I recently installed the Arc Feather electric bike kit on my bicycle and I wanted to share some observations and tips on the process. My bike is an Avanti Giro F 2 women’s road bike in size small. The product manual for the Arc Feather is available here.

In the box are the e-wheel, a pouch containing the battery and controller, the pedal assistance sensor and magnet ring, the handlebar display and the optional throttle (which I haven’t mounted). I also ordered the universal torque arm, which is recommended to prevent damage to the bike’s front forks. This came in the same box.

The first challenge was that the axle of the e-wheel was 10mm and the dropouts on my bike were only 9mm. Using a half round bastard file, I filed the dropouts to fit the larger axle. In retrospect, a 10mm drill bit might have achieved this a bit more easily and with a slightly nicer shape.

In an ideal scenario, your existing dropouts would be the same size as the axle. There was enough material in the fork that I was able to file out the dropouts without compromising the safety and strength of the dropout, making sure to take it out of the thicker side at the back. If I’d needed to remove more than 1mm it probably wouldn’t have been suitable.

The kit doesn’t come with a tyre and tube. If your old wheel has the same dimensions as the e-wheel, you’ll be able to remove and re-fit your old tyre and tube. I needed to purchase new ones because my old wheel has a narrower rim and a Presta valve rather than a Schrader valve. The e-wheel does come with rim tape, but I had the guy at the bike shop put some stronger rim tape on.

Once your dropouts are ready and your tyre and tube are in place, you can fit the e-wheel. Notably, the user guide doesn’t tell you which way the wheel should go on. If you hold up the battery pack in front of the bike as if you were going to affix it to the handlebars, you’ll see the cable connector for the hub motor coming out on the right side. The cable connector on the e-wheel should be on the same side. If you put the e-wheel on in the wrong direction, it will spin in the wrong direction.

There are some c washers included to use for spacing on the axle. They are just loose in the box so you might find them stuck to the magnet ring.

I don’t have disc brakes on my bike, so I don’t have any guidance to offer about installing an e-wheel on a bike with disc brakes. I did need to adjust my caliper brakes to accommodate the slightly wider rim of the e-wheel.

In Australia, an electric bicycle with a 250W motor can only be considered a bicycle (and so allowed to be ridden wherever you would ride a bicycle) if the motor is activated by a pedal assist system. The magnet ring is attached to the crank shaft and rotates when you pedal. This rotation is sensed by the pedal assistance sensor, which causes the motor to activate.

The magnet ring can be split into two pieces so you don’t need to take the crank arm off the bicycle. There’s a metal circlip to hold it together, which I was able to attach with my hands (with a little struggle). The included zip ties for attaching the pedal assistance sensor were a bit soft and weren’t holding the sensor firmly so I replaced them with higher quality ones. If the sensor moves so it isn’t close enough to the magnets, the motor will not activate.

The display and the battery pack are mounted on the handlebars. I don’t have a lot of free space on my handlebars so I had to move my bell and reflector around to make room. The display also obscures my front gear indicator, but I find it’s pretty obvious what front gear I’m in just from the resistance I feel when pedaling, so I don’t consider that a great loss.

Plugging in all the cables is simple because all the connectors are colour coded. The cables are quite long, which might be good if you had a much larger bike or wanted to mount your battery pack somewhere other than the handlebars. There was a bit of work in tidying up the cables and fastening them in place.

The installation manual for the torque arm is available here. I wasn’t really happy with the hoseclamp they supplied to attach it to the front fork. It seemed like a weak fixture and I also thought it would scratch the paint. I went to Bunnings and got some clip heads to affix the torque arm properly.

I put some K-Flex elastomeric insulation (also from Bunnings) under the clip heads to protect the paintwork. I covered them in shrink wrap for water resistance and a nicer surface.

I was a little bit apprehensive about riding the bike for the first time. I was worried that I wouldn’t like the speed and I would feel less safe. Once I was on the bike, that worry disappeared. I actually feel safer, even riding near traffic, knowing that I can quickly get myself out of a bad situation. Riding up hills is effortless, and it is actually pretty fun to go fast. I haven’t really tested it out enough yet to comment on the range but I rode it for about 7km and it didn’t seem to consume much of the battery.

Prior to the conversion, my bike was quite light. It is heavier now at the front, because of the motor and battery pack. This is not really a problem while riding, but it is something to consider if you ever have to carry your bike.

Although there were some tricky parts, the conversion was not too difficult. However, if you think this project is not for you, some bicycle shops will do the conversion for you.

You can find an abundance of stories on Medium about the journey to a software development career. But whether you started out driving trucks, mopping floors or selling tomatoes, the story of what brought you to your current career path is more than just a popular format for a Medium article.

By looking back on your past choices and contemplating them in light of where you are now, you can get a new perspective on what motivated you, what made you happy and what didn’t. The value of this insight is perhaps most obvious in the job hunt or on the path to promotion when you need to communicate your motivations to someone else.

But the real value comes when you understand those motivations yourself. When your career goal-setting is backed up by your career narrative and informed by thorough knowledge of your values, you are on your way to a fulfilling work life.

What is a career narrative?

A career narrative is a way of talking about your career that emphasises your unique qualities and the value your experience brings. Instead of giving a dull retelling of your roles so far, a career narrative focuses on:

• Where you see yourself in your next role;
• Highlights from your career history that demonstrate your ability to do that role; and
• What is exciting to you.

Preparing a career narrative enables you to speak confidently about your goals and your abilities, instead of leaving it up to others to guess if you will be a good fit for the role you want.

A career narrative is coherent

A curriculum vitae, which plainly lists the roles you’ve had and the dates you held them, can lack a common thread to tie it all together. This is especially true if you have changed careers. If you haven’t thought about how to weave your work experience into a coherent story, you risk seeming like you’ve jumped randomly from one job to the next. It’s hard for a prospective employer to understand what motivates you, so it’s hard for them to be confident that you are a good fit.

A career narrative gives the impression that you make choices deliberately and with a clear direction in mind. If your story makes sense, it can help an employer see you as more trustworthy. If your past choices were backed by solid reasoning, it can be assumed that you’ll continue to apply solid reasoning.

A career narrative is compelling

Before becoming a software developer, I was a lawyer. When I started to pursue software development, I dreaded being asked about it. I hoped that somehow people wouldn’t notice the jarring shift in my career direction. I worried it made me seem less serious about technology, or less sure of what I wanted.

In reality, people find it fascinating. They’re not going to ignore it, so I need to be prepared to discuss it.

• Why did I start to pursue law?
• Why wasn’t it a good fit for me?
• What skills did I gain from it that benefit me in my current role?

Rather than dreading these questions, I took it as an opportunity to take control of the narrative. I knew these questions would be asked, so I prepared a response that neatly tied my work experience together.

Even if you haven’t changed careers, you might have made other, less drastic changes. Maybe you moved from a large company to a smaller one, or you switched from web development to mobile apps, or you started to favour a different Javascript framework. Think about why you chose the path that you did, and whether those choices satisfied you.

A career narrative is authentic

If your career narrative doesn’t feel authentic, trying to share it with others will be embarrassing. You can’t just copy and paste a career narrative you found online or make one up on the fly. It has to based on deep examination of what you want, what you’re passionate about, what you value, what you enjoy, and what excites you.

Think about what a great day at work looks like–what made it amazing. Or a time when you were miserable at work–what could you have changed. Your career narrative is personal, and crafting it authentically is a personal process.

What can you do with a career narrative?

A career narrative can be a written essay, a few paragraphs that you include in a narrative résumé, or a polished elevator pitch. The format is pretty flexible and really depends on how you want to present it. What matters most is that you have put some thought into it. You need to have examined the turning points in your career and be able to talk about them without feeling caught off-guard.

I’ve seen the benefits of building a career narrative in my own life. I credit my career narrative work with helping me get a job at a senior level, gain the respect of my colleagues and managers, and have more faith in my own abilities. This confidence enables me to perform better at my job.

Career narrative work can be difficult and uncomfortable, but I highly recommend giving it a try.

Craft a career narrative and bring your goals to life was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In software development, there is a widely-held belief that you must always have a side project, with a strong preference for side projects that involve writing code. The story is told that if you get home from work and you’re not brimming with enthusiasm to write more code, then you’re not passionate about your job, you’re not interested in honing your craft, and you’re stagnating.

There is value in side projects, of course. I have some myself. If you want to read about how to manage side projects in addition to full-time work, there are hundreds of articles about that already. But the most important piece of advice I can share with you about side projects is that it’s perfectly okay not to have them.

In truth, having the time, energy, and focus to work on a side project is a privilege. Treating side projects as a defining feature of a good software developer excludes a huge number of people. We don’t need that kind of gate-keeping in our industry.

Who is excluded?

When I first started working full-time, I came home from work each day and went straight to bed. I didn’t have the energy and focus to decide what to eat for dinner, let alone to be creative and start to build something. I was suffering from anxiety. Trying to keep up with the household chores made me feel like I was drowning, and I lived with a partner who wouldn’t lift a finger to help. Making sure we both had clean shirts for work was the biggest challenge I could handle outside business hours.

A few years later, my home life had improved a lot. I had a new partner who took on a fair share of the housework. I felt supported and better able to manage my anxiety. But my job was sucking the life out of me. I didn’t agree with my employer’s priorities, I believed the work we were doing was unsafe, and every day was a battle. I came home every evening feeling angry and powerless. In the moments when I could muster up the energy to do something productive, I wasn’t writing code. I was looking for a new job.

My experiences are not unique. In fact, many people face greater barriers. But if I had subscribed to the belief that not having side projects meant I was not a good software developer, I would not be in the industry today.

And who else?

For another large group of people, side projects are just not a priority. These might be people who value work-life balance and don’t feel that coding in their free time represents balance for them. They could be people who prefer to spend all their free time outside, or doing non-tech activities with their loved ones. Maybe they have an awesome job that completely fulfils all their code-related passions and they just don’t need a side project.

If everyone in our teams shared the same priorities and interests, our work would be informed by a very narrow range of experiences and perspectives. This is not a good thing when you consider that we build software for all kinds of people, not just for software developers.

Keeping it up

I have reached a point now, personally and professionally, where I am able to pursue a few side projects. Some of my projects involve code, and some involve other activities directly or indirectly related to technology, like writing, connecting with other developers, designing printed circuit boards, soldering and learning about electronics. When people ask me how I manage to keep all of these things up, I tell them honestly “sometimes I don’t”.

I posted the below tweet back in May, excusing myself from side projects for a week. Then I didn’t write anything for two months.

{:ok, name} 🦄 on Twitter

I am letting myself off the hook from any non-essential effort expenditure this week (side projects, writing) because I have something hard going on. My thanks go to the people who tweet reminders that green squares on github are not a measure of self-worth.

That’s okay. I focused on some other priorities for a while. I still spent some time here and there working on my electronics. But I didn’t have the mental space to sit down and write words, and I didn’t write much code either. It happens.

Having side projects is an optional part of being a software developer. It’s not a prerequisite to your right to be in the tech industry. There are lots of different ways of being a software developer, and we don’t all have to fit the same mould.

It’s okay not to have a side project was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.