These are the four things I wish I had known when I was just starting out.

Don’t chase money

I realize that everyone needs a certain amount of money to survive and I’m very privileged to be able to work at a place that I enjoy and pays me enough to cover all of my bills.

The advice I wish I knew when I started was to not pick the job purely because it offered $1k more a year. Find a place where you enjoy working at and then work your ass off. The difference in salaries will generally correct itself when you’re motivated and enjoy working at a place.

Jessica Pryce-Jones, author of Happiness at Work and Founder of iOpener, agrees.

“Happiness at work is closely correlated with greater performance and productivity as well as greater energy, better reviews, faster promotion, higher income, better health and increased happiness with life. So it’s good for organizations and individuals, too.”

By enjoying the place you work at those promotions that close the gap generally come faster.

Find a mentor and ask for help

Finding a mentor early on in your career can be immensely beneficial. Mentors are someone you can ask for advice, someone who can help you get through tough situations and someone who can help you get to where you need to be.

Mentors can come from anywhere. Don’t be afraid to talk to the senior leadership team at your organization. It’s easy to get into the mindset that they’re too busy or too important to talk to you but some of the best mentors I’ve had have come from the VP level.

You don’t always have to look upwards to find a mentor. Your colleagues, friends and acquaintances can also be mentors. Everyone has different experiences. People who work at the same level as you will have had different opportunities that you can learn from. These relationships can often be more collaborative since both sides can learn a lot.

It’s ok to fail

I wish I had taken more chances when I was starting my career. I had the mindset that failure was bad and should be avoided at all costs. Failure can be a great thing, as long as you learn from it. If you’re continually failing at the same thing, over and over, you’re only going to get frustrated. If you can take that failure and learn from it, you’ll be better prepared in the future.

It’s easier to fail when you’re just starting out since you’re likely to have less at risk. Once you have a family, mortgage and other responsibilities it’s harder to take risks since failure is more costly.

Family > Job

At the end of the day, your job is just a means to make money (and hopefully friends) to be able to spend more time with your family. There will be times where focusing on your career, spending long hours working, is putting your family first. You’re spending the time to learn, to further your career which directly benefits your family. The advice I’d have for my younger self is to always circle back and make sure the work I’m doing is putting my family first.

Is that 80 hour work week going to put me ahead so I can spend more time with my family in the future? Is this new position going to unlock things for me or give me more time with my family? If the answers no then you need to look really hard to see if it’s worth it.

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Why restart this blog?

This year the world was hit with a devastating pandemic, COVID-19. While under lockdown I began to think about financial stability and how dangerous it is to have a single source of income. I began thinking about the kind of activities I could start doing to better protect myself and my family in case I ever lost my job. I’ve thought of a number of ideas, ranging from building out a side project, writing, dividend investing and more, and I wanted to start chronicling them here. I have no idea whether any of these ideas will ever come to fruition but I thought it’d be an interesting experiment to try.

I’m going to set a goal for myself to hit $5000/month in passive income. This is slightly more than the average Canadian income and I thought it’d be an interesting milestone to reach for. In an upcoming article, I’ll speak more on why I set this goal and how I plan on hitting it.

What to Expect

So what can you expect from procrastinatingdev.com? Well, I’ve got a number of articles already written and plan to release them once a week, every Tuesday, at least for the foreseeable future. These posts will generally fall under one of these categories.

Technical Articles

I’ve got a number of articles planned where I deep dive into a technical topic. My background is in Python so a number of these will be focused on that but there’s also the possibility for articles on Postgres (or databases in general), Javascript and more.

Management Posts

I’ve been a manager for over 7 years now and I’ve spent a tonne of time reading, researching, experimenting and failing at how to be a better manager. I’ve mentored junior developers to senior, senior devs to managers. I’ve hired dozens of people and fired a few too. I’ve managed budgets, negotiated software licenses and presented 5-year strategic roadmaps to C-level executives. I plan on writing about all of these things here.

Side Hustle Updates

I mentioned that one of my goals was to hit $5000/month to protect myself against having a single income. One of the ideas on getting there is to start a side hustle. I’ve got a few ideas brewing (and a couple of domains purchased) so I’ll be speaking about how to build a side hustle from scratch.

Financial Updates

Every month I’ll have an extra post going through the financial update for that month as I strive to hit my goal. I’ll break it down by channel and give insight into how I went about making it and how you could too.

So if any of this sounds interesting and you’d like to follow along please feel free to signup below to stay up to date. See you around!

