👋🏽 I’m Mariano Simone, and this is a short intro to me. I hope you’ll find it useful if we need to work together. This is a stripped-down version of what I'd share internally at my company (as I usually customize it to refer to a particular team, include tooling, etc.)
I usually like to have one big project and multiple smaller things going on at the same time, so I can take a break and shuffle things around if/when I get bored.
Things you’ll see me doing:
- Keeping track of what needs to be done and making sure that we are all on the same page.
- Asking “Why” and “Are we sure we want to do this?” many (sometimes five) times.
- Doing small steps towards the goal: I like to keep changes small, easy to explain and undo.
- Philosophizing a lot about the perfect way to do something, and then choosing what’s the best, practical way to do it.
- Relentlessly downsizing (be it code, documentation, processes, slack channels, etc.)
- Keeping an eye on any changes to our codebase, trying to keep readability, code quality and good typedness as high as possible.
I don’t have a strong preference on Slack (or any other IM platform) over Email, but I’m pretty principled about:
- Don’t ask to ask, just ask, and ask useful questions.
- Don’t invite me to a meeting without a clear agenda. If I need context, please include it (or links to relevant documents) in the invitation itself.
- How to ask good questions.
- I love Jira/Trello and Dropbox Paper to keep track of things to do… I can deal with Google Docs and Google Sheets, but I’d rather not.
- I turn off my notifications after hours 💤/when I want to relax 🏝… so feel free to ping me at any time without worrying about bothering me. I'll get back to you when I'm available again.
- In case you haven’t noticed in this document… I make extensive use of emoji 🎉.
- 🇦🇷 I’m originally from Argentina (but no, I don’t like fútbol - soccer -, nor beef… so I had to leave the country).
- ⛰ I live in Aurora, CO. Since I moved to the US, I’ve always lived in “smaller” siblings of well known cities: Brooklyn (NYC), Berkeley (SF) and Aurora (Denver). - 🍻🧀 I enjoy (and sometimes make my own) beer and cheese.
- 🎵 I love music, and my taste is pretty eclectic. Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Marley are some of my favorites… but you will also see me listening to Yo-Yo Ma, System of a Down, Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, Miles Davis or Hiromi Uehara any other day.
If I’m not working, I’m probably:
- 📚 Reading books, or random internet things (see my Pocket profile).
- 🧗🏽♂️ Climbing (mostly bouldering).
- 🍵 Drinking tea.
- 🍳 Cooking (see some of my recipes).
- 🗺 Traveling (see the places I’ve been to).
In previous lives, you might have found me:
- ☯️ Practicing kung fu (I still do from time to time, but not much)
- 🎸 Playing an instrument (guitar, laúd - a Spanish lute -, or trumpet)
- ⛵ Sailing
- 🏹 Shooting a longbow
Most of these are serious… some may look like they are not, but they are.
- “Done” is better than “Perfect”… but we should know what “Perfect” looks like, and explicitly decide not to go for that.
- There’s one, and only one, way to write down dates: YYYY-MM-DD. (I’m not alone… ISO 8601 is praised by a lot of people).
- There’s no need to discuss tabs vs spaces. All sane people use spaces, and I wouldn’t discuss with insane people, so 🤷🏽♂️.