the people who aspire to some form of ideal.
Speaker 1:Right, we have a lot of people who are very self-improvement focused, very productivity focused, very.
Speaker 1:We want to have good relationships, we want to have a good relationship with family, and so I think the demand put on ourselves can be, you know, massive, and so instead of looking at, okay, what's the one thing that you can work on that's gonna make you a better version of yourself tomorrow, it's like how far am I from perfect? Right, that is a crushing thought. And, yeah, then you add family into the mix and it's a whole can of worms, especially if you know we all have, whether it's neurodivergence or you know, trauma, or you know everyone is working with something right, and so everyone is working on improving something about themselves, and that can cause tension, struggles, difficulties. So I'm really happy to hear that you are. I think it seems like you have a very healthy mindset about those things, and so I really appreciate you sharing that experience and also, I think, a lot of folks in tech. I've met a lot of people who struggle with negative self-talk, which I think is part of what you're talking about here. Is that compassion towards yourself, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, very much.
Speaker 2:That is a big part of also being able to manage my mental health. It's not, again, not perfect, but who is right? But that is changing the narrative right. That can be small things, like when you make a mistake, maybe at coding. Often people reach for a language like oh, I'm so stupid, right, I'm such an idiot. And that in itself is already duty-meaning yourself right. And what I found personally very useful. There are two major things I would say. One is a little hack.
Speaker 2:At this point I'm very much ingrained. It's like I would ask myself how would I react if somebody else made that mistake? And most of the time the answer is you know what shit happens. Did you learn something from it? Yes, good, nick, rinse and repeat. That is, in general, like error culture at companies can be very helpful there if you have a healthy error, mistake culture, like when stuff goes bad and people don't ask who's at fault, but how do we fix it right and what can we learn from it. But you can apply the same layer of thinking to yourself. Like you make a mistake, well, you're not stupid, you didn't know better. But what can you do to fix this? What can you do to improve upon. It can be something as small as oh, something it could change.
Speaker 2:You made broke production. It was just the day before yesterday I broke our staging system unexpectedly because I merged some stuff together. There was a merge conflict in that particular part where I subgraphed my query inside of like just a big string and basically I merged that query in the wrong way, so that particular part of the application just broke. Yeah, what did I do? I mean, I fixed it pretty quickly. I wrote some regression tests, but I didn't at some any point try to beat myself up over it because, yeah, that shit happens. I wrote some regression tests. Now this thing can't happen again. Right, I learned something from it, because I assumed that this particular part of the application didn't need those regression tests because it's just strings, right, like I mean, like I'm gonna change strings only in expected ways, but turns out like merge conflicts can happen and things can break unexpectedly. Yeah, that is the one part.
Speaker 2:So trying to ask yourself, how would you react when other people made that mistake? How would you be so hard on them as you are towards yourself? And sometimes the answer to that is yes, but I think then there's a whole slew of other things you might want to unpack as a person. And the second thing is and that might sound cheesy, but mindfulness. Honestly I was back then when I had my very first burnout.
Speaker 2:One thing I did started to pick up was meditation, and my meditation practice these days is a bit wonky, honestly, and I want to pick it up again, but that has been a very it's a very big help, very helpful in being able to step away from negative thoughts and being able to take a big of more of a holistic view on where I'm standing, because, at the end of the day, mindfulness and meditation is about being in the moment and, at least for me, burnout and depression were very much related to not being in the moment but being stuck in my own head. So, yeah, those are the two things that has been really much helping me to be more compassionate towards myself.
Speaker 1:Mindfulness does not sound cheesy in any way. I think it has tremendous impact. I have also been, I think, slacking on my meditation as of late, but I'm very inspired by folks like Renee Brown, tar Brock, the RAIN method if anyone has not encountered that, I think is a really good tool for if you're ever having really strong emotion for allowing that. Recognize, allow, inspect, nurture, I believe, is the acronym. So it's a mindfulness process you can go through to allow yourself to experience things, because I think one of the things that tends to make those types of experiences worse is one the I think there's a term for it, but I can't remember this kind of spiral, thinking of like you feel bad about feeling bad, right, and so that kind of like you already feel bad, that something bad happened. You had an issue that happened in production that doesn't feel good on its own, but then you add on to that and you're like, oh, I am bad for making that happen, right? I've even seen people do the triple, where they're like, oh, I shouldn't tell myself that I feel bad about feeling bad. It's like it's this endless spiral of a negative talk. So that can really, I think, exacerbate that issue.
Speaker 1:I feel like I started this sentence by saying one, and then I'm not sure what my two was, which I do often.
Speaker 1:I can't very much think, yep, sometimes you get lost in the middle of the thought.
Speaker 1:But yeah, anyway, the core of what I wanna say was that mindfulness, I think, is a fantastic practice and you see, it affect your interactions with people, right, like I've had to more and more start to accept I need to do the things that help me take care of myself, because ultimately it doesn't actually make you more productive to stay up late, work super hard, neglect your relationships, neglect your physical health.
