Jezeniel Zapanta

What a challenging year

2021-03-20T10:00:00+08:00

Last year until as of this writing, we are experiencing a pandemic.

I am really humbled, even though remote work is possible in this day and age, lots of people still lost their jobs. My younger sister and some of my friends lost theirs. I consider myself lucky because we are already doing remote work, and really lucky because I was not laid off.

The threat of the virus, were reported last December 2019. Lockdowns in the Philippines started March 2020. It went on for months, the uncertainty, the fear, the stress.

Even though we are a fully remote company there are challenges I faced as a manager. Due to lockdowns, mental health of my colleagues were affected, cabin sickness crept-in the quarantine and lockdowns are taking it’s toll. Prior to the lockdowns we managed to avoid this because of our bi-weekly meet ups where we go to Metro Manila to gather to hang out together and do tech talks. But due the pandemic, we stopped the meetings, and the cities and towns were on lockdown.

As the manager of the engineering team, I have to find ways to improve the situation and to care for my colleagues. Here are two simple and relatively easy things I introduced.

Weekly hangouts

After the standup meetings, people tend to focus on their work and just communicate things through slack. There are times people cross team/project communications doesn’t really happen at all. Teams started becoming siloed and fragmented.

To solve this I started organizing end-of-day Friday conference call with the whole team. We play games like krunker.io, skribbl.io, jackbox party, talk about work, how did their week go, and about non-work related topics.

It improves team camaraderie, and sense of belonging. It improves trust with each other by developing relationships.

Weekly 1-on-1

I also organized regular 1-on-1s with each member of the team, as much as possible I tried to have it weekly for about 20-30 minutes. This is where I ask how they are doing, and about their problems and concerns.

1-on-1’s are important because you can make it more personalized to each individual’s needs, and to express things that other people cannot do in a group setting. You will have a better understanding about the struggles or problems they are experiencing, so you can guide and help them out accordingly. This is also a great time to give valuable feedback regarding their work and performance.

It can help build trust, and getting to know more about each person of the team is really great. To make this really effective, try to have a couple or at least one actionable task to go back to the next time you meet.

What’s next?

Culture is important. But a culture is nothing without it’s people. It will take commitment and proper communication with the whole team to make it work.

I am planning on reviving the talks we are doing. Because we did our tech talks face-to-face pre-pandemic, and after lockdowns, the habit just died down. But having the weekly hangout is a great gateway habit to do this again albeit online.

No matter how small, these two things are, it made a difference. We became stronger as a team, my team mates became happier and the morale increased. But one thing is for sure, you have to care for your team, and having an emphatetic approach will go a long way.

I would like to thank all of the frontliners for their sacrifice and hardwork in these dark times. You kept on fighting even though this government doesn’t care enough.

Moving Back

2019-12-17T20:00:00+08:00

Last September, me and my family moved back to my hometown in Pampanga. We stayed in Metro Manila since 2017, and rented a condo unit in Pasig City in order for our daughter to come live with us. Living in Metro Manila was both great and stressful, great in a way that a lot of things are accessible and available. Traveling around is fairly easy due to ride booking services like Grab. That’s why me and my wife mostly used Grab when going out.

Though Grab is convenient, it is quite expensive, this is why I still need to commute when going to work. Commuting in Metro Manila is tough most of the time, I spend 30 minutes to 1 hour in queue just to get a ride. I averaged 2 hours per day just for commuting, and in bad days it can take up to 3 hours. When it rains, it is another story for another time.

There is another option, driving your own car. But doing this, in my opinion, is not advisable due to expensive parking space, rude drivers and severe traffic. In some places they implement their own traffic schemes which prevents you to travel through those areas, leaving you no choice but to commute anyway.

Just to avoid severe traffic I stay in the office until later hours, time that I could’ve spent with my family. I always thought whenever I get stuck in traffic in a cramped vehicle, that this is not a good way to spend time and I need to find a way to get out of this cycle. I have been reading articles online about fully remote companies that don’t require you to go to office, all of the work is being done through the internet. This means more time for my family; this means no daily commute. This, my friends, is my solution to break the cycle. That’s why I started looking for a remote job and luckily, I found one!

