Relief, or, putting a project back on the shelf

In late-February I was headhunted to move from the Monolith Platform team where I'd been for four months working on a big Sorbet upgrade and sunsetting an ancient Rails app that was no longer serving a purpose, to the Ruby Architecture team. Amazing! I had put the team on a pedestal since 2021 when they started a quarterly Rails upgrade rotation that I wanted to do but because of organizational politics I never could. Now, I was finally in the team - and permanently! Finally able to learn from the wealth of knowledge accrued by people I looked up to as long-standing Ruby and Rails Core team members. Exciterrifying!

I was assigned a large, difficult, project that'd had many Staff engineers working on it since 2022. Well then. If we're doing promotion-driven development, what better way to cement myself as having "impact"! I was going to try my hardest to understand everything and get it done.

The person who was leading on the project was about to leave, so they braindumped everything they could to me on day two of the team. It was intimidating, but I tried to break it down into smaller pieces.

A month or so passes, and things are going slowly but OK. Then my manager leaves, which is a shock even though it's all on good terms. Now we're a team of three, in very disparate timezones - I'm the only one in Europe. It's quite lonely as I'm quite a social person.

I try to keep up, but I spend increasing amounts of time doing "snack projects" that align with my interests - not this big blob of "changing the JSON library that GitHub uses". Oh, did I not say that that was the project? Yeah, that's the project. It's a big deal, with lots of moving parts, an extreme number of test failures, and lots of brokenness very visible to users if it goes wrong!

A Staff engineer joins the team. We have a 1:1. They ask me what I'm working on and, importantly, "how are you doing?". I try to explain the project, but my emotions are so unexpectedly close to the surface that I start crying instead. Not the best introduction! They liken it to "being alone floating in the middle of an ocean".

I realised that I was so overwhelmed with trying to do a good job and prove I'm "deserving" of being on the team, especially as the only Senior engineer in a team full of Staff engineers. But what does that even mean? Impact? Cementing myself? But people already thought I could do a job on the team, else they wouldn't have moved me over. I just put too much pressure on myself. It was just the wrong project for me at this time.

I'd spent some more time breaking off little chunks of it to pave the way for tackling the bigger problems. The bigger problems are mostly character encoding in areas of the application that would have involved a number of other teams weighing in on their areas of expertise, which they don't have time to do alongside their other competing priorities for something that's ultimately a "nice to have". That's a lot! "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" comes to mind.

On that note, we decided as a team to put the project back on the shelf. I didn't even know that was an option until someone said "yeah I would have put this on the shelf and said no if I'd been handed this". So, massive amounts of relief!

I had some help shaping the thoughts of projects I actually want to do - DX, monolith, Ruby stuff - into plans that are "epic"-shaped and maybe even good for promo if I want to go for it. So, people are on my side. And I can do anything I put my mind to if I just relax a bit. It has been a good thing that I tried to do it, because I've learned a lot, but it's not sustainable for a single person to do it all.

So, here goes formalizing my next project! Some DX work - where my passions really lie - moving towards making the GitHub Rails monolith more of a standard Rails app.

(With heartfelt thanks to jhawthorn for attempting to dump his years of knowledge about JSON over two hours of Zoom, joelhawksley for asking the right questions at the right time, composerinteralia for his help in shaping my "snack task" thoughts and ideas into something that leadership might like (rather than just the whims of someone with ADHD and a desire to do good work), and to bensheldon for bringing me onto the team even though we only overlapped for a few weeks.)