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My dad, who is a humanities educator whose passing awareness of tech basically stopped at "I can read email on my phone I guess but why would I even want to," valiantly asks about what I'm working on these days and I truly wish you could hear the conversations we have about software teams it's pretty delightful
My dad is like:
have you suggested that everyone get together and read the Iliad. It could foster a sense of camaraderie against the slings and arrows of life's difficulty
Have they tried stoicism
Do they ever recite poetry together
@grimalkina Your dad does sound delightful. Are those suggestions made seriously or in jest? Both are legit.
@fitzscott it's kind of both, we have completely serious conversations about this but also we both have a sense of humor about how unusual of a feeling that would be. But he genuinely does teach poetry and classics and natural history so it's his normal life
@grimalkina I feel extremely proud of myself in this moment having recently proposed my work book club read the new translation of the Iliad.
@minmi that's incredible!!!
@grimalkina this bookclub has been so fascinating to me cause these guys are such smart good guys but their aperture to see the world is so so narrow so reading literature with them is such a revelation
@grimalkina Poetry is an important part of software development, this fact isn't appreciated enough.
@grimalkina omg, after the mass layoffs, stoicism was all anybody would talk about. it flooded the internal social media.
@twifkak yeah the manosphere is remarkably into that one which seems to have a lot of tech crossover
What is an SBOM but a Catalogue of Ships persevering?
@grimalkina Those are actually good ideas
@grimalkina god, your dad sounds like a baller
@grimalkina I should bring up the poetry thing at my next retro.
@flyingsquirrel key to this advice is that the poetry should be memorized, so you set yourself a task to memorize a long epic poem and then you get to be celebrated in accomplishing this
@grimalkina Good tip. The last poem I memorized in full was Al Purdy's At the Quinte Hotel, which I don't think would have the inspirational theming required. I'll see if I can find something more appropriate.
@grimalkina Oh. My god. I wonder if devs would ever do it. Get paid to read the Iliad?!
I was like well think of a codebase as a shared narrative with an oral tradition with lots of tacit rules and he was like, yeah yeah I get it, it's the same here
@grimalkina oh so that’s what the Catalogue of Ships was
@[email protected] I have used precisely this analogy in trying to explain how engineering teams function! As a data point, my dad has a classics degree...
My dad: do you ever encourage these people to go take walks and learn different kinds of birds and trees
@grimalkina get this man a fedi account looool. These are the messages I want to hear 😂❤️
@grimalkina decades ago after a particularly stressful week (I was part of a team managing the build and code repositories and coding tools/platforms for a massive bank with over 1000 full time programmers in the late 1990’s) my office mate gave me some really great advice which echos your dad’s
“Go take a walk by the river” (our office was in downtown Chicago)
At the moment it seemed odd but we rarely left the office (lunches were free and brought to our desk) doing so did indeed help calm me
The reactions to this are cracking me up because indeed, my dad is an incredibly charismatic education visionary who has founded multiple liberal arts programs and it's really funny to see that charisma translate even here. I do expect you to all give me credit for how many poems I know now
Well, have you? Sounds like a good idea tbh.
@grimalkina Would you be willing to share your dad? Mine never suggested reading the Iliad and I've held it against him ever since.
@grimalkina it might appeal to their deep desire to live separate from the modern world 😅
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