Vacation period...when you work in a team

Vacation period is the time of the year when