Enthusiasm is contagious

The best developers I’ve worked with have always shared one trait, enthusiasm.

They were the ones who got genuinely excited about something. Whether it was a new framework, language, editor, or even just changing colourschemes & fonts - their enthusiasm was infectious.

I first noticed this two years into my career. There was this senior developer who was recently hired who was absolutely obsessed with Emacs and Arch Linux. I was blown away as someone who had only used xfce, the default terminal and atom for 2 years, with 0 plugins etc. He also introduced me to TDD as a fun fact. But that’s where I caught the dotfiles bug, I remember going home and spending the weekend watching videos and reading articles on arch and emacs, I saw the potential on what I could create from what his setup was like but I didn’t want to copy that. I wanted to figure out how to get there. The enthusiasm was contagious though, from that first weekend until he left we would constantly discuss dotfiles, fun times. DistroTube the goat.

Enthusiasm breeds exploration #

I ended up discovering & settling with AwesomeWM, doom emacs and ubuntu for the most part. I enjoyed trying to get the most out of emacs. I had emails coming through and being sent from it at one point. The ripple effect was real. His enthusiasm didn’t just make me want to learn Emacs - it made me want to understand why he loved it so much. I quickly figured it out, you can turn your tools into anything, any keybind, any usecase. The possibilities were and still are endless.

You can just build whatever you want to solve whatever problem you have.

I’ve since had the pleasure of meeting and working with developers, who are much smarter than myself, and they all have the same trait. They’re enthusiastic about what they do. Maybe not on each daily task, but overall you can get them into a conversation about something they enjoy in tech. It’s the best, I learn so many things from just random throwaway conversations. It’s not that you learn it there in that conversation, it’s that it stores in your mind somewhere and you come back to research/learn about it yourself properly at a different time after learning the top level information in a conversation.

Something I often try and do in life is look at other people’s perspectives, and when you try and understand someone’s enthusiasm it’s usually very easy to become enthused in it yourself. That’s why I follow so many sports, I usually can find the fun in them! Other than f1, still struggling, sorry dad.

Iron sharpens iron (or whatever the developer equivalent is) #

There’s an old saying about iron sharpening iron, and I think it applies perfectly to development. When you’re surrounded by people who are genuinely excited about what they’re building, that energy is contagious.

I’ve worked on teams where everyone seemed to be just going through the motions. Tickets got completed, code got merged, features got shipped. But there was no spark. No one was excited about trying new approaches or leveraging new tools, or to be honest even going looking past what had already been implemented. If it hadn’t been implemented before there was no innovation. It felt stale.

Then I’ve worked on teams where people would share articles about interesting architectural patterns they’d read about, new languages they’ve tried, new frameworks or even just showing what side projects they’ve been working on.

When I joined my current job I had the pleasure of working with a chap named Damian, every monday morning in the office we’d ask each other if we worked on any side projects over the weekend. If we did we’d chat and probably show the other. It was nothing special, probably not longer than 15 minutes most times but it was always an interesting way to start the week just speaking about something that gets the brain going.

The difference in output was night and day. When people are enthusiastic about their craft, they naturally write better code, ask better questions, and push each other to improve. How often do you ever get the correct implementation first time, before realising there’s a better way or scenario you’ve not thought of? Active teams catch these problems.

Negativity is contagious too #

The flip side of this is equally true, and much more draining. Teams that aren’t all on the same page, and there are internal issues etc are tiring. Not even to the people directly involved but all members. Getting things done moves from being a smooth sailing operation to constant issues, and worst of all if people are stubborn you can get decision fatigue.

When you’re surrounded by that kind of energy, it becomes infectious in all the wrong ways. You start to see problems everywhere and solutions nowhere.

I’m not saying you should be blindly optimistic about everything - healthy scepticism is important. But there’s a difference between thoughtful criticism and demoralising negativity.

Find your thing and share it! #

So what’s the takeaway here? I think it’s twofold:

First, find something about tech that genuinely excites you. Maybe it’s functional programming, maybe it’s DevOps tooling, maybe it’s AI this day and age, or maybe it’s something left field like home automation. It doesn’t matter what it is, but having something you’re passionate about will make you a better developer, it pushes you to keep going.

Second, don’t be afraid to share that enthusiasm. You don’t have to evangelise or force your preferences on others, but talking about what excites you gives others permission to get excited too. I like using terminals, I like building dev tooling, I enjoy football, basketball & american football currently. Feel free to reach out to me about any of them :) Though I’ve had it rough in sports with United, New Orleans Pelicans and New Orleans Saints in the last 12 months though so that’s a touchy subject.

Hope you enjoyed & go do something you enjoy with the rest of your day.