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Favourite Books

Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change — Ellen Pao

I followed along as Ellen’s lawsuit was happening against Kleiner Perkins so reading about it from her point of view and all of the events that led up to it was very interesting. The subjects are important and extremely relevant since I’m also in tech. The writing still is simple and easy to get behind and I finished this book extremely quickly.

Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It — Chris Clearfield

I really liked this book for a number of reasons. The stories were interesting and I was able to tie each one back into a failure I’ve experienced throughout my career. I was expecting this book to be a little dry when I bought it but it was hard to put down once I started.

The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels — Michael D. Watkins

In September I switched roles and picked up this book to help with the transition. The diagrams and worksheets were invaluable and the examples throughout were incredibly useful even though I’ve been managing for the past 8 years.

I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone switching jobs or becoming a manager for the first time.

The Martian — Andy Weir

This is one of my favourite science fiction novels of all time. I love the story, the humour and the actual science that was thoroughly researched. This is also one of the few books where I thought the movie didn’t totally butcher.

Statistics

Last year I read/listened to 26 books. You can find the full list here. I listened to 17 audiobooks (at 1.5x speed) for a total of 122 hours of listening time (5.1 days). This is one of the reasons why I was able to get through so many books. On average it took me 4.3 days to get through an audiobook vs 12.14 days to get through a hard copy. Of the 7 physical books, I read a total of 1246 pages.

Of the 26 books, only 9 were written by women (35%). This was a significant increase over 2018 where 14% of the books I read were written by women. I plan on continuing this trend into 2020.

The trend continues where I rated books slightly more positive than the rating on Good Reads. In 14 cases I rated the book more favourably than the community, though my average rating was a 4.15/5 vs 4.09/5 so the difference is very minimal. I rated books pretty evenly regardless of the gender of the author but I did notice that I rated physical books much higher than audiobooks in general (4.3 vs 4.05). This makes sense since I tend to only buy books that I think I’ll be interested in.

This year I was much more consistent in the genres of books I read. Last year 23% of the books I read fell under the business category. This year Children, Business, Science Fiction, Politics, Self Help and Fantasy all tied for 11.5%

Onwards

I already have a couple of goals for 2020. I want to continue being mindful of the books I’m reading and who’s writing them. I want to make sure that I’m reading books from a diverse set of authors.

The second goal is to read at least 30 books. This is less than my goal for 2019 but more than I actually read last year. I want to try to be more consistent in the number of books I read in a month. In 2018 there was only a single month where I didn’t read any books, in 2019 there was 4.

My final goal is to read more physical books. I love audiobooks because I can listen to them while I’m walking and driving but I’d really like to get to more physical books. There’s something about flipping through the pages and finally getting to the end that is so much more satisfying than finishing an audiobook.

Here’s to 2020 and more hopefully many more books!

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This was the first time in over 15 years that I really set out to read a lot of books. I used to curl up on a couch or hang out in my bedroom all day reading until my parents forced me to go outside or come to dinner. Then high school, university, work, parenthood and numerous other things got in the way and I never got back into reading.

That changed in 2018 after talking with Ian MacNeill and seeing how much he read in 2017. At the same time, I was also looking into how I was spending my time and decided I wanted to spend time reading instead of watching Youtube and Netflix.

Now, I couldn’t just read books and not track what I read.

Favourite Books

Before I deep dive into statistics and the full list of books I thought I’d mention my favourites.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

I found Bad Blood riveting, I literally couldn’t put it down. I work in Tech and followed along loosely to what was happening at Theranos but I never all of the details. To see someone so adept at lying and manipulating is chilling. There were also a lot of anti-patterns when it came to management that I took away.

Beyond the Castle: A Guide to Discovering Your Happily Ever After

I’m a big fan of Disney, especially the parks and I found this book really interesting. I liked all of the personal stories and the little extra pieces of information as to how Disney runs such a tight ship. Just as a warning for those who aren’t religious, Jody Dreyer is and weaves it throughout the book. In my opinion, it’s done very well and even if you aren’t religious it’s not shoved in your face.

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street

I found this book really interesting. The sheer greed and lengths people go to to make money is mind-blowing. There were times where I couldn’t believe the events actually happened in real life. Similar to Bad Blood there was also management anti-patterns that I took away, specifically around siloing information your staff receives.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon and Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

The main takeaway from these books is that I have no desire to start or run a large company anymore. Sacrificing family and your personal life isn’t worth it. While I found them both very interesting it definitely shed new light onto Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. I’m impressed at the drive they have and what they’ve been able to accomplish but it’s definitely not a life I want to pursue.