Working Remotely

I got hired last June as a Staff Engineer, my responsibilities are mentoring, R&D, improvement of engineering process and leading some of our projects. We do two week sprints and daily standups every morning through Google Meet or Sococo. Our team also has a bi-weekly meet up in which I travel back to Metro Manila to do tech talks, catch up and hangout.

After a few months, we were able to move back in our province. My stress levels went down significantly, I have more time with my wife and kid, and I can visit my parents more frequently. Cost of living is also cheaper, we can buy more healthy food and can save some of our earnings.

Working remotely is great, but it has it’s fair share of challenges. Communication has a much more important role, you can’t just tap your colleague’s shoulder, do impromptu meetings or discussions. But due to faster and cheaper internet, the rise of softwares like Slack, Jira, and Skype, collaborating online is easier. Company culture and trust with your colleagues matters now more than ever. It is really different from the typical staying and working in a co-located place, new processes and practices should be implemented for it to work.

While remote work is also gaining more popularity throughout the years, I hope it is here to stay and in my opinion more companies will adapt it. In the future I will write more about my experiences and things I tried which worked or did not. For now, I am very grateful to have such a great opportunity and more time to spend on what matter most.

Why I Use Vim

2019-09-03T00:00:00+08:00

Vim is an open source text editor created by Bram Moolenar in 1991, which is an enhanced clone of vi. It is keyboard-driven, and due to how the default keybindings were designed, your hands don’t often need to move far away from the home row keys. Vim is very configurable, you can add custom shortcuts, commands, and has tons of plugins to improve your workflow. You can run it in your favorite terminal or as a stand-alone application.

Vim has gained a reputation of being hard to quit, causing it to have a meme, speedrun video, and be one of the top StackOverflow questions. You can also do fun things like vim golfing to test your skills, or even play Tetris inside vim.

Now I am stuck forever

The Beginning

My adventures in vim began when I started using Linux. Tutorials and guides around the internet sometimes use it to modify configurations and files. My first time in using vim is when I tried modifying a config for a software that I was using. I fired it up and … I can’t even insert any text, then I started maniacally typing random characters until I pressed some unknown key that allowed me to insert something. After editing, I still need to Google how to save my work and quit vim!

I forgot to use sudo again for the nth time...

Then I read the “Learn Vim Progressively” blog post. It mentioned vim as a “Six Billion Dollar editor” and “the best text editor known to humankind”. The promise of improved productivity is too hard to pass. The young me thought that if I can do everything in the terminal without relying on a GUI, it will make me a cool and l33t programmer. Maybe I tried learning it for the wrong reasons, either way I pushed myself to use it even though my productivity suffered a bit because of the learning curve. Eventually, I got used to it and I am using vim ever since.

I can be like this, minus the mullet.

Why use it?

Vim is a modal text editor, this means it has different modes that you can use. Keybindings, commands, and actions will change depending on the mode. This is quite different from the usual modeless text editors today like Notepad, Notepad++ and GEdit, in which you can enter text right away at the start. Though some of these editors are modeless by default, editors like Emacs, Sublime and VSCode have plugin systems that can emulate vim.

To compare shortcuts between modal and modeless editors, here is some comparison between vim (in NORMAL mode) and vscode:

action	vim	vscode
cut line	`dd`	`Ctrl + x`
copy line	`yy`	`Ctrl + c`
move line up/down	n/a	`Alt + ↑/↓`
jump to matching bracket	`%`	`Ctrl + Shift + \`
insert line below	`o`	`Ctrl + Enter`
insert line above	`O`	`Ctrl + Shift + Enter`
go to beginning/end of line	`0`/`$`	`Home`/`End`
go to the beginning of file	`gg`	`Ctrl + Home`
go to the end of file	`G`	`Ctrl + End`

Because of the modeless nature of vscode, it relies on using modifier keys like Ctrl and Alt to execute commands. But it doesn’t mean that vim is better than vscode. Vscode has nice features out of the box that you still need to configure/add to vim. What I am trying to show here is that due to the modal nature of vim, it doesn’t rely much on modifier keys. This lessens chording and keyboard travel time, which increases productivity once you get used to it.

