073 Oh my GAD (General Anxiety Disorder) with Jeffrey Kunkel

April 30, 2018 By Michaela Light 2 Comments

Jeffrey Kunkel talks about “Oh my GAD (General Anxiety Disorder)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

By our nature web developers are prone to anxiety. Web development takes a monumental dedication to continuing education, networking, and being an expert source for many of your coworkers. Learning to manage stress early can be one of the most indispensable skills for a long healthy career in web development. Be it FOMO, Impostor Syndrome, Analysis Paralysis, or just generally feeling overwhelmed, developers of all levels can benefit from learning to take a step back and allow themselves to relax and be productive.

I will focus on my perspective of being a web developer with anxiety in today's web development world. I'll talk about using “Fake it 'till you make it” philosophy to help combat the anxiety of keeping up with the ever evolving web. I also plan to delve into “Impostor Syndrome,” and more specifically how to foster self confidence in your ability without cultivating an ego. By the end of my talk I'd like people to leave with the stress management skills and frame of mind to increase their productivity and overall job satisfaction.

This talk is ideal for developers feeling the weight of career and having stress and anxiety productivity issues.QB

Contents

Episode Highlights
Mentioned in this episode
Bio
Links
Interview Transcript:

Episode Highlights

Why this matters to all CF Developers
- 20% of general population
- 60% of CFers sometimes have Anxiety Disorder
- Introverts
- Stressful profession
Anxiety
- Stress → bad for health and happiness
  - Can follow you home
  - Can lead to suicide
- Bad for productivity
FOMO
Impostor Syndrome
- Late to Git
- Fear of being accused of being a fake, not knowing the topic
- Just start learning it
- Ok to admit you don’t know something and learn it
  - Stackoverflow
  - CF slack channel
  - Google
  - Ask
- Impossible to know everything about everything in full stack development
Self confidence in your ability without cultivating an ego
- Remember what it was like to be new to this
Analysis Paralysis
Overwhelm
- Too many tasks to do
- Lack of priorities
- Planning up front save time in the end
- Lots of tabs → more anxiety and distractions
- Turn of speakers – so chat notification don’t interrupt my train of thought
Perfectionism
- Adding bells and whistles to code
- Ok to come back to less important issues later (add to todo list)
- Limited perfection to top priority issue
Is anxiety all bad
- Advantage of double checking
- OCD = Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
- Interruptions → anxiety spikes
  - Save where you where
  - Todoist note
  - Git Stash
Self medication
- Alcohol
- Food
- Caffeine
- Can be bad for your health
- Negative feedback loop
Conferences
- Alcohol
Stress management skills
- Take a break
  - Wrist tracker reminder
- Deep, slow breathing
- Yoga
- Reach out to developer friends and CF Community
- Getting Things Done method
- Music while I work
- Turn off sound notifications on computer and phone
- Mindsets
- “Fake it 'till you make it” philosophy
- You never learn if you panic before you start
- CF Community
- Standing desk
- Exercise
- Sleep
  - Naps
  - Earlier to bed vs later getting up
- Less Caffeine
- Family time
Female CFers more anxiety
Talk about your anxiety
Why are you proud to use CF?
WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?
What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.

What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.

And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.

You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.

All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.

Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.

No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.

√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!

Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Mentioned in this episode

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.

What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.

And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.

You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.

All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.

Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.

No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.

√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!

Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

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Bio

Jeffrey Kunkel is an in house web developer for www.lightingnewyork.com. He has been developing for six years, and is excited to start contributing to the ColdFusion community at large.

Jeff has been living with anxiety, depression, and OCD for his entire career. He wants to take the lessons he's learned working around and with these conditions to better the workflow and productivity of his colleagues.

Links

Twitter

Interview Transcript:

Michaela 0:01
Welcome back to the show today we're going to be looking at G ad general anxiety disorder and I am here with Jeffrey Kunkel rhymes with Uncle and we're going to look at why this matters to all cold fusion developers. You may be surprised by how many people this kind of thing effects and we'll talk about anxiety fo mo imposter syndrome. analysis paralysis, being overwhelmed. OCD,

perfectionism. And is anxiety all bad if you're a CF developer. And we'll also look at some solutions. But dealing with this, particularly if you're going to conferences this year, because it's a lot of cold fusion events happening. And that can bring out the worst in the anxiety. So welcome, Jeffrey.

Unknown 0:46
Oh,

Michaela 0:48
hey. And if you don't know him, he's a co founder and developer. He's been one for quite a few years now. And he's just getting more active in the coffee here. community. And this is the first time he's speaking. Yep. Publicly at a conference. So probably your little anxious about the whole talk thing that you're giving on anxiety? It's a bit of a

self referential Yep, they're

Jeffrey Kunkel 1:13
living the experience I'm talking about. Absolutely.