Statistics

Last year I read/listened to 42 books. You can find the full list here. I listened to 30 audiobooks (at 2x speed) for a total of 154 hours of listening time (6.4 days). This is one of the reasons why I was able to get through so many books. On average it took me 3.8 days to get through an audiobook vs 13.4 days to get through a hard copy. Of the 12 physical books, I read a total of 3225 pages.

Of the 42 books, only 6 were written by women (14%). This is something I’m actively working on in 2019. My goal is to have an even split of female authors to males as well as an even split between race.

On average I was slightly more positive towards the books than the rating on Good Reads. In 27 cases I rated the book more favourably than the community, though my average rating was a 4.09/5 vs 3.97/5 so the difference is very minimal. I rated books pretty evenly regardless of the gender of the author but I did notice that I rated physical books much higher than audiobooks in general (4.4 vs 3.9). This makes sense since I tend to only buy books that I think I’ll be interested in.

Genre-wise I didn’t find anything interesting. I read 10 Business books which made up 23% of everything I wrote. After that came Fiction (14.3%), Biography (9.5%) and Politics and Science Fiction (7.1%).

Onwards

I already have a couple of goals for 2019. As I mentioned above one of them is to become more mindful of the books I’m reading and who’s writing them. I want to make sure that I’m reading books from a diverse set of authors.

The second goal is to read at least 35 books. I know this goal is less than I did in 2018 but work and personal life are already crazy in 2019 and I‘m not positive I can keep up with what I did last year.

My final goal is to give up on books sooner. I finished a few books that I really wasn’t interested and it showed. By not completing books instead of slogging through them I’m confident I can surpass my reading goal for 2019.

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Son, I promise all of these things and more for as long as I live. I love you.

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People

The people at G Adventures are some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. It really makes work enjoyable when coming in every morning feels more like hanging out with friends instead of a tedious chore. Along with the great people, G Adventures also has a very shallow management structure. Above me is my manager, the VP of Technology and then Bruce Poon Tip. This shallow structure allows decisions to be made quickly and without the waste of getting 50 people to approve a single decision.

Bruce is also one of the best CEOs/Owners I’ve ever known. He cares for the business, the travellers and especially the employees. I’ve worked at businesses where you never see the top management team. At G, my desk is 10 feet away from Bruce and conversations happen regularly. This is a leadership quality that I plan on taking to any companies that I create in the future.

Technology

Because of the shallow management structure, the developers at G are able to manage our own technology stack. This means that we have the final say on what software we use, what servers we host our stuff on and even on when we deploy. Because of this, we’re also able to try out new technologies faster. If we want to try out the latest CSS/HTML framework, new deployment script or the latest programming language we can try it out. If it works we’ll launch it into production.

To further our learning, G promotes going to meetups and technology conferences. This helps us as developers improve our skills which also helps the company. It’s small things like this that make developers feel at home here and foster a culture of innovation.

Culture

One of the important aspects of any company is the culture that it has. If you’re miserable at work it doesn’t matter how much you get paid; it’s not worth it. You often spend more time at work than you do awake at home so the culture has to be right. At G we have a number of things that help create a welcoming culture. Every Friday at 4 pm we have Beer O’Clock. Employees are encouraged to go down to the kitchen and grab a beer (or wine) and mingle. This time allows people that wouldn’t normally talk in their normal workdays a chance to catch up and talk about things outside of work.

We also do a number of things outside of the Travel Industry. In response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, we raised over $10,000 for relief. We also have a number of outreach events in Toronto including Christmas in the Community for underprivileged kids. These events just add to the culture at G and make the work environment so much more rewarding.

Culture is so important at G that we even have a special “Culture Fit” interview that decides whether a person is right for the job.

Things We Can Do Better

Open Source All the Things: G Adventures writes a lot of code. With 16 developers and growing, we generate a lot of unique software tools and applications but most never reaches the development community. I think we should release more software, both to give back to the community as well as make our code better.

20% Time: Google is famous for its “20 percent time” policy that has employees working 80% of their week on their normal projects and 20% of their week on projects of their choosing that would normally be outside of their job description. I think this is a fantastic idea that allows developers to think of creative ideas that can benefit the company.

Hackathons:  Hackathons are a great way to get the creative juices flowing. Whenever I complete a hackathon I always feel revitalized and excited, coming back to work with new ideas on things to work on. I think G Adventures should host semi-regular hackathons, not only for our own developers but for the community as well.

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