Developers: work like a champion today

Just like top-level athletes, engineers must use their best assets to excel in their craft.

How can we apply a champion’s mentality and work ethic to our day to day job?

by Truc Nguyen, Bonitasoft DevOps Engineer

Working in a rapidly evolving business environment can be challenging for multiple reasons. The IT domain especially demands that engineers stay up-to-date and perform well to stay up with today’s digital transformation train.

What your comfort zone is for

Your comfort zone is when you feel comfortable at what you’re doing in your preferred location and at your favorite time.

For an athlete, the local training gym is where all the hard work happens. This is where preparation happens, to get the best version of yourself in the field of competition.

For a developer, this means coding in your favorite language and framework, at the office and during regular working hours, the most favorable environment to put the work in. Your comfort zone is also where you build confidence. This is the time you allow yourself to try new things. You experiment and fail, you learn how to recover from mistake and how to be more resilient. Still, you need to be focused and consistent in your tasks, whether it’s using or testing the product you are developing so that you just know it inside out.

Preparation demands practice and repetition. You cannot become an expert in your craft if you practice just once in a while.

And then — the challenge

And then comes the challenge. It can be something you decide to take up, a demo you commit to deliver, a speech you choose to give.

Usually, this happens outside of your comfort zone. You have to deal with the unexpected — technical issues, stress, pressure, impediments, interruptions, last-minute changes. Everything that makes it different from what you’ve prepared for. But as champions do, you need to keep your composure in order to reach your goal no matter what may occur.

You will have to be patient. You will have to accept that things don’t go the way you imagined. You must be ready to reset your priorities, continuously. You must be modest enough to question yourself and not lock yourself in with certainties that may be wrong! Often you will find your way through with the help of your team using reviews and confronting each others ideas.

Sometimes you will succeed, sometimes you will learn. But at the end of the day, you will find some satisfaction having worked like a champion today.

Coding like a champ

This is my reflection on how developers can choose to work like champion athletes. There is no magic recipe to succeed in every single day of your developer’s journey. But, you can code like a C.H.A.M.P.:

• building Confidence in your skills,
• working Hard to achieve your goal,
• embracing an appropriate Attitude,
• finding Motivation to learn,
• while remaining Patient to never give up!

About the author

I am a techie since day one and I have been working at Bonitasoft for the last 7 years from QA to DevOps.

I am also practicing Taekwon-Do for more than 30 years. A bit of my achievements as an international competitor:

• 3-times European gold medalist (2015, 2017, 2019), World Bronze medalist (2015) in technical trials
• Best overall male competitor award winner at the European Championships 2015

This experience at high-level competition definitely helped me overcome challenging situations in my day to day job as a developer.