Alishah Novin's Blog

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Self-Appreciation

May 31, 2023

A few years back my daughter gifted me a little book called "Things I Love About Dad," with pages of prompts that she's been filling out over time. The other night she told me she filled out a new page: "I love that you taught me to appreciate me." This one may just be my favorite page to date. It's so easy to confuse appreciating oneself with being confident, having an ego, or being arrogant. But those others show themselves externally. Appreciating yourself is being friends with your inner monologue, it's knowing you may not always get things right and may make mistakes, but it's acknowledging the intention that's behind them. It's writing a post about a personal note from your daughter, worrying if you're conveying the right message, debating whether to hit post, and thinking 'if it helps someone pat themselves on the back instead of beating themselves up... it's worth it.'

Cover Letters & ROI

May 23, 2023

Someone recently asked for my take on cover letters - and while in the past I'd say they're largely pointless unless they provide details your resume cannot (a personal link to the company, an employee, the product - or best of all, some specific experience that would be invaluable to the organization) this current job market has me re-evaluating. I still believe (based on data) that many cover letters will get ignored - when volume of applicants go up, hiring managers don't have the time to read them all. They'll prioritize the resume first, then - if the candidate looks appealing - they may gloss over the cover letter. They may then read the cover letter in more depth in advance of the interview - but at that point, the ball's already in motion. Below 1,000 employees and your cover letter will have greater impact than above 1,000 employees. The smaller the company, the more they'll want to have information about their candidates, rely a lot more on trust, an

Dear Old Me / Dear Young Me - On Comparisons

May 16, 2023

Dear Old Me, Whether it's in classes, talking to friends, or in interviews - I'm really feeling like I'm never good enough. When I see what others can do, the solutions they create, it looks so easy for them. I really want to be a programmer - so hopefully you've gotten better? ~Alishah -- Dear Young Me, Let's start simple: Output is a terrible way of measuring difficulty. You never know how hard something is for someone - even if they explain their thought process. That's why we say "they make it look easy." Have you ever looked at one of those images that has a hidden image inside it? The first time, it can be tricky to find - but once you see it, it's always there. A lot of problem solving boils down to how many things you've already seen. The fewer things you see for the first time, the better equipped you become at solving them. Part of the trick is taking those problems and simplifying it down to basic parts. Then, whenever you encou

Mistakes on Stage

May 11, 2023

My daughter was telling me how she's nervous of her upcoming recital. Asking why, she said how was worried about messing up in front of others and getting embarrassed. Being the supportive parent I am, I said "Well, I can promise you this: you will absolutely mess up. It will happen, and there's no avoiding it." Seeing this was doing nothing to build her confidence, I elaborated: " Perfection is impossible. There are no perfect performances. Everyone messes up - and really, a perfect performance isn't always that interesting. It's robotic. The thing that gives music its 'soul' is imperfection." What wows people is how you handle the mess up when it happens. Do you shut down and walk off stage? Are you so scared of messing up you never get on the stage? Do you laugh at the mess up and forge ahead, continuing to make more mistakes? Do you pause, reset, and continue on without further mistakes? Or do you take that mistake and make something out

Dear Old Me / Dear Young Me - On Novelty

May 09, 2023

Dear Old Me, So - you wrote recently about how "all the answers become distractions." What did you mean by that? It sounded good, and I wonder if it's what I'm dealing with? As I get better with coding, I'm constantly getting new ideas. Ideas come faster than I can build them - and I just can't keep up. Are you still dealing with that challenge? ~Alishah P.S. Did you ever finish Zinglok-725? -- Dear Young Me, The problem never goes away. Someone I/you (we?) admire called us creatively erratic - and while it stung to hear, it was only partially accurate. The thing is, you'll eventually learn to manage it in a few different ways: You'll get better at identifying what intrigues you about the idea. Ideas will come to you as massive projects - but if you spend the time to dissect it down to the trivial bit you'll usually come to the conclusion that: the problem you're interested in has already been resolved, and the rest is just an interesting i

SkatGPT

May 04, 2023

Everyone's talking about ChatGPT. Today, I'd like to introduce SkatGPT . ...Jazz singers, be afraid...

Hearing What You (Don't) Want To Hear

May 03, 2023

Insecurities can really mess with our senses. You hear things differently. You hear the things you don't want to hear. Compliments become invisible while you see criticism everywhere - explicit, implied, subtly hinted at. Feedback becomes the evidence that validates your worst fears about yourself. Praise only comes from those you've duped. Take time to impress yourself. It'll help you see things as they are.

