This article is based on part of the talk I gave at Pycon PL October 15th 2015. All graphics in this presentation were originally slides in my slide deck of that talk. Don’t let the apparent length of this post scare you off — it’s mostly pictures. Today, I’d like to talk about something close to my heart. That’s right: me. Unless you’re Dutch or just familiar with Dutch names, you may not realize that my name — Zef Hemel — is not a very common one, even in The Netherlands.

A few weeks back we had an internal lightning talk, at STX Next, from a product owner and scrum master of one our teams. The talk was about their experience over the past year joining an existing team that, until then, had functioned without these roles. While the talk focused a lot on the value of adding “Agile people” to teams, for me it connected the dots on an important thing we don’t do enough:

About three years ago my boss asked me a question that changed the way I approach problems today. In a sense it’s super obvious, but somehow we don’t ask it often enough. It was about three years ago. I just moved up to the VP of Engineering position at Cloud9 IDE, and we were having a rough time with keeping the site running. Sometimes a few nights a week I would get a 2 a.

People often come to me, and ask: “How do you get so much shit done? Why doesn’t anything fall through the cracks? Why don’t you ever seem to be bored? How can I be more like you?” The answer is simple. It’s all thanks to my very own system that I call “Getting Shit Done.” It’s a lot like the “Getting Things Done” system, except simpler, plus it has “Shit” in the name, because I’ve worked hard to build up sufficient street cred to use edgy words like that.

I seem to have an irrational compulsion to blend in, to appear to be a native wherever I go. I seem to have this most strongly in foreign cities and countries. I had it when I lived in Schiedam (in the west of The Netherlands, a foreign place, since I’m really from the north), I had it in Dublin, I have it in Poland and here in the US as well.

Wikipedia on Murphy’s law: Murphy’s law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. Actually, the way I always heard Murphy’s law be formulated is “Everything that can go wrong with eventually go wrong.” However he said it, after running operations and release management for a web application with significant traffic, I can tell you this: Murphy was an optimist.

So, you decided to build a real application. Not a toy. Not a hobby project. Something that’s supposed to last, supposed to scale, supposed to work and remain reliable. If you’re in any way like me, I bet right now you’re browsing the interwebs like crazy to find the hottest new technology you get your hands on to use in this new venture. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity!

When we moved to Poland I did not speak a lot of Polish. In fact, I still don’t, but that’s another story. I definitely was not close to the level where I could actually function in an office environment. When it came to finding a job there I had to ask myself: would a Polish software company hire a foreigner without any industrial experience who does not speak Polish? Also, would there be any interesting work for me in the city we decided to move to at all, or would I have to compromise?

About a month or two ago, me and my wife got a present from friends: a 1000 pieced puzzle version of this Escher drawing: Yesterday we decided to give it a shot. Have a good look at this picture, 60–70% of it is shades of gray. The pieces are small enough that only a few pieces by themselves contained anything recognizable: Escher’s eyes and parts of the window in the background.