now

Getting back to blogging, again

| Vasily Belolapotkov

Life is generous for surprises of all flavors …

That’s how the last Getting back to blogging post starts. It was published on Feb 20th, 2022. On that day I was sure the storm is over and had no idea about upcoming challenges. 

Russia-Ukraine conflict which started on Feb 24th, 2022 has put many lives under stress test, including my own. I don’t want to talk or write about the conflict because I don’t know a lot, and neither I have possibility to validate any of the controversy communicated in the news. For now, I just want to acknowledge that this big change triggered another chain of events in my life where I had to make many choices and take actions. As a result, my fragile blogging beginning was dropped and abandoned, again. 

Luckily, it wasn’t forgotten completely. I was thinking about writing from time to time, and even had some interesting ideas for blog posts, but I didn’t have enough courage, energy and time to write. I even felt guilty sometimes and ashamed of not writing anything because I was aware of broken commitment to publish a post per week.

So here goes an interesting leadership lesson I learned after initial shock had passed.  Conscious reset of priorities is necessary at extreme conditions like this, or when the context you operate within changes significantly. I found that the following steps are important for proper reset: 

  1. Acknowledge the changes.
  2. Start/stop/continue. Figure out what you should start doing, continue doing, and stop doing.
  3. Make priorities for things left on your plate explicit. Any prioritization technique would work.
  4. Accept it and communicate to others involved.

I did it for many things at my job and in my life to some extent, but definitely I could do better with blogging. Today I realize that blogging wasn’t the top priority at the moment, but I didn’t accept it then, didn’t give myself permission not to write, and haven’t communicated about it anywhere. 

Now, it’s almost four months passed. New lessons learned, I moved to another country, I feel myself in a much better position today, and ready to give another try to blog. The little blogger within me was knocked out, but luckily there is no referee who would count to ten and stop the fight. Luckily, I can start blogging again.

It was great to go back and reread blogging experiment post to remind myself those five why’s behind this blog:

1. I got curious about the blogging world and the technology driving it. There are lots of tools and practices helping people to deliver useful content to the audience and I’d like to learn them.

2. Automattic creates lots of great products but there is always room for improvement, so by using our own products as a customer I’ll be able to provide valuable feedback to internal teams and make publishing on the web even better.

3. I want to join the community of bloggers and hopefully make some new connections across the globe.

4. Share my knowledge, thoughts, and experiences with readers at the highest quality I’m able to provide.

5. I’m curious how far I can get in the long term doing baby steps every single day.

Blogging experiment post

Getting back to blogging

| Vasily Belolapotkov
Photo by Ivan Samkov on Pexels.com

It’s been about a month since I published my last post – book review for Indistractable. I know I planned to write 30 minutes a day and one post per week as part of my blogging experiment, but so many things happened to me so far that I had to drop the experiment to digest the life. Keep reading for more details about my adventures.

Role switch. I got a new role at Automattic – Director of Engineering for Transact Merchant Experience group at Woo 🎉 That’s both exciting opportunity for me and big challenge at the same time, because I have never led other leads before. It takes time and energy to transition and settle in the new role, but I’m surrounded by great people and professionals, feel supported by my leads and excited about the plans we have this year! Follow WooCommerce.com site and social media for updates.

Vaccination in Croatia. The decision of going to the other country for vaccination sounds weird taking into account several vaccines are available locally in Russia and there is no need to wait for it. However, none of the local vaccines are approved by EU and US authorities, making it hard to travel for work, so I went to Zagreb for COVID vaccination (some nice images from the trip are here). It didn’t go perfect – I was able to got a shot which is great, but unfortunately I got sick a few hours later, and it took me a whole week to fully recover from it. Everything is good now, and I received my EUDCC (EU Digital COVID Certificate).

Moving. Another surprise was awaiting me on return from Croatia. We had to move out of the place we rented with the family, urgently, almost without any notice. That was a very stressful and exhausting experience: looking for places, calling all the agents, arranging meetings, and running around the area to check potential places (we decided to stay in the same area due to convenient logistics for kid’s school). Luckily, we’d found a very nice apartment quickly and moved in within a single week 🤯 It took another two weeks to unpack and get used to the new place.

Now. It feels like the storm is over. Each of the events would be fine to handle on its own, but not all of them in such a short period. Now I’m good, enjoying a calm weekend, started seeing friends, doing some sports and ready to get back to blogging 😌 I’m grateful to all the people around who supported me over those weeks. I also started building plans for the future, both personal and work-related. Those are exciting, and I’m looking forward to making them real.

I’m glad to be back on track with my life and blogging!

Now: Dec 26th, 2021

| Vasily Belolapotkov
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

“Now” – the magic moment in time which will never happen twice in your life. It’s shared by billions of people on Earth but still unique for every individual. In this post, I want to capture my very own “now” and share it with you. It’s all about me and my life, so proceed reading if you are interested in day-to-day details. As always, it’s ok to skip if you are not at that place now.

I’ve heard about the idea of “now” page from my blogging group fellows and liked it a lot but was putting aside for a while to focus on writing about leadership, software development and books. I’m at the end of the year and sort of trying to slow down a bit after a long, challenging and eventful year. That in my opinion makes a good timing for “now” post. So where I am now?

I am at my home now (the rented apartment at the northern part of Moscow), in my office (cozy corner in the living room), writing in the dark room (it’s less than 5pm, but already dark). 

The Christmas tree is all set up and lights are blinking to remind about the upcoming New Year. There are still three days of work left before the holidays, but the holiday mood is already there. I probably need to explain a bit the context specific for Russia and some other countries. Christmas is celebrated on Jan 7th, that’s why I’m not away from keyboard yet as most of my colleagues, and New Year’s Eve kicks-off a holiday season with big presents exchange happening on the New Year night.

That Christmas/New Year mood though has a bittersweet flavor this time. My daughter has got sick couple of days ago and there is not that much emotional energy left to party and celebrate. Anyway, I’m looking forward to it as a very needed break to refill my tank and jump into exciting 2022. There is still enough time for my kid to recover and for us to get prepared for a little family party.

My wife and I had a very productive year, learned a lot and have enough moments to remember. We both miss trips, but 2022 looks more promising in that regard, despite all the additional risks and unexpected changes which have been appearing since COVID times the beginning of 2020.

My work at Automattic has been an amazing adventure this year. I’m proud of what we achieved with the company as well as with teams I work closely. WooCommerce Payments has become available in 18 countries and got a ton of new features, it’s powering thousands of online stores and is helping merchants to sell their great products all over the world! It’s incredible to be part of that journey and share it with such wonderful people and professionals. There are ambitious plans for 2022, but I won’t share them here, you’ll find out yourselves either by following my or WooCommerce Payments’s updates.

I’m glad that I started writing and sharing my thoughts with people a few months ago. It’s not easy sometimes and far from ideal, but I’m happy with consistency since the beginning of the blogging experiment.

Wellbeing has become important to me recently. I started to focus more on this part of my life as well as continuing to care about other’s comfort. Thinking is not doing though, so the “doing” step needs to be improved in 2022 😀

Pausing here for now to spend some time with my family, bye!