Dear Old Me / Dear Young Me - On Perl

May 02, 2023

Dear Old Me, HI! Did you ever become a coder? Should I learn Perl? What about ColdFusion? I'm worried I won't ever get a coding job unless I learn them all. ~Alishah -- Dear Young Me, Don't bother learning Perl. I don't know a single coder who knows Perl. In fact, you'll come across dozens of languages over the next 20 years. Every one of them will do the same thing but in slightly different ways. Instead learn how to break problems down into simple steps. That's the important skill. Ask yourself how you'd solve a problem manually (like how would you find the word "tiger" in any book?) . If the problem is too hard on its own, or too hard to then translate into computer instructions - then ask yourself what tools or tricks could make it easier (what if the book had an index or table of contents?!) In fact, you'll often find a lot of problems either: Lack a structure; If so, introduce what you need. Have the wrong structure; If so, break and r

If it matters 100 yrs from now... it was important.

April 27, 2023

I'm a sucker for a hidden message. The mysterious letter that shows up, a digital easter egg tucked away, geo-caching, a cryptic riddle... 6 years ago, we were changing out the original mirror in our bathroom and, prying it off the wall, found this message: If it matters 100 years from now ... it was important. Weirdly, I'm finding myself giving similar advice to others as I review their resumes. I'll read through their professional experience - either a paragraph or bulleted list of tasks they performed - and I'll hit them back with: Why did it matter? If it matters enough to include on your resume, it was important. State why. This is what it means to focus on your impact . e.g. I would reviewed customer support cases each month, and was also responsible for keeping our technical documentation up to date. Why does this matter? What makes it important? There's a hidden feedback loop in there that's not being called out, and the impact is lost. Typically, we r

Dear Old Me / Dear Young Me - On Persistence

April 25, 2023

Dear Old Me, Remember how you struggled with Bit Blitting, so you made that Calvin & Hobbes fighting game using transparent icons? That was a cool but hacky way to solve that problem. Are you still stubbornly persistent? I really hope coding gets easier, because it's hard to learn how to get better. ~Alishah -- Dear Young Me, You'll soon marvel at how much easier things gets. Learning Bit Blit through random blogs wasn't easy. Now there are now better websites like StackOverflow and Wikipedia that do much better at explaining concepts - but technology is also much more powerful and faster, so you don't have to do as much from scratch . Oh - and there's also something called ChatGPT now - it's AI that can write code based on your prompts - but that's probably a discussion for another day (honestly, we're still not sure of all the implications of something that powerful!) You don't know it yet, but the thing that made you good is exactly what I

Always Be ... Growing?

April 24, 2023

ALWAYS. BE. GROWING? No. I had an interesting conversation with someone the other day about how LinkedIn/Corporate culture creates this pressure to use every waking minute to "invest in yourself" and to "grow grow grow". That if you don't have a side hustle, or if you're not able to monetize or leverage what you're doing to help in your career, that you're wasting time. After that conversation, I went outside and for about 45 minutes threw these foam boomerangs with my kids. My step counter gave me no credit, because (as you can see) my feet never had to move. And there was a moment when I just paused and thought: This is fun. I'm enjoying this. It reminded me of being a kid - when you would play well past sunset, as the air got colder and crisper, but you were just enjoying the simple activity you were doing. Afterwards, I felt great - and, the truth is, while you don't need to always be growing, moments like these can wind up doing more for

1997 Holiday Crafts Fair

April 21, 2023

Found an old photo from 1997 when I appeared in the local paper (up front, holding the CD). Sadly, what the article fails to mention is that my group was selling holiday-themed computer games that I had coded in VB4. Admittedly, they didn't sell as much as the Mistle-Toads (which definitely had better branding.) 🧑‍💻

Work Experience vs Professional Experience

April 20, 2023

In reviewing a bunch of resumes this week, I noticed quite a lot of resumes with a "Work Experience" section. In each of those resumes, people had de-valuing some very valuable experience - and I write that with no exaggeration. The problem is people were looking at their experience purely through the "Job Title/Relevancy" lens and had reduced their experience down to a list of discrete, random, disconnected jobs. No interconnectedness, no narrative thread weaving through it all. As much as you may feel some jobs have no way of being connected, the reality is you are always the connection . To not connect them on your resume is to lose all that growth, knowledge, skills, impact, value, and trajectory. In other words - you lose the " You " in the resume. I recommended they start with a small change. Reword "Work Experience" to "Professional Experience" because, ultimately, every single job they had was in service of building their

