Adjustments

If there’s one thing I got out of being a competitive swimmer through high school, it’s that your body always adjusts to the water temperature.

Water can be high 50s and it will feel fine after 15 seconds of swimming. Yet, people who don’t fully get in — who test it endlessly — will either take 10 extra minutes to get in (which is a lifetime in a swimming workout) or not go in at all. This is why swimmers jump right in.

As software engineers- and in general as people — if we do not adjust to new business requirements, new frameworks, new DSLs and the passage of time, we are failing our stakeholders. Moreover, if we do not make it a responsibility to place ourselves in new conditions that are more challenging than our current ones, we are failing our stakeholders.

The reason new conditions are challenging is precisely because they are *new*. Something like transitioning a company from a REST to a GraphQL API will be initially challenging because of a lack of experience with GraphQL. Raising financing for a first-time founder will be hard because he or she is making connections for the first time and giving the elevator pitch for the first time. Negotiating with a new client, adjusting to an unfamiliar codebase, completing a triathlon — all are hard not because of any inherent hardness, but because the activities are unfamiliar.

So, the actionable takeaway of all this for me it that facing the unfamiliar should be done as soon as possible. The unfamiliar will become familiar with time.

We decide when that transition happens.