Speaker 1:Those things make you feel productive for a day and then the next day you pay for it, or the next week or the next month, or With interest. Yeah, it usually makes things a lot more With a very big interest. Yeah, despite knowing this, I do still engage in some of that. But that's something that I'm really trying to get on lockdown right now, because I see it and I think, especially in teaching and maybe you've had this experience yourself if you're not your best, you are less patient, you're less able to kind of navigate the social situations of teaching well and like it makes you worse, and I'm sure the same is true in just regular development life as well, but particularly in teaching, where a lot of the job is social, I find it has a major impact Whether or not I have slept enough exercised and I'm just feeling good in general.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not that, that's not about teaching happening my life, but I can very much say that the parenting is like teaching on steroids. So, yeah, they're very much there I can. There was a period in Time, like at the end of last year, where I quite like second burnout and everything, where I couldn't even Engage really with my kids anymore because I was just so beat from the day-to-day stress and that it is just not enjoyable for anybody and it's kind of Sad sometimes that it has to get to that point for you to realize that something has to change right, which is again like a minute was said earlier. You're grateful for me talking about this, but I that is exactly the reason I'm talking about Experiences like this, because maybe at least one person hears this and takes a corrective turn in their life and figures out Okay, maybe I don't have to let it get to that point, right, and then then the world is a tiny bit better than before.
Speaker 2:And If we don't talk about experiences like that, then there, how would other people know and understand that this is not just them and this is not just an experience they are having, but even people that might look like super Successful and productive and experience from the outside, which I would expect. I mean, like I've been I'm no lexical mix for a while now. So I would presume the people looking at that podcast Especially from a more early great perspective might look at Adi and and me and Alan as like these Super experience engineers, which kind of they should figure it out. And I'm here to tell you, well, no, we don't. We're also just human people, but we've been on this planet for a little while longer. So, yeah, yeah, if you really want to to, if you want to retain your ability to do a good job, then self-care is non-optional, and that is something you just said and I definitely 100% agree with that the.
Speaker 1:That transparency I really appreciate and You're completely right, talking about your experience is the best way, for I think it's it's mutually beneficial, right you get to share your experience with other people who can maybe learn and benefit from that. But I also think there's something I have always appreciated, which is the accountability of Knowing. I have to describe things. Knowing I have to say certain things like if I am I did this with my manager recently actually, who's absolutely phenomenal. I Love my manager. He is just an absolute wonder is is really like everything that a manager should embody.
Speaker 1:And I had to have a conversation with him and say, hey, I'm not sleeping. Well, I'm overworking myself, I am overstressed and like having that, you know, like especially leading up to elixir comp and got a lot of stuff on the plate and it's just managing that has been frankly, very difficult and and knowing that I have to have that conversation helps encourage me to do the things that will make me feel better. Right, it's the Shining the light on things can often make them better, but if you just repress and ignore and don't talk about that's how problems get worse.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's also been my, my experience and I I mean I said, sadly, therapy is not something that is easily available to anyone.
Speaker 2:But I've said in the past, I feel that everybody could probably benefit from at least some therapy.
Speaker 2:But even even if you can't, the Experience to talk to people that truly listen, that your manager sounds like somebody that truly listens right, that can be liberating in itself and that is an experience that I I feel in today's society, and especially in like the way social media is working right there is, there is not a lot of that going around in general. I Also, like I mean me as a European looking into the inside from the United, the culture of the United States, I feel there's a whole still also going on there with, like people not necessarily talking about how they feel, and I have opinions on the question hey, how are you? Because usually people don't want to hear the real answer. So it's refreshing when you end up talking and engaging with somebody that truly listens and that truly cares and that is a Therapist, at the very least is that. But even even if figure again you don't have access to a therapist, a friend can be that or a Great manager can be that I'm gonna see not sure what kind of point I'm trying to make.
Speaker 1:I think I love how this conversation is turned into. One of that, I think, has Everything to do with software and nothing to do with software at the same time, because I think you and I have probably thought a lot about mental health Quite a bit, so I'm really glad this conversation has gone in that direction. I also want to say like, yeah, therapy is, is not accessible for everyone, right, it's exclusively acceptable to the part of the population who probably not to devalue your experience, my experience, other people's experience but it's exclusively available to the portion of the population who probably needs it the least. In a way, maybe that's a bit of a hot take, but I think the people who probably need that type of like Mental health help the most are those who are in not a great financial situation, who can't afford it, who Probably have very difficult, complex relationships, you know, and or or Maybe even abusive relationships, or like people who are in a position where Everything around them is working against them. Getting help and seeking help are the ones who have the hardest time accessing therapy and who really needed the most. So Society I really think we haven't figured that out Absolutely.
Speaker 1:The North American culture is one of this. This like independent, pull yourself up by the bootstrap but simultaneously, the only people who can are the ones who are already born with certain advantages. I'm part of the problem, like I am one of those people born with certain advantages. I had some financial help to get into programming, I had two parents who helped Support and, like I'm not part of the problem, just more I can talk about these things only because I've had Certain privileges that have allowed me to gain advantages. And yeah, we really have not, I think, figured that out In any real way.
