Project Progress
| Project Week | Project Hours |
|---|---|
| Mon, Aug 23 - Mon, Sep 20 | 1.0 |
In the last four weeks, I managed to make a plan about how to create my users. I decided that the first step I'm going to take is set up my backend to read the Firebase tokens. I'm leaning towards using AWS Lambda and .NET 5 on their free tier. I'm excited to build that out at some point.
Life
Life has been incredibly busy. My oldest daughter started kindergarten. My beloved cat died. My favourite comedian died. Finally, I started growing grass. I keep telling people that I know far too much about grass than I ever wanted to. Having said that, the whole experience of growing grass is fascinating and it's not even over yet.
The whole reason I'm growing grass is because my lawn was destroyed by chinch bugs. The first mistake I made was trying to figure out what the problem was myself. I mistakenly thought it was grubs, but some things just didn't match up and when I mentioned it to my neighbour, he mentioned it might be chinch bugs. After that, I did some more reading and finally did the chinch bug test. Sure enough, it was chinch bugs. I thought maybe it was because I didn't water my lawn regularly, which is what it looked like. Since, we had an unusually hot and dry summer, I just thought my grass was going dormant. I was completely wrong. Chinch bug damage looks like dormant grass. Anyways, the damage was done, so I got a local lawn company to massacre the chinch bugs.
Now I had to figure out how to repair the damage. The first thing I did, was start reading as much I could about how to repair patches of grass. I found out that the ideal times to start repairing grass is late summer to early fall, when the temperatures start dropping, but there are still sunny days and more moisture. Then I had to figure out how to put the seed down. Since, I already had an existing (damaged) lawn I was mainly overseeding, rather starting a whole new lawn. Although, I think some parts that were bare, probably needed more seed. Now, that I have some idea of what I had to do, based on YouTube videos and blog posts, I needed to figure out what kind of seed I needed. I was focused on tall fescue seed for its resiliency.
The problem I had now, was finding the seed. It's turn out I couldn't find a specific seed in the big box stores like Lowe's or Home Depot, so I found a local place that offered specific seed. The owner was there running things and was super nice. He confirmed some of things I found out on my own and introduced me to the concept of fertilizer grades, which I really didn't think about. I use to think of fertilizer being mostly the same, but I was ignorant and was already overwhelmed with all the new information about grass repair and grass seeds. Now that I had the knowledge of everything I needed, he got me all the stuff I needed and laid out a plan on how to bring my lawn back. He gave me a mix of creeping red fescue, perennial ryegrass and kentucky blue grass, as well as start fertilizer and fertilizer for after the grass has been established. I can't remember exactly the story he used to describe the different requirements for each type of grass to be successful, but I do remember chuckling. The story essentially described germination periods, which is the time it takes for a grass seed to be established and ready to cut without destroying it. The last thing he told was to remove all the weeds before I followed his plan, which ended being the most work, since I did that by hand.
Following the plan to repair my grass was intimidating and a lot of work. The only thing I had experience doing was pulling out weeds. I even messed up there, because after I pulled out a good portion of weeds, I realized I pulled out healthy grass, because I mistook them for weeds. The only thing I had experience doing was putting new topsoil down for a new lawn. I never laid down grass seed "properly", I just spread it with my hand. Anyways, after the weeds were pulled out, I laid down the topsoil and then spread the seed within the day. I was trying to get it down before it rained. This meant I started spreading seed at night, like a psycho. My wife helped me see in the dark with a cell phone light, because we couldn't find any of our flashlights. I believe they were all with the camping stuff, which we never used, because of covid and the fact that camping with toddlers isn't fun. One funny thing to note, was that when I was trying to spread the seed with a handheld rotary spreader, I was checking if it worked, and tilted it to the side to look at the spreading mechanism and spilled a bunch of grass seed on the grass. I wouldn't even call that a rookie mistake, that was just dumb.
Once I finished laying down the topsoil and the seed, my job was to keep the ground moist. Grass seeds need moisture for germination to happen. This means, that if it doesn't rain, I have to water the lawn twice a day. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I have to keep doing this until the grass reaches at least 3-4 inches or I get past the germination period, which can be as long as 28 days, since I have Kentucky Bluegrass seeds. I'm taking pictures, so I can see the progress. For the first week, I was getting sad, because I saw little growth. It's been 13 days, since I put down the seed and I can see more growth, which makes me happy. Also, the grass seed that I spilled grew a whole bunch grass in a clump, which is something you don't necessarily want. Aside from that, we'll see what the coming weeks bring.
This brings me to some parallels I noticed relating to leadership and people. I currently lead a team of developers and for me, one of the hard things to do, is to find someone's strength and make the most of it. It's difficult, because I have to acknowledge that not all tasks will be completed in the same way by different people. Also, some people will need more time to thrive. This may sound lame, but this is exactly the same thing as germination periods for different types of grass seeds. The grass seed will turn into turf and serve the same function, but it will have different characteristics like being more drought tolerant, more disease resistant, or more pest resistant, but it can't have everything. Teammates can have different tolerances to different working conditions, can be more effective at different tasks, or comprehend things differently, amongst a whole bunch of other differences. They all serve the same purpose, and when new team members arrive, we may have to adjust the time needed for them to ramp up and provide them with a successful environment for them to thrive (or sprout). I haven't even gotten to the fertilizer part. I guess the equivalent of fertilizer would be good code reviews, pair programming, good quality one-on-ones, and access to training resources.
Finally, the biggest similarity that stuck out in my mind is the amount of work involved in setting up the environment for the seed to successfully germinate and the amount of work to set up how a team operates. With the grass seed, I learned as much as I could and executed on my plan. As I mentioned before, I only saw a little growth after a few days. Some grass seed sprouted here and there, but not that much. I was getting worried, wondering if I did something wrong. I still kept doing everything I had to do to keep the soil moist, which was all I could do. Sure enough after a week I saw some more growth and today, it looks like the grass is well on it's way. Setting up the way my team operated was similar. I learned as much as I could, tapped into my own experiences and set up how we were going go about delivering software. I saw some immediate results, but also, I was questioning whether I was doing the right thing and if what I had set up would resonate with the team. If I look back at it now, I can definitely say we grew in positive way as a team and improved our execution. At the time though, it was like me looking at that grass seed after only watering it for a few days, not really sure if I did everything the "right" way, but trusting that I would see results, because I did my due diligence.