--- title: Working with CJ slug: working-with-cj published_at: 2020-11-02 00:00:00 +0000 updated_at: 2024-07-27 21:59:27 +0000 summary: In this article, you will learn how to effectively collaborate with CJ by understanding his background, career journey, working style, and core values. 🚲♥️ tags: [Values, Principles] author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/articles/working-with-cj type: article --- # Working with CJ *Published: November 02, 2020* *Tags: Values, Principles* This is a place where I'm working through some self reflection and might be valuable as a bit of a "working with CJ" or some insights to help more quickly start collaborating effectively. ### About my life Born and raised in the Sierra Nevadas on the North shore of Lake Tahoe. Our family moved from Kings Beach, CA to Reno, NV when I was 13. Attended high school (Manogue) and college (UNR) in Reno. Nicole and I were married in 2010. We have two boys who are 15 months apart in age. Growing up, I snow and water skied, wake and snow boarded, and was very into BMX -- 🚲 bikes are still a big part of my life. ### About my career I've had a really odd and varied career journey. I started trading code for money in 2005 when I got a job that I was woefully unqualified for in a seismology lab. I was writing perl, learning vi, and using a sun solaris machine. After that I started buildng websites in classic asp, a little php, and then for many years with .NET. While in college studying Computer Science, I joined the Nevada Army National Guard which took me on deployment to Afghanistan in 2011 -- a year where I learned a ton about networking and security. After college, I had a couple jobs where I wrote code in the Microsoft ecosystem: VB.NET (finance / stock trading), ASP.NET (liquid handling robotics). In 2013, I found and fell in love ♥️ with Ruby. I attended, then taught at App Academy (Rails bootcamp in SF). In 2015, Nicole and I decided to move back to Northern Nevada from the Bay Area and I took a remote job working for MyVR, a platform for vacation rental managers. Here, I learned python, django, and angular and built a ton of API integrations. In 2019, I made the move from product engineer to support engineering at Stripe where I had the opportunity to help more developers learn how to build API integrations. In 2020, I again shifted a bit into Developer Advocacy -- a role where I'm able to work across dozens of technologies to build demos and videos to help grow the GDP of the internet. ### Reaching me - If we work at the same place, Slack DM is always welcome - If we dont work at the same place, Twitter DM is the next best thing - Email me if you need a paper trail - I ignore any phone calls from numbers I don't recognize ### Things I care about - **Passionate execution**: Do everything to the best of your ability and work hard to get better. - **Hacker ethos**: bend the spoon; do things that don't scale; - **Respect**: Have regard for the abilities, qualities, and achievements of users and colleagues alike. - **Grit**: perseverance for long-term and meaningful goals ([book rec](https://amzn.to/2GlEzIU)). - **Impact**: Have a strong (measurable) effect on someone or something - **Ownership**: be responsible for tasks which you directly control and for tasks that affect whether or not your mission is successful ([book rec](https://amzn.to/3embWYK)). - **Freedom and responsibility**: Set your own schedule and be held accountable for your actions. ### My working style - **FILO Tornado Stack**: I will start a task 1, get an interrupt for task 2 and start working quickly on task 2, get an interrupt for task 3 and quickly bang out task 3, then go back to task 2, get an interrupt for task 4 and bang out task 4, then go back to task 2 to complete, then go back to task 1 to complete. Tornado because I'll often move from thing to thing haphazardly keeping track of tasks in a quick and dirty TODO list. - **Dreamer**: I love to brainstorm and get a lot of energy from trying to think of creative ways to solve problems. - **Starter**: I'm super good at starting new things. It takes a lot of will power and effort to drive them to 100% completion, but I can get there. ### Some context about what follows I've been told that I can be quite rigid in my perspective of how the world works. That I live by a bit of a "CJ's rules for life" that might be different from most. I'm going to try to capture some of that here. ### Unreasonably high expectations I tend to have unrealistic expectations for myself. These expecations sometimes begin to fall onto others (unfairly) and its something I have to work really hard to combat. Telling myself "X is good enough" when X is my own or others work. Its a challenge to know where to draw the line. An unfortunate side effect is that sometimes I worry that something wont be done to the bar I've set, so I tend to say "yes" to way too many things from a dillusional place of thinking that I might be able to do it better (rarely true). It takes effort for me to see others perspectives and without full and clear context from others, I can sometimes jump to the default conclusion that something didn't happen the way I envisioned it. Given I want to achieve, compete, push hard, something I've found really useful is to constantly ask for feedback from peers and managers, especially outside of the standard performance cycles so that I learn my blind spots. ### Rush to accommodate It's better to rush to accommodate others rather than "taking it easy" if others are waiting. Even to the point of being a martyr, I feel like one way we can help others is to be on-time, and avoid making anyone wait. I hate being late to meetings. This also manifests as being poor at advocating for myself. ### High bias for action My bias is generally to manifest something. Take action and iterate. This comes at a cost of not fully thinking things all the way through before diving in. ### Juggling and prioritizing I tend to have very high output. This can lead to some slop in areas that I'm not passionate about or that I don't consider important. If something is especially important to you on a project I'm executing for you or with you, please let me know so that I can actively prioritize. One example: I am horrible at CSS and I while I could invest in getting better at that, I've mostly just learned enough to get by. --- [Back to all articles](https://www.cjav.dev/articles) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! If you found this content useful or have suggestions for how we could improve, we would love to hear from you. 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