Photo credits: Bradley Griffin The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends for his power on his ability to make others powerful. My job was to awaken possibility in other people. And you know how you find out? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining you know you’re doing it. - Benjamin Zander Recently, I’ve talked to a few companies as I was going through a job search process after a long time.

Photo credits to UnknownNet Photography I’ve been in search of a new job for the past few months. Thanks to my recruiters and interviewers, I’ve received some useful feedback. Many thanks to them for this gift. ``Needs more energy’’ - This was the most memorable feedback I got. It was from the VP of a company. My interview with him was the last of the five on the same day.

Image credits to NCinDC Context is everything. Due to a context mismatch projects such as exporting democracy, agile transformations, building startups, losing weight, mindfulness or anything you can think of fail to repeat. Context is formed by why / what / who / when / where / how, each of these being a critcial part. Most often it’s common to focus on the how alone - forgetting the rest of the context while adopting a recipe for success in business.

Manager’s Mind As managers, we have the benefit of view because we have our eyes on longer term goals. To achieve those goals, we often have to introduce a change. For example, we may want to change how a team is formed or what product a team works on based on new business needs or opportunities. So, we put a lot of thought into it and propose our plan to the team hoping the following reaction:

“I’d like to tidy up the entire planet. I would go anywhere if there were something that needs tidying.” - Marie Kondo Well, she came to my work calendar in spirit. Let’s start with some backstory. When I was developer, my typical day looked like this: one standup meeting and then pretty much the rest of the day in coding. Sometimes I paired up or jumped on a whiteboard session with my coworkers to hash things out.

Beginning with a story here. Back in 2008, I was a couple of years out of college and working for a software company in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Like many of my classmates from my college, I was studying GRE alongside my job for a PhD admission in a reputable US university. That process being long and uncertain, I also applied for an MBA program at the University of Dhaka as a backup plan.

This week I took a couple of days to focus on my mid-thirties. It got me thinking about what I actually love doing as a hobby. The list is fairly small, walks with the family, soccer, tennis, coffee with friends, reading, writing, car videos, and Netflix. Thinking about how I spend my idle time, I realized that I missed two things that I actually love and spend a fair amount of time on: stock markets and reading open-source code.

Since I commonly work with a diverse group of people, this post is a way for me to broadcast some quick tricks that may help our working relationship. When we work together, let’s do this: Trust is only earned when it’s mutual. Let’s work with this shared belief. Context is everything. Most importantly, show me why we need to work on something. If the answer isn’t clear in your mind, we can work together to build a crisp context.

Source: [Audrey on Flickr](https://flic.kr/p/pUW8f9) I think nobody knows how to stitch together an app with full-stack micro-services. I have the following open-questions if you disagree. Of course, if we could send people to moon, we could solve these problems. But the question is, is it worth and should your team solve these problems? Especially, for small teams? How to render the UI from tens of independent micro-services into the same web page?

Gone are the days when I used to go to a ton of local developer meetups. After Polyglot YYC, this was the second conference I joined this year. This was a 50/50 event for me in terms of like vs. dislike. Here goes my notes: Ix-Chel Ruiz presented the keynote to start the day. Her storytelling style reminded me of WWII movies, where a lot of cloudy and gloomy scene keep getting darker and darker, ending with a deep sense of sadness.