All it takes...

In a recent coaching conversations, I was struck by a blinding flash of the obvious. Not quite as astounding as ‘Code is Read more often than it is written’ but on that order. ‘That’s all it takes…’ , I know , I know… let me explain.

In the last month or so, I’ve been tinkering with Docker, hence the posts. I kind of took the challenge on as part of a personal project. I’ve seen a number of trends moving towards virtualization and containerization. So I thought it prudent to ensure I at least was familiar with some of the tools. You know… in case I needed to put the skill on offer for future marketing materials for You Corp. But I digress. I’ve been playing with Docker, well…, to play with Docker, while I also explore some other programming languages. Nothing too exciting there. And most recently I have been exploring Io.

Now Io is a smaller language, in that the community of practitioners is much smaller. But nonetheless, I was intrigued, and I even was able to find some answers to some of my initial struggles. I had initially intended to use Io in a Docker container, to keep my local system clean. That would make it easier to manage exploring multiple new languages. But I didn’t find any image to use as a base. Given the size of the community, I suppose that makes sense.

So I set about trying to do it myself. And to be sure, I was doing this purely to serve a desire I had… and cause I wanted to see if I had learned enough about Docker to pull it off. It took some doing, but I did eventually solve it. I had asked some questions for support, while building the image. So I thought it made sense to share the final product with the group and opened a pull request on Github. I am honored that it was added to the repo in short order. Then I pushed the image to Docker hub and went on my merry way.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later, while explaining the the whole benefit of When one teaches two learn to a colleague that I realized what I had done. I had contributed a tool that might ease the entry of new members into the Io community. Moreover, I had done this while having barely a month’s experience in the language myself. I’ve talked a lot about contributing what you have anywhere you go. But I am still amazed by the variety of ways in which it can be done!

I mean seriously! Even if you are brand new to a project, a team, a company, you can contribute! It doesn’t matter whether are the most junior member of the team, or are joining as a team lead! If you are willing to apply yourself, there is something you can uniquely contribute! In the case above, I took the trouble of combining Docker and Io knowledge in just enough quantity. There was nothing spectacular about the feat, just the willingness to give what I could for the good of others. ‘That’s all it takes…’