In vim, the usual modes being used are NORMAL, INSERT, VISUAL, COMMAND and REPLACE.

Normal Mode

NORMAL mode is the default whenever you start vim. You cannot type any text, but instead, this is where you can do navigation, text manipulation, undo/redo and many more. You will need to switch back to this mode by pressing ESC before changing to other modes.

Insert Mode

INSERT mode is the most familiar mode, due to being the only mode of modeless editors. This is where you, as the name suggests, insert/type texts. Pressing i will make you switch from NORMAL to INSERT mode.

Visual Mode

VISUAL mode is for highlighting/selecting lines or blocks of texts, it is similar to using SHIFT and arrow keys in modeless text editors. You can press v to select by characters or V to highlight lines of texts, this allows you to apply commands only to the selected texts.

Command Mode

COMMAND mode is like a command line input. You can go to this mode by pressing :. This is where you can save :w, quit :q, save and quit :wq or call vim functions.

Replace Mode

REPLACE mode is like using the Insert key of your keyboard. It will replace text from the starting point until you go back to NORMAL mode. You can activate this by pressing R.

There are still lots of things you can do in vim, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. “Learn Vim Progressively”, Vimcasts or vimtutor which is already installed when you install vim in Linux are good place to start.

Takeaway

Vim is not a perfect text editor, but it introduced me to a more efficient way of doing my work. It taught me that people can still find ways to innovate/improve something that was considered good enough. There are times that vim is not the best fit for some projects, and it might be better to just use other editors or IDEs like PyCharm and Android Studio. However, I am glad that the community of awesome programmers creates vim emulation plugins so we can enjoy the best of both worlds.

In the end, it is not about what is the best one (because there isn’t any), and neither about being cool nor l33t. It is about what makes you do your work enjoyable and fun.

Bonus

For modeless text editor lovers, you can try vim mode! Here are some good vim emulation plugins for your favorite text editors:

Evil for Emacs
IdeaVim for IntelliJ platform like Jetbrains products or Android Studio
NeoVintageous for SublimeText
VSCodeVimA for vscode

Hello World!

2018-07-15T04:00:00+08:00

I have been meaning to create a blog and write things ages ago. But I was afraid to actually post something, because we now live in a time that it is easy to be criticized (the bad type), trolled and hated.

I even posted in HN to ask about this. It did not received that much attention but some people still gave me great tips and advice.

Here are some excerpts from the comments:

This sort of fear is very normal, and is what stops a lot of people from giving a lot of value back to the world by writing about their area of expertise. If you overcome it, you’ll help not only yourself but also lots of other people. – thenomad

Everybody makes mistakes, including bloggers. From my experience, if something is wrong or doesn’t work your readers will let you know in the comments. Just be humble and ready to correct your mistakes and there should be no issues. – jetti

The thing is, everyone who writes on the internet has been wrong. Everyone. You aren’t going to be this horrible exception, the one person who said one thing wrong on an otherwise-perfect internet. So go ahead. Write. Make mistakes. – AnimalMuppet

These comments ring true to me, even smart people make mistakes. The intention to share and impart knowledge is the one that should matter. Even making a mistake and being corrected by others is an opportunity to learn and meet someone new.

So what now?

As of this writing it is the middle of 2018, more than a year has passed since I asked the question in HN. The time of being afraid is done. This is the time that I will push myself out of the comfort zone and start writing.

I am inspired by blogs of awesome people like Armin Ronacher, Kenneth Reitz, Jeff Atwood, Martin Fowler and many more. Their works and writings greatly helped me be a better engineer and maybe someday I can do the same to other people like them.

I used Jekyll, a static site generator in creating this blog to avoid managing a cloud server and database. My blog’s theme is a modifed version of end2end.

Hopefully I can continue this endeavor to contribute to this open and free well of knowledge, no matter how small it can be. Maybe one day someone will stumble upon one of my posts and help them solve their problems.

I hope that this will also help other people to start writing and blogging about the things they want to share and are afraid to do so. Until next time.