How to care 💅🏼 about technology watch 📡 instead of having to submit oneself to tedium down 😮‍💨 a software career path?

Part 1 out of 4

This is the first post in a series of four articles telling a story
about how I came to appreciate software technology watch
as part of a tailored-made self-education process,
deemed bearable with regard to mental health preservation
in the context of my line of work since 2009.

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TL;DR - In this article, I’m laying the ground about some of the practical reasons why software tech workers might need to get involved into so called technology watch.

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At the beginning of my professional career in 2009, I started to work as an intern 🤓 at a non-profit organization held responsible for organizing ICT conferences worldwide and publishing scientific conference proceedings. As peculiar as it may sound, we used to burn compact discs 💿 at some point in our development process lifecycle ♻, which in itself was a show of progress in addition to printing plain old books at the time. Said proceeding papers joined together dozens of articles with regard to a narrow scientific subject like semantic technology for example.

I never decisively knew if burning ROM was such a good choice for preserving knowledge over a long period of time, even though the underlying decision chart had already been followed accurately and long before i got hired there 🙊.

I didn't have glasses yet though and as a result, I could certaintly not see myself as a full-fledged cyborg yet for this very reason . One might have perceived such small organization (about 15 people collaborating daily) like a miniature Springer looking-like publishing factory only with far less sparkles ✨.

From here on, I trust that you can see already how everything in this post and the next ones will have to be taken with a grain of salt (or two, or more) 🧂.

Around this year, I started to realize how curating online publications emitted by trusted sources, and community leaders, helps in making slightly better decisions while collaborating in product development teams and to risk being overly specific

• when working on technical software designs from scratch or
  existing implementations 👷🏼,

• when considering a progressive software rewrite supposed to take after some infamous legacy app declared sacred nonetheless as

  • it actually survived through the unforgiving passage of time ⏳

  • often thanks to a gazillion patches 🩹 applied over the usually well-thought-of features factory lifecycle and

  • being eventually elevated to the long awaited for,
    battle-tested status and now-ready for advanced marketing combat 🪖.    

• when having second thoughts on her own or
  during recurrent peering sessions 💬,

• when trying to stand by blissful, and also wishful 🧞 thinking and
  also maybe before praying secretly with folded hands
  for having picked the most robust, dependable (or interchangeable) software libraries in the context of a much bigger project whenever things should always be done one of those undefined right ways™ or again

• when starting to learn a new language and related idioms that could "matter", or otherwise make a difference in the context of

  • 🎯 accelerating for-profit product development lifecycles,

  • 🎯 open-sourcing pet projects as a company or individual
    without reinventing unsustainable wheels or

  • 🎯 offering presentation to early-adopters about some brand-new technology in order to have a better grasp
    at things few years before they might become ubiquitous
    (or not, and only before said technology ends up EOLed in a GitHub archive program),

  • 🎯 moving to next career milestone or checkpoints
    (no pressure is necessarily ever applied by recruiters nor their community peers at large in any case - hence comments from Internet which shall not be taken too seriously - there is a bit of irony in these last words, just saying 😅) ,
    while one could also have honest-to-god intents for

    • 🎯 building more of a problem-solving mindset
      (in the vein of what came to existence in the automotive industries with the Toyota Production System in the past)
      so that we could prevent spoiling shareholders’ coins or worse? public money while looping over 5W sequences
      and also for

    • 🎯 growing more and more accustomed to alternate solutions modeling and visualization when being given the opportunity
      (in all agreement with absolutely hard-to-predict time constraints and to-do lists, because why not to try to separate what is complex from what is complicated, or hell(ish) chaotic evil, after all and if we could only figure it out?), 

      • which may positively contribute in covering problem spaces at hand well-enough in spite of rarely even using the same words or meaning attached to most naturally articulated sentences describing what lies ahead and between us even after mapping everything over sticky notes
        (I highly recommend doing this exercice by meticulously using verbs conjugated in past tense with someone as skillful as Charles Desneuf - it helps a lot 💡), and

      • which understanding and refinement would be ideally
        shared continuously in some living, and written format

    • 🎯 instead of dreaming to pick the "perfect" tool once and for all,
      what could be referred to as "looking for the silver bullet" or
      framing things "within golden ratios" as we might state in photography or painting 📐 when there is absolutely no single agreed-upon rule, even less obvious consensus building mechanism around a table, nor clear leadership either
      - because such ideal tool or construct has to be unique like the one, right? …😷 (cough) gollum (cough) 😉

Wouldn't some believe like i'd be inclined to, that being well-informed might lead to better performancetive results (however those might be observed or measured in practice)?

- Duh! No real surprise here, isn't there? 😅.

That’s covering it for today 👋🏼
Thank you for having read these introductory words!

This article cover is a painting authored by Gaston de La Touche entitled L’ennui

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This was the first post in a series of four articles telling a story
about how I came to appreciate software technology watch
as part of a tailored-made self-education process,
deemed bearable with regard to mental health preservation
in the context of my line of work since 2009.

Today in 2022, I’m a freelance software developer
about to return to the University of Reunion Island,
where I used to study ten years ago,
so that I could learn more about computer science again.