Observation created about 4 years agoDouble shout out to our residential front end wizards (or wizard and witch, if you prefer) and "honorary" Practice members, Carolyn and Ethan, for super-ly putting the team first!
When Ellie was here, they both jumped in to help her sort through front end issues and learn the ropes of our codebase, and now that John and I don't have our own React-Gandalf to look to, they have both made time (lots of it) to answer questions and help us navigate through some weird bugs on a difficult project.
Carolyn and Ethan, we really appreciate how you've generously given us your time and have been so positive and helpful!
Observation created about 4 years agoThis message in a thread really needs nothing around it to explain its absolute amazingness.
A tiny bit of context. The team was really pumped about making an optimization to our authorization system that is now making a lot fewer calls to the database. The team was excited about the results and the thread was full of gifs and celebration. A non-technical member of the team came in to show appreciation and celebration as well, and asked if someone could explain a bit about why everyone was so pumped (up to this point you really needed to have significant experience in site reliability concepts to follow).
The amazing Ethan responded with this...
ELI5 Fridge example. Before whenever you were hungry for grapes, you would go downstairs, open the fridge, grab one grape, and return upstairs to eat it. That’s fine when you are younger and have a smaller appetite, weren’t sure if you liked grapes yet, and generally had fewer things to do. As you got older, you found yourself hungry more often and you found out grapes were your favorite snack. You realized you were wasting a lot of time making trips and only getting a single grape. Instead of getting a single grape every time you are hungry, you take a little extra time to fix a bowl of grapes instead. You eat from the bowl when you’re hungry instead of making many smaller trips. This frees up a lot of time you would have been using on additional trips which were causing you to take longer to go hang out with friends or finish your schoolwork.
Now for our scale, imagine you were getting hungry 77k per hour, but making 2.68 million trips per hour. Now you make a bowl and only make 77k trips🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️
Observation created over 4 years agoThis is long overdue. Ethan is always very patient with me and no matter how trivial of a question I have, he always gives me his full attention and time. I have been trying to enhance my frontend skills and he is always very willing to help out and I really appreciate it.
Observation created about 5 years agoI've been feeling a little down on our codebase lately, overwhelmed by the myriad things developers have to remember (and help each other remember in code reviews) to make the stuff we build work properly for our users. So I felt immense gratitude to Ethan for two things this week that will make developers/testers lives easier while helping us deliver better experiences for the folks using our software. But I'm also deeply impressed with how Ethan went about these changes. Change is hard, and the more valuable the change, typically the harder it is to make, or else we would have made it already! But Ethan met these challenges with curiosity, tenacity, and a drive to create clarity in messy situations.
The first example is with
autoprefixer, a tool that automatically adds to our styling code to make things look right in older browsers. For years, we've often forgotten to add this code manually when building new pages, taking up testers' time catching bugs and leading to rework. While Waseem started the effort to introduce this automation tool, it was Ethan who saw the value and ultimately delivered on it in Waseem's absence, picking up the story and diving into an obscure IE bug to make it shippable. And look at this incredible comment explaining the issue, its cause, and what we need to retest: https://app.clubhouse.io/lessonly/story/41159/add-css-auto-prefixer#activity-42233 :chefs_kiss:And then there's the UI Library, a massive project that will make the app more consistent for users and allow us to design and prototype new features at lightning speed. We've struggled for several quarters to prioritize that because it's hard to know where to begin. I'm not sure who all gets credit for the new approach (at least Ethan and Jaki) we're taking of looking at customers' custom CSS for clues about what's most valuable to standardize, but I'm :jazz_hands: to see movement on this project, and just look at the incredible statistical analysis Ethan did to get it moving: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pQPVfhRd1c-8wZiT7I5XibRwsKplGScaDgpM0Y2179w/edit#gid=72331942
The next time I find myself thinking "X would be so great, but how do we ever start?", I'm just gonna ask myself "What would Ethan do?" 😉True grit.
Observation created over 5 years agoFeaturing:Ethan M.Joseph A.Joshua A.Waseem D.We ask clarifying questionsWe get agreementsWe inspire others to do better workCommunityDesign CollaborationBack-end engineerFront-end engineerDiscovery engineerEpic shaperStory shaperI am grateful for how these 4 have been communicating on this project. This is a complex project for a variety of reasons. We are splitting up the frontend and the backend. Linking elements in our app is a difficult endeavor. The way these four have communicated to one another and to me has been such a joy. Whether it be Waseem posting killer updates in the channel, Joshua and Joseph presenting their findings on technical deep dives, or Ethan walking me through expectations on epic breakdown, everyone has chipped in to really get this off the ground.
I have been inspired to bring the level of clarity I have found here in other aspects of my job.