UX and Birth Years

April 19, 2023

The older I get the worse the UX becomes when selecting my birth year. There was a time when the top of the selection list was really close to my birthyear. Now, there's just so much scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

Dear Old Me / Dear Young Me - On Creativity

April 18, 2023

Dear Old Me, Hi! I hope you're well! Now that you are an adult, do you still have fun coding and creating things like games and movies and stories? It's tough for me right now, because I don't always have the right programs and sometimes they're really expensive. Either way, I hope you found a way to keep being creative and never turned into a serious adult. ~Alishah P.S. Did you ever get your own domain name? Is it a Dot Com?? -- Dear Young Me, Most people will tell you that, as an adult, it's hard to find the time to be creative. They'll tell you that you have to "make the time" - but you can't schedule inspiration. Being creative is like exercising. As you get older, it's less a part of your regular day. Just like I don't have Recess or Gym class, I don't have Art class. But you know, just as well as I, you didn't need either of those to be active. Remember how you'd run up/down the stairs, jump off the sofa, dance around i

Maps

April 11, 2023

Maps are a great metaphor for ... well, no spoilers. I remember one of my college professors paraphrasing a quote that I think was also misattributed. He said ( and I, myself, must paraphrase... ) "The most accurate map would be one that you could unfold, step inside, and walk along the map to where you want to go. All the trees, all the bugs, are exactly where they are. When you get to your destination you step outside the map and fold it back up, and you're where you want to be." My professor said the quote originally came from Alexandre Dumas; But given I have to Google a paraphrasing of a paraphrasing, it's been hard to find the original quote. Closest I've seen is comedian Steven Write's joke: “I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.”

Unexpected Benefits

April 05, 2023

Drinking more water lately has lead me to think more about virtuous cycles and the unintended and unexpected benefits that come with doing something good. My FitBit has always nagged at me to get in more steps and I've gotten pretty good at ignoring it... And then, I noticed I wasn't getting the notifications anymore. I figured I'd won the battle, and FitBit gave up on me... Until I checked my stats, and I was hitting my step goal every hour. And then I realized, by drinking more water, I was having (obviously) having to use the restroom more, which meant getting up from my desk and walking more. When Jr Developers ask me for how they can grow in their career, reading is always at the top of my list of suggestions. It's an obvious one, but so few ever follow through. Whether it's a book on business (organizational structures, producitivity frameworks, customer/product management approaches), books on science/mathematics, or - at the very least - books on technology

Portfolio Red Flags

April 04, 2023

I know a portfolio is an opportunity to experiment, have fun, and implement all kind of nifty doo-dads. Avoid this temptation. When you think of your portfolio as a product, those little distractions are scope-creep. If you want to highlight how you like to play around and challenge yourself then, rather than make those snippets a "core feature" of your website, give them a dedicated a section on your Portfolio. Label the section "Experiments", showcase them there along with a writeup of what you learned. Alternatively, host them on CodePen, and direct traffic there. If you have a lot of gimmicky effects as part of your main portfolio, that can be a 🚩 red flag 🚩 (Especially if you also have very few projects on your GitHub!) It gives the impression you get distracted easily, focus on novelty not value, and will cause scope to balloon out of control.

Never Giving Up

April 03, 2023

I make a lot of content about job hunting / resume advice. Often it's with my 8 year old daughter's Legos. This past weekend she was watching me closely and asked what I was doing. I told her how I like to take the things I know about and make things for others who may find it helpful. She paused - then asked if she made her own story, if I could share it. So here it is. A short story about confidence and never giving up by an amazing girl who is persistent, confident and never, ever, ever gives up. Hope it gives you a bright start to your week. 🌤

"FOLLOW THAT CAB!"

