# The Sun

When you feel happy it becomes easier to learn and grow. Today, dedicate attention to the things that you enjoy. Whether it is savouring your coffee in the morning, chatting with a dear friend, petting a soft critter, feeling the sunshine on your face, or feeling satisfied with the work you complete, when you notice good feelings your world expands.

vitality, joy, success, optimism, clarity, authenticity

The Sun is a card of vitality, success, and simple joy. It represents solutions and information becoming clear, and the expression of one's authentic self.

# On Being A Senior Engineer (John Allspaw)

This is because they know that nothing they make will ever only be in their hands, and that good peer review is what makes better design decisions. As it’s been said elsewhere, they “beg for the bad news.”

the degree to which other people want to work with you is a direct indication on how successful you’ll be in your career as an engineer.

We as an industry need to (of course) refrain from critiques of human character and condition, but not shy away from critiques of work product. We need to get tougher skin and be able to receive critique through a lens that attempts to eliminate personal focus. There will be assholes, they should be shunned. But the attitude that someone’s code is their baby should come to an end. Code doesn’t have feelings, doesn’t develop complexes and certainly doesn’t exhibit the most important trait (the ability to reproduce) of that which carries for your genetic strains.

See also below #2 and #10 in The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming.

Nothing indicates that you have a lack of perspective and awareness like a poorly thought out and nonconstructive tweet that slings venomous insults. It’s a junior engineer mistake to toss insults about a piece of complex technology in 140 characters.

Mature engineers do not shy away from making estimates and are always trying to get better at it.

Avoiding responsibility for estimates is another way of saying, “I’m not ready to be relied upon for building critical pieces of infrastructure.”

In general, mature engineers are comfortable with working within some nonzero amount of uncertainty and risk.

Mature engineers understand that not all of their projects are filled with rockstar-on-stage work. However menial and trivial your early assignments may appear, give them your best effort.

Sometimes the saving grace of a tedious task is their simplicity and maturity manifests in finishing them quickly and moving on. Sometimes tasks are tedious because they require extreme discipline and malleable attention span.

When privileged people begin to see the systems of bias and privilege, their first instinct typically is to mentor those who haven’t benefited from the same privilege. This is understandable–they want to help those who are marginalized grow, get promoted, or become better engineers, to help balance out the inequity that pervades our industry. But at its core, this instinct to mentor plays into the idea that those who are marginalized aren’t already skilled enough, smart enough, or ready for more responsibility or leadership.

What members of underrepresented groups in tech often need most is opportunity and visibility, not advice.

They know that one cannot be both efficient and thorough at the same time (The ETTO Principle), that most projects engineers work on exist on an axis of optimality and brittleness, and that whether the problems they are solving are acute or chronic.

They know that they work within a spectrum of ideal and non-ideal, and are OK with that. They are comfortable with it because they strive to make the ideal and non-ideal in a design explicit.

Later on in the lifecycle of a design, when the original design is not scaling anymore or needs to be replaced or rewritten, they can look back not with a perspective of how short-sighted those earlier decisions were, but instead say “yep, we made it this far with it and knew we’d