Speaker 1:So I hope that eventually society and culture shifts towards one of Caring about people, empathy towards people, and for those of you who might be in a situation of kind of needing Someone who will listen, needing Maybe therapy, but but can't necessarily afford that, that's not necessarily a viable option right now I Think one of the things you can do Is you can also be that person for the people around you.
Speaker 1:There's a phenomenal amount of I Think I don't know how to describe the word, but I'm gonna say help for yourself that you get by helping other people. So even if you have, you know, people surrounding you who maybe aren't the type to listen or you can't afford a therapist, or it's just not viable for for your, for whatever reason. Being able to be kinder to the people around you, supporting them, can be a great way. It's not like I could pro quo, like reciprocal, businessy kind of a thing, but I find that you tend to get from the world what you put out into the world, and so, even if you can't receive that yet, you can at the very least start giving that, and over time I think that that will eventually find its way back to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree 100%, and I think this is also a point where we can kind of segue into, like technology, because when you were in Elixir Mix, we talked about the benefits of teaching and helping people out because there's a whole slew of things even experience of engineers can learn from teaching other people and from helping other people, and the same holds true even if you're not an experienced engineer.
Speaker 2:Right, like you can help other people picking up coding, or you can help other people work with technology that you already have a bit of a handle on and that in itself can be first of all, like just a nice experience helping people, like honesty. Helping makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but at the same time you might learn a thing or two, and that it's like a kind of a double deal there. Right, like you get, you get two things for free not for free, but you get two things for price of one. So to add to what you just said, brooke, is that of course, you're not obligated to help other people out, but when you are not in such a privileged position as yeah, honestly, broken me are, then maybe, just maybe, getting in touch with folks and helping each other and be it. Learning to JavaScript, right Be it learning Elixir is this time that makes your personal life a tiny bit better and also you as an engineer a tiny bit better at the same time.
Speaker 1:This has been by far the most heartwarming episode I think I've ever gotten the chance to record. This didn't even feel like the recording. To be honest, I feel like you and I could have just had this conversation and there happened to be recording happening. It pains me to say we are reaching the end of the time that we have available for this particular chat, but I really hope that we get to keep continuing this conversation because I've had an absolute blast talking to you and I hope you've enjoyed this as well.
Speaker 2:Definitely, and there are a few topics I definitely would like to pitch here at the end.
Speaker 1:But maybe we can pick it up another time. I would love to do a part two, if you're interested in that. We can definitely talk more offline about the specifics, but I do want to ask is there anything that you would like to shout out to or just kind of point people in the direction of, before we end our episode here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can maybe use it as a spoiler of what I would like to also get into, because we I mean, as I said just said a very heartwarming chat also about mental health, about to certainly be true to yourself and being accepting and compassionate towards yourself, and I also talked about error culture and there is a thing as a concept called psychological safety. There's something, if you look at up there as a host of talks I also gave a little lightning talk on that, I think, at some point and something in a nutshell, the teams that are most performing. The one thing that differentiates them from other teams that are also performing is a little tidbit called psychological safety, and psychological safety is the ability to somewhat be true to yourself but also to feel comfortable making mistakes in the team, and if so, basically everything I talked about earlier, everything you did talk about earlier, contributes toward making a more psychological safe environment, first of all for yourself. But if you end up being able to have a team that kind of believes in those values, then you can come to a point also where you as a team and as a software developer can really start shipping stuff and really get productive, because you know other people have your back and a lot of the good work has been done by Brinne Brown, which you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2:I'm also a big fan of her work. But there's also, interestingly, the very much an overlap into that and like the whole DevOps space and DDD community and like it's like tangentially related. But I would like to do a shout out here for a book I've been reading a while ago that is called Team Topologies and it doesn't really explicitly talk about psychological safety and the likes, but it talks about how people interact with each other and how that kind of contributes toward building technological systems. And that is a big interest and a big, big, big, big of a pet subject for me, like understanding how sociology and technology intersect and how we as people build software for people. So you really can't remove people from the equation when doing technology. So yeah, that would be my shout out.
Speaker 1:I'll definitely have to give that a look through because I'm very curious to learn more about applying this to kind of team management. I think even just you speaking about that. I definitely see that at Dockyard, so I'm really curious to kind of learn more of the hard knowledge on that, as opposed to kind of the softer theory or feeling I currently have. I want to give you a huge thank you for being here and talking with me today and I will include that. I will say I will include the link to that book in the show notes for anyone who's interested in checking that out as well. That is going to be it for this episode of the Elixir Newbie podcast. I want to thank all of you so much for listening.
Speaker 1:I hope you elixir newbies out there enjoyed this episode and learned a lot and grew a lot. I feel like this was a very growing episode, as always. I definitely know that I did. If you want to chat, you can send me a message. I'm at Brooklyn J Meyers on Twitter. Dockyard Academy is launching its next cohort in November, so if that's something you're interested, you can also see more information in these show notes there. And, sasha, I just want to thank you again. Thanks so much for being here. It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you for being here.