Working Out Loud - Part 2

Working Out Loud - Part 2

After working presenting some background in part one of this series, today I’ll give you the actual experiences I had during the circle meetings.

My goal

The focus of Working Out Loud is on twelve weeks of continuous work on a single goal. The base however is not working on this topic on your on, but on the way to reaching this goal, to build a network that can help you reach it.

As already noted in part 1

Instead of networking to get something, you invest in relationships by making contributions over time, including your work and experiences that you make visible.

The project I’m currently working on is heavily relying on databases. And even though I have been working with databases for almost 20 years now, I have never come to a point where I had to extensively work on querying tuning.

So my goal for the twelve weeks with the Circle was to improve my query tuning skills in SQL-Server.

The other members

Forming a Circle as a single person is quite hard, so I went to look for folks to join the cause via a Tweet and a short message on the Software Crafters Slack.

Two weeks after this message five people (of whom in the end four stayed on) had answered the call. A lead architect from Israel, a UX expert and an Agile Coach from Germany as well as a Psychologist from Belgium.

The goals of the other WOLers were - that’s me paraphrasing - “become more self secure and be taken more seriously”, “promoting a more human way of therapy”, “improve communication skills”, “improve a website and blog for a specific software development topic”.

Age wise we were between 25 and 50 (dangerous guessing work here ;) ) Four of us were employed with one person being their own company.

Meetings

Over the course of three months the group met each week for about an hour to exchange their progress and work together on concrete tasks

The framework for each meeting is set by the “Weekly Guides”. These contain the relevant tasks, suggestions and hints to further information.

Each week you start with a short “Checkin” to catch up and then work on the tasks in the guide. You finish up the meeting with a round of “Commitments”

The 60 minutes are more or less preplanned and one of the Circle members should chair the meeting and keep an eye on the timing.

I think we only managed to really finish within the hour and took on some homework for the next week most of the time

This was not caused by the tasks being to large to start with, but rather by us being side tracked by our conversations to different topics and interesting exhanges that popped up during task discussions.

Outcome

My goal

Did I reach my goal and improve my SQL tuning skills? The answer is a clear “yes, but”. I continuously worked on the topic (and keep doing so now). I managed to read through a book and am working on a second one.

I even managed to apply some of the learnings at work already.

However, I have the feeling I should have made more progress.

Side effects

During the twelve weeks with the Circle you work on so many things that only in (and with a) retrospective you realize how much you really accomplished.

I got to know four great humans, who provided great insights without hesitation. Also I was allowed to provide feedback on a regular basis and thus could improve in this area as well.

I have learned about new topics that I’ll probably be looking into at a later point in time. Also some of the excersises got me out of my comfort zone, especially when it comes to interaction in professional social networks.

I make use my Bullet journal more often and have actively worked on abbandoning learning paths that are no longer relevant for me to save the time for more important things.

I even got back into blogging :)

What’s to come

In a few days the Circle meets again and we will reflect on the first few weeks we spent without talking to each other regularly.

The experience as a whole was so positive that I will take part or start another WOL Circle at some point in 2021. I don’t know the topic yet, but whatever I’ll choose I know that the other members will help me to “keep at it”.