March 31, 2023

I was playing 2 Truths & A Lie with some coworkers. One of my truths (that everyone was convinced was a lie) is about how I'd once jumped into a cab and yelled that classic line that appears in just about every movie genre. It was from a time when I had long, shaggy hair tucked under a tattered cap. The cab driver, realizing it was an #opportunity to live out his car-chase dreams, broke quite a few traffic laws that night. I won't get into the specifics of that story. You can pretty much pick any movie and the elements behind that scene were the same make up of my own true story, (including a classic scene where we were driving over a bridge, lost the other cab for some moments, and then when we spotted them again, we had to pull across 3 lanes to make a turn just in time...) But this story is not the purpose of the post. Or rather, one story is not the point. The point is ALL. The. Stories. I don't see life as discreete experiences. They're all parts of a larger st

To thine own resume be true...

March 28, 2023

Should you lie on your resume? Should you lie in an interview? Should you embellish your experience? While the answer is obviously no, the concern I have is for the hundreds of coworkers & friends that I know are selling themselves short. Obviously, no honest person ever wants credit for someone else's success. But, if you're a naturally humble person, you're probably undervaluing the role you played in that person's success. Anyone who is part of a team, department, business unit, organization can never be independently successful. Success is a team effort - and everyone deserves the credit. When I think of my own successful projects - I was trained by my seniors, enabled by my leadership, supported by my direct reports, and strengthened by my peers. And I know I played a similar role for others. You shouldn't lie on your resume. But you absolutely should recognize your contributions towards success. Showcase it on resume, highlight it in an interview, share it

The 4 "REs" of Systems Debt

March 20, 2023

I like to joke that the perfect code is the code you've not yet written. It's optimized, bug-free, fully capable, and carries zero debt. Because, the unfortunate truth is, as soon as we're writing code, we're likely accruing some debt - and that's ok provided we're consistently paying it down. A common suggestion is to allocate 20% of the teams' time towards paying down technical debt. As a reminder, Technical Debt is when teams take shortcuts to deliver a project sooner, knowing they will later refactor. Not paying it down leads to a product with a brittle code base that is tough to maintain, scale and support - and teams are often bad about actively paying it down, which leads to Engineers having a strong preference for green field work over a debt-ridden brown field . So - what if we allocated 20% of our time towards paying down debt? In a typical 5-day work week, this could mean dedicating Fridays to paying down debt you accrued over the course of the

Hire for Capability not Experience

March 16, 2023

Advice for fellow Hiring Managers: Hire for the generalized capability, not the specialized experience: If you need someone who can shovel dirt, hire someone who can shovel. Hard. Stop. When you get too specific in your jobposting you turn away amazing candidates - particularly those in groups that are known to self-select out when they don't meet all requirements. If you're thinking: "But, I need someone who has experience with dirt... dry dirt, wet dirt, compacted dirt, gravel dirt, ornamental dirt..." then why are you hiring a shoveler? Get yourself a Dirt Specialist. You're either trying to get away with a 2-for-1 role (which never works out well... Dirt Specialists don't want to shovel, and Dirt Shovelers just want to shovel), or you're not really hiring the Right Person for the Right Job (see EOS by Gino Wickman .) Otherwise, you're unknowingly eliminating the best kind of candidates: One who has core skills, but is also looking to learn, adapt,

Creating Opportunity

March 15, 2023

An important theme across my career has been, in the absence of opportunity, to create my own. With today's jobm arket being tougher than ever - with few opportunities, and lots of competition - I'm setting out to create opportunity. If you're a coder or in tech, if you're #OpenToWork and want to fill some time with a project, I'd love it if you joined me. I won't share too many details just yet but the project is entirely community-focused, designed to help out job seekers no matter their job title or industry. If you're curious to learn more, connect with me on LinkedIn .

My place, my rules

March 13, 2023

One summer, back when I was a teenager, I visited my oldest brother who lived in another city. We were at his place hanging out and, out of nowhere, he said "Lets play hockey." We used to do this a lot when we were kids, living under one roof (Please don't tell my parents). "Where?" I asked. "Here," he said - as he grabbed a couple of hockey sticks from his coat closet, moved all the living room furniture to the side, set up some nets with pillows, and tossed a tennis ball on the floor. "Are you...allowed to do this?" I asked. He looked at me incredulously. "What do you mean? Why would I not be allowed. It's my place..." It's a memory that also reminds me of a joke by Mitch Hedberg: "I just bought a 2-bedroom house, but I think I get to decide how many bedrooms there are, don't you?" There are a lot of unspoken rules we follow - and end up inhibiting ourselves as a result. Conversations we avoid, extra work we

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