Curiosity

If there is only one attribute that my teammate can possess, it would be curiosity.

Thousands of people had seen apple falling from the tree but only Newton asked AND go for the reason. When you are looking after a system, lots of events happened everyday but have you ever noticed any of them and feel dubious?

One morning, we've got a notification alerting us disk space is running low on a system. Nothing new and what one would usually do is to do some purging, log files in particular. But by the time when we are going to issue the “rm” command, we noticed that the log file is indeed quite big. Since it is a testing environment and we are not aware of any planned testing. Curiosity triggers our desire to have a quick look at the log and we are seeing lines and lines of exception complaining slow search response.

Search? It wouldn't comes from no where and thus, we starts to fiddle around the web server logs. To no surprise, we are seeing different product page requests on the site that each of them will trigger a call to our search engine. The number of requests are more than we expected for a testing site and looking closer at the requests, we noticed that it is invoking from an external IP. Resolving shows that it belongs to Google! That means all the requests are meant for indexing our site but how could Google bot get access to our testing site?

A look at the virtual host config shows that the access restriction is being remarked, for performing a test sometimes ago and never have it tighten afterwards.

Curiosity = Motivation to learn

Curiosity motivates people, too. The platform that drives our e-commerce site is complicate and the learning curve is steep. We spend time with new joiner in going through the components but we noticed that people who pick up faster are usually those who are eager to poke around, identified something they don't understand and try to learn from it. With enough time spent, they are able to stitch all the components together and seeing them as a whole. Also, they are more willing to try new stuff, either a new piece of software for work or a new approach to handling projects. Thus, whenever I need to roll out a change in a process, I would try to approach my teammate with this personality as the guinea-pig.

So how can we grow the team's curiosity? Like before, I would start with the people who already got the personality and hopefully, by encouraging them to stay curious, we could build such a culture and start influencing the rest of the team. One of my approach is to make this become a habit. In our daily catch-up, I will usually start the first couple of minutes, inviting them to share anything they find interesting. For instance, some will share tech news that caught his attention, while some may share the stuff he plays on. This approach can widen what we see and it might spark up further conversation when certain thing might came across - either on project we are working on or ideas they have in mind.

Another thing I like to do with the team, is to run a "Boot Camp". It can be any topic, but I usually conduct it for trying out technical stuff, or practicing our engineering process. I remember in one of the event, 10 people in the team are serving different role as in a company. Those used to be a developer becomes either a user or a project manager, the idea is to let everyone to experience life of another role. Another objective is to pick up a new programming language. We spent the day to get the “requirement”, do the mockup and develop the application. Everyone is excited and we ended up with a system that enable us to place order for dim sum!

No matter if you are a parent or a team leader, you should help to cultivate the atmosphere of exploration. Empowering your kids or your team to try things out, to explore the unknown. Ending this blog with a quote by Albert Einstein.

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious - Albert Einstein