Code and smiling people

Eleven years ago, my coworkers and I hosted Bike-to-Work Day for our office building. Under a white popup tent, we handed out juices and bananas and moaned that we didn’t get Qdoba to sponsor us. For a couple of hours, engineers mingled with librarians, making our parking lot feel more like a neighborhood than an office park.

Later that morning, with the cooler ice melted and drained, we went back to our desks to do engineering. My brain was buzzing. Whatever we'd just done outside made me feel so alive! Why don’t we do that everyday! I didn’t write much code that afternoon.

Skip forward to last week. On Tuesday I sat at a table handing out ballots to voters for a 16 hour shift. On Thursday I sat at my desk for far less than 16 hours redoing my approach to iterables in my Python interpreter.

Tuesday’s work was moving tables and chairs and smiling at my neighbors, while Thursday’s was moving boxes around in my head until the compiler smiled at me. Both went well, and by Friday the week felt lived-in.

It seems I’m still chasing the same balance, local participation mixed with deep technical work. Last week reminded me how much I enjoy having both in the same week, even if they come unbundled from one job.

I don’t yet know what that will look like eleven years from now, but I hope it contains both.

-Tyler

P.S. - Qdoba sponsored us the next year.