Changing the World with a Breath and a Test

Today is Friday and it’s time to relaaaaaax.

Chilling out in tech can be so hard sometimes.  There are so many places the stress comes from, I don’t even feel the need to explain it because it exists for all of us in one form or another.  Yes, you can say, “that’s life,” however, I feel it’s intensified to a fever pitch in tech almost every day at even the best workplaces.

As I worked on finding ways to chip away at my personal incarnation of stress, I began to think of how a web app could address the larger topic of workplace stress and chilling out when you need it the most.  I won’t ask you to raise your hand if you’ve suffered anxiety at work, because I now assume that most of us do.  This was on my mind as I was doing lots of testing of text fields for my job such as names, comments and descriptions.  Testing text fields often involves pasting some text into those fields, usually from a dummy text generator commonly referred to as an ipsum generator.

Every tester has their favorite Ipsum, from the meats of Bacon Ipsum to the irony of Hipster Ipsum or even the NSFW Samuel L. Ipsum.  One day as I was pasting another lengthy sheaf of text while taking some deep breaths, it occurred to me that it might be helpful to see the meditative phrases I’m often muttering to myself staring out at me through my test data.

This is how I came to build the app I’m releasing today, Relax Ipsum.  I built it with help from friend and javascript developer, Ryan Dy.  It’s a fairly simple, straightforward, static app that uses HTML, CSS and Javascript with a guest appearance from JQuery.  You can look at the source here.  In the process of building this app and working together on some other JS projects, Ryan taught me a lot about thinking in Javascript vs. Java (the language that began my programming journey), test driving code and taking Javascript from tutorial-grade to a real-world implementation.  

Our mentoring relationship has been the difference between me putting this app in your hands vs. me building another fake twitter cobbled together from web tutorials and stack overflow.  That’s power.  Having someone tell me that, yes, I can do this even if I feel like an idiot, is a machete cutting deep into imposter syndrome.  I carried this confidence with me to AdaCamp where I discussed the power of mentoring with others who have had similar experiences with mentoring and I even helped some people get started on their own web development journey.

I feel like Ryan and I discovered the path to change the world. The folks organizing this year’s Cascadia.js conference agree that we are onto something.  Ryan and I will be talking about Hacking Mentor.js at this year’s Cascadia.js conference in Portland.

In the meantime, let’s take a deep, everybody-chill-out-we-made-it-to-Friday breath.