Small things and people around us
This is the reflection about how small things can effect bigger things.
I have a story. It is several days ago. I have a consulting job after my workday, for client in the US. I am in Indonesia, I often spent time until 2 a.m. in the morning to finish my job and I usually order food via on-demand app called Go-Food. It is basically Uber Eat of Indonesia.
In Indonesia it is common to rent a room called “kost” for early career who work outside his hometown in the bigger city. I am also the one who rent “kost”. My “kost” building having 3 floors. First floor is the owner house then second and third are rented for people.
I live in the second floor. Sometimes I am not aware that when I want to out and go downstairs, I don’t know that I am running and the sound when I tap the stairs is disturbing the owner or maybe other people who live in the “kost” building. Same with that day when I ordered McDonal’s burger and the order arrive. I go downstairs and when I finish took my order and paid some amount of money for the food and delivery fee, suddenly the owner of the building open the front door and tell me something like this “Please don’t run when you go downstairs especially in the night, the sound is disturbing us.”. Something clicked in my mind and at that time I realize that I have a bad habit, and I learn to know it the hard way. But I thanks to the owner of the building, now I am feel better that I know that I have yet another bad habit.
I learned several things:
- Take time to have retrospect to our habit, maybe we have bad habit that disturb people around us. If not, you will get to know it the hard way.
- It is small things that’s matter. How you walk in the stairs, how you speak, how you clean up the room, and many other how for small things that’s matters.
Related to Software Development
“Every code is one liner in the beginning. Then it grows.”
Before I got to know my bad habit, I already believe that small things is important. How we name our variable, how we order the declaration of variable, how we create a class, how we setup the continuous integration, etc. Those are small things. I remember my senior in my current company said “Every code is one liner in the beginning. Then it grows.”. He said this in the context of discussing a story we want to work on which can be done with one liner. In that context he want to mention that one liner is matters, we have experience that one liner can create an incident.
