Calming Down

The last month or two have seen increasing stress levels for me. I've been getting teeth pain again because I spend so much time grinding them (literally). However, that seems to be coming to an end now. I finally woke up this morning and felt refreshed and relaxed. We'll see how long it lasts, but I'm trying to making changes that will reduce my stress in the long run.

For example, I know most of the stress comes from work. A common problem is that many developers are working independently - they fail to get buy-in and reviews from the other developers, and so their hard work ends up unused and wasted. This is frustrating and sad, but it's also stressful for me as I'm meant to maintain and encourage the development of a reusable codebase. I'm thinking to offer "a free lunch to anyone who writes more than 300 lines of code, and that code is used happily by 2 other developers".

I'm hoping it will change the way people write their code. They'll still perform their tasks as required, but with just a little more effort they'll score themselves a free lunch as well. Some have already started down this path by asking others for reviews, but we need to get from "asking to reviews" to "producing reusable code".