The patience of a gardener

George is a traditionally masculine name with Greek and English roots. The prevailing meaning of George is "farmer" — in Greek it comes from "georgos" which indicates a tiller of the soil.

Many others have gone through what I am experiencing during the pandemic: I became a plantiner. You might call me "plant dad" if you're not as cool as I am.

You know how they say no one prepares you to become a parent? That's why a bunch of my plants died. It made me feel like one of those people who leave their babies unattended inside their cars, as they stroll off to a supermarket or something. The guilt and shame were unbearable.

So here's one thing I learned the hard way — plants don't grow because you want them to. You know you have to give them sun, water and a yummy soil. But they take their own time. And they don't care if you've invested a lot of energy in them or bought a R$225 self watering pot, so it would be impossible for you to fail to quench their thirst. Give them too much or not enough sun, water or nutrients, and they will be gone before you know it.

What about pests, pets, or the fact that someone else might find you so unreliable that they would be horrible people if they didn't water your plants themselves — and drown them in the process? These intangibles are never mentioned in the Google search results for "plants dying need help".

Gardening takes a lot more than I thought. It takes patience, attention and discipline. It's funny, because working in tech you tend to start believing that anything is possible. That, like a wizard, you can make things pop out of thin air. You write some code, push it to your Git repo, let your CI/CD toolchain do its magic and… tada! Your burrito delivery marketplace is online. Well, let me tell you something: that's not how it rolls with them plants.

Now isn't this the case with almost everything that is worth something in life? Happy and long lasting relationships with your significant other, family and friends. A successful business or career. Teachers watching their 5th grade students grow into adults making a difference and changing the world. Trailing the everlasting journey towards self-awareness, self-improvement and selflessness. These take time and some MMMBop:

Plant a seed, plant a flower, plant a rose

You can plant any one of those

Keep planting to find out which one grows

It's a secret no one knows

Again, this fast-paced world we live in skews our notion of reality. You start believing that your career will skyrocket, just a couple months after you're hired by the latest startup to join the unicorn club. When I joined VTEX, I knew there were many interesting and difficult challenges for me to work on — that was one of the reasons why I joined.

But I was also eager to prove myself, show what I could do and be recognized for it. Almost two years in, I'm absolutely proud of the work we've done so far… I also feel like I'm just starting to see my first seedlings sprout.

This week I came across a short but sweet post by one of my LinkedIn connections:

I kind of laughed an evil laugh in my head — it was an awesome recognition, coming from a developer, but it was also illustrative of what the last couple years have been like for the Education team at VTEX. Maintaining a knowledge base of 2000+ tutorials is hard, but shifting the way the whole company operates with regards to docs is harder.

Documentation takes a lot more than I thought. It takes patience, attention and discipline. Building a documentation team requires putting a lot of energy into hiring, and having the patience to see new hires flourish into awesome tech writers. Documentation processes need to be aligned, adapted and abandoned with great attention to their costs and outcomes. Documentation culture needs to be nourished with discipline in every interaction with different teams.

We get addicted to instant gratification living in times like these, with free same-day delivery and the modern day equivalent to the Library of Alexandria at the palm of our hands. But my plants taught me that hard work and high expectations aren't enough for my garden to grow. All I can do is have the patience of a gardener — cultivate the land, sow my seeds, keep my plants alive. And hope that, someday, one of them might become a giant sequoia tree that will last for generations.

If you liked this post, you might also like: The Epicenter of Greatness by Bernardo Montenegro. His article motivated me to write something more personal, when I spend most of my days writing and reviewing technical documentation.