A Rather Peculiar Journey

Slides from my crowdsourced Webstock ’16 talk.

Transcript

1. A Rather Peculiar Journey Harry Roberts – Webstock ’16 – Wellington, NZ
2. About Me
3. About Me Hi. I’m Harry. I’m a Consultant Front-end Architect from the UK. I travel the world helping teams write better quality UI code. I didn’t realise this needed to be a non-technical talk…
4. Crowdsourcing a Talk
21. Crowdsourcing a Talk Work/Life Balance Travel Hobbies Cocktails The Development Community Moths Chumbawamba
22. Please let me take you on a rather peculiar journey…
23. Work/Life Balance
24. Work/Life Balance Everybody wants it. But it’s really not that simple. Especially when we’re connected all the time. When most of your life is work, it’s even harder.
25. The truth is, I haven’t.
26. Work/Life Balance I don’t have any routines. I don’t have any consistency. I spend weeks at a time away from friends and family. I seldom get weekends. My schedule is offset from everyone else’s.
27. I have a ‘bad work/life balance’.
28. But I kinda like that.
29. Work Work Life Life
30. Work Work Work Work Life Life Life
31. Life and work, not life vs. work.
33. Work/Life Balance My work and life constantly intermingle with each other. I create life wherever my work is. I’m an optimist—I look at things as positively as possible. I see my life as a constant vacation punctuated with work that I love.
34. Life When Traveling
35. Life When Traveling I’m grateful every day that I get to travel for work. Especially in an industry that is design to avoid it. But travel sucks.
36. Being in new places is amazing—getting to them isn’t.
37. Traveling For Work Travel is expensive, inefficient, and seldom enjoyable. It means huge stretches of time away from loved ones. It puts immense strain on friend- and relationships. But… it comes with the territory. How can we make it suck less?
39. Travel Pro-Tips
44. Hobbies
45. Hobbies One of the key aspects to a good work/life balance. The best hobbies contrast and complement your work. Hobbies that don’t tie you to a location are very handy. Hobbies are good for your outlook.
46. “I stopped caring about programming the moment I started getting paid to do it.”
47. Give a s**t about something that doesn’t pay you.
48. The Best Hobbies Provide an escape. A complete departure. A chance to do something your work doesn’t provide.
49. Find a hobby that contrasts your work.
50. Take your hobbies with you.
51. Adapting I’ve had lots of hobbies of the years. Some are just not at all suited to travel. The best ones are ones that can be taken anywhere. Even if you’re thousands of miles from home, it’s nice to have ‘your thing’.
52. Cocktails
54. Such a stark contrast to development.
55. Cocktails Steeped in hundreds of years of history. No truly right or wrong way. All about taste—very subjective. Deals with actual, physical things. A break from the fast pace. A chance to indulge, to make, to craft…
56. Code is not Craft
57. — csswizardry.com/2013/11/the-problems-with-crafting-code “Craft is, by its very nature, slow, meticulous, bespoke, indulgent, self-serving, and inefficient. Code should be none of these things.”
58. Code is not Craft ‘Craft’ implies one-off, labour intensive. Subtle imperfections. I don’t want crafted code—I want engineered code! Fast, testable, reproducable, consistent, unambiguous. I have a hobby which is an escape from that.
59. Making cocktails gives me an excuse to craft things.
61. The Last Word
64. — wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) “The exact recipes for all forms of Chartreuse remain trade secrets and are known at any given time only to the two monks who prepare the herbal mixture.”
66. 1920 Invented at Detroit Athletic Club 1951 Published in Ted Saucier’s Bottoms Up!
67. How cool is that?!
68. But imagine if this happened on the Web.
69. We often take the availability and openness of information for granted.
70. Cocktails are a time for indulgence.
71. The Web is a time for responsibility.
73. How did I even get into cocktails?
75. The Community
78. The internet isn’t about React, or Gulp, or Sass—it’s about the people.
79. I rely on the community for so much more than code.
80. The development community is amazing…
81. Embrace it.
86. Meeting strangers from the internet is amazing*. * Your mileage may vary. I accept no responsibility for any disasters.
87. The internet is ‘what we do’, but it means so much more to so many of us.
88. Meeting People If you’re going to a new place, try and meet strangers from there. If you see someone new is visiting your city, be that stranger for them. If you have to travel for work, this is almost mandatory—it keeps you sane.
89. Moths
93. + = GIBSON
94. + = SOME MOTH
97. Shaken or Stirred?
98. — Harry Craddock “Shake the shaker as hard as you can. Don’t just rock it—you are trying to wake it up, not send it to sleep.”
100. Shaken or Stirred? Shake Citrus or fruit juice Eggs, milk, or cream Stir All translucent liquids Alcohol-only cocktails
101. Even the best advice goes out of date…
102. Be prepared to leave old ideas behind.
103. Chumbawamba
109. Crowdsourcing a Talk Work/Life Balance Travel Hobbies Cocktails The Development Community Moths Chumbawamba DONE
110. Takeaways
111. Takeaways Work/life balance is hard—just do your best. Hobbies are super important—remove yourself from work. Openness is what sets this industry apart—don’t take it for granted. The web is more than just ones and zeroes—it’s about people. Only shake drinks with juice or dairy in them—stir everything else. Even the best advice has a time limit—know when to use new information.
112. Thank You.
113. Thank You. People of Twitter. Dunstan Bruce of Chumbawamba. All of you, for indulging me.
114. Thank You. Harry Roberts csswizardry@gmail.com @csswizardry