2023 October

October, my birthday month 🎉 is over and it’s time to recap what I’ve been doing!

Monthly principle

“Never start a chat with ‘Hi’.” “Reduce use of this and that, be clear and consise.” “Include full context in chat/email messages.”

This months principles is about making communication more effective. As a friend of me wrote on hos blog timharek.no/blog/no-hello, starting a chat with “Hi” and then waiting for an answer, is a waste of time. It’s better to just write the question you want to send right away and let the recipient answer when they have time.

I have also noticed that the use of “this” and “that” in work chat application, PR review comments, daily tech discussion is reducing the quality of the communication. It is not always clear what “This can be replaced with the shared function we have.” means. Instead I try to say “The function getAverage can be replaced with the shared function in utils.ts”.

The last principle is about providing all neccessary context and information in a question or support ticket in order to improve respone time and reduce number of messages needed back and forth.

• “There is a new post on LinkedIn, check it out.”
• “Customer reports that the app does not work. Can you look at it?”
• “We just released a new feature, release notes are in confluence.”

These are classic examples in the daily work life, the problem with the messages is that they do not provide any context or information about what the message is about. So the recipient needs to ask back for more information, which is a waste of time. Instead try to write something like this:

• “LinkedIn Post: New post about the new awesome FeatureBlaster 3000, check it out! <-Link to Post->”
• “<-Customer Name->: Not Resolved - Reports nothing is working when clicking the button ‘Do something’.Can you look at it? <-URL to support Ticket->”
• “FeatureBlaster3000 - 1.20.2: <-ReleaseNotes-URL-> - Brief description of most important changes.”

One should never assume that the recipient knows what you are talking about or where to find additional info. The suggested messages also includes links to the relevant information, which is very useful.

Work chat is not the same as messenger chatting.

Finances

Crypto has gone back up which is nice, but other than that the market has been very stable.

Spendings & cash flow

I’m back to more normal spending in October, but another trip to Paris lead to some expensive restaurants which was worth it. I also replaced the washing machine for my tenants, which leads me into the topic of buffer accounts.

Buffer acount is something people say is very much needed. I agree on the topic of being able to pay for larger expenses without taking a loan. So the size of a buffer account needs to be appropiate for the amount of things you have. If you are a student, the most expensive thing you have to fix is probably your phone. So a buffer of 10k NOK might be enough. Once you own an apartment the most expensive thing might be the washing machine, so a buffer of 20k NOK might be enough. If you own a house, the most expensive thing might be the roof, so a buffer of 100k NOK might be enough. And so on… But you should also consider how much money you have left after expenses in a normal month, if you have 10k NOK left after expenses every month and need 10k bufffer, then you do not need a dedicated account.

Work life

In October the company performed cost cuts which resulted in reducing the junior developers from 3 to 2 😢. The cost reduction came as a surprise to everyone as the owners has been saying for a long time that we have a lot of money and dedicated to the company.

Other than that we have been focusing on delivering a new Virtual Sensor functionality where you can perform math operations on any kind of measurements and produce new measurements. Typically you would calculate “average temperature on deck 4” etc.

Personal projects

On my freetime I have spent time preparing for https://boskonf.no/arkiv/2023/ together with friByte. It was a great success and it was fun to hold a talk about OpenStreetMap. Hopefully we will have another conference next year!

Daylio recap

Average happiness 4.0/5.0 a decrease by 0.1.

Activites done in October 2023