human-user-guide.md

Human User Guide for Nathan Stocks (@CleanCut)

About me

What are some honest, unfiltered things about you?

• I love the Rust programming language...so much that I teach it (on the side) and contribute to Rust itself.
• I'm an aspiring indie game developer...and I'm determined to make my games in Rust.
• Shipping things that make people smile is one of my big motivators
• Family is important to me. I've got a wife and four kids, lots of siblings and relatives.
• I'm religious, which mostly shows up in the workplace as avoiding profanity, alcohol, coffee and tea.
• I'm addicted to food. Really! I eat it almost every day. Just can't stop. Especially cheddar, mozzarella, and parmesan cheese. I put cheese on lots of my food.

What drives you nuts?

• Unwillingness to ship to learn and/or sticking to a bad decision after it has been recognized
• Narrow-minded thinking, like focusing on $$$ as if it were the sole way to measure whether something should be done or not.
• Run-time crashes
• Design by committee
• Java
• Boiled vegetables

What are your quirks?

• For a long time I thought I wanted to be a manager, but I learned that I was confusing "managing" with mentoring and teaching. I don't actually care for "managing". I do love doing the engineering work, leading technical efforts, sharing what I know, etc.
• I like to control my environment. When I pick up a new tool, I will spend a lot of time going through all of the configuration options and customizing things. When I get new hardware I like to clean my whole office and my windows. Stuff like that.
• I really like shade trees, especially maple trees. I have over a dozen maple trees in my yard, many of which I grew from seed. I also have an autumn purple ash, a honey locust, and even a baby oak tree (oaks struggle in the desert).
• I'm really calm under disaster-like pressure. I have over 20 years of on-call experience.

What are some things that people might misunderstand about you that you should clarify?

• I grew up in a home where we discussed things by stating our opinion bluntly and waiting for the other person to respond with their own blunt opinion. Nowadays I'm a lot better at asking your opinion when I want to know what you think, but sometimes I still slip back into that conversation pattern, which can feel overly aggressive to people who don't communicate like that. If I slip into stating my opinions as if they're absolute truths, it would be lovely if you could take that as--"Oh, Nathan wants to know my thoughts on the topic". It's sort of weird, I know. I'll keep working on it.
• Being religious != being pushy or judgemental. Each of those character attributes are independent of each other. I strive to be only the former, not the latter. If you want to talk about religion, I'm happy to share my beliefs and hear about yours. Otherwise, the subject probably won't come up outside of things like this human-user-guide.
• Liking Rust != being pushy or judgemental. See also above. 😄

About my colleagues

What qualities do you particularly value in your colleagues?

• I love how everyone has different strengths and skills that I can rely on and learn from.
• I love bouncing ideas back and forth with people, even if we don't end up using many of the ideas.
• I love it when my colleagues ship & learn, adjust, ship & learn, adjust, etc. Especially if I get to participate.

What do you wish colleagues didn’t do?

• Leave PR's unapproved after feedback has been addressed
• Get mad at each other

How can people earn an extra gold star with you?

• Teach me something new
• Share food with me
• Being nice and empathetic 😊
• Work with me on a project

About my interactions

How do you coach people to do their best work and develop their talents?

• I love sharing what I know!
• Talking through pros and cons of various options
• Handing off work I could do to someone who will benefit/learn more from doing it than I would
• Encouraging others to take ownership of a feature, project, service, etc. and then helping them out until they feel confident.

What’s the best way to communicate with you?

• I love hopping on Zoom chats to pair with people (or just hang out)
• Slack, Discord, GitHub Pull Requests
• Any way! I like interacting. I don't like feeling lonely in a crowd.

What’s the best way to convince you to do something?

• Thoughtfully consider the options
• Explain the benefits of what you want me to do
• Be open to changing direction if it doesn't work out

How do you like to give feedback?

• For positive feedback I try to communicate it ASAP in whatever communication medium we're using at the time
• I prefer to give technical feedback in context (usually on the PR), and ASAP.
• I prefer not to give personal constructive feedback at all. When I do I give it privately, and only when it's either absolutely essential or asked for.
• I love giving people sparkles (an internal GitHub slackbot thing)

How do you like to get feedback?

• Any way is great for positive feedback. Public, private, in person, sparkles, slack, zoom, discord text, whatever.
• I prefer direct, immediate, in-context communication for constructive technical feedback (just say it on the PR!)
• I prefer slightly delayed, calm, private, slack/zoom for constructive personal feedback