Eric J Ma's Website

Ever since "going corporate", it's meant picking up more new productivity/coding habits. Here's a sampling of what I've learned.

(1) Living by my calendar

Basically, the "work calendar" defines everything about the day. I've had to make sure that if I am not going to be pencilled in for a meeting, I have to block out time on the calendar first.

Also, sending invites to people + rooms -- the latter being the newest habit I've had to pick up.

Finally, setting informative titles for calendar events - if I want to have coffee or lunch with X, I can't just write "Coffee with X" - it literally shows up as "Coffee with X" on X's calendar, which is super awkward, as if they're having coffee with themselves! Something more informative, like, "Eric <> X coffee" really helps the other person, who might be super busy and thus only glances at their calendar once in a while.

(2) Flagging emails and applying rules

Emails fly everywhere. It gets super overwhelming after a while.

If there's stuff that needs to be followed-up on, it stays in my Inbox until it's done. It also gets flagged, which automatically creates a Todo on my task list. (If this sounds like Outlook - yes, it's Outlook. On macOS. With no "email snoozing" feature...)

(3) Hacking through legacy code and shared compute resources

Working on a compute cluster with a code base that's built for legacy versions of programming languages is super frustrating! Thankfully I know enough about the differences between Python 2 and Python 3 to hack my way through.

Shared compute resources means using modules, but not everybody sets up modules with the same set of assumptions as others. Some create virtual environments inside a module, others append to $PATH, and getting the right combinations in a modular way is really tricky. It means I have some really painful one-off $PATH hacks to make stuff work. Documentation is paramount - without putting in docs, I'll never remember what I did...

(4) Adapting to others' coding styles

Not everybody is a Python programmer, and not everybody is a Pythonic programmer. The usual Python idioms that I'm used to (whether functional or object-oriented) sometimes get thrown out in favour of some other style (globals, anybody?), and I have to adapt to figure out what's going on. Thankfully my colleagues are open to me modifying their code, as long as I can demonstrate that the new version works fine, and I've been working hard to bring in Pythonic code style.

(5) Performance reviews

Gotta start getting used to this. I had a taste of it while volunteering as part of Tang Hall's student leadership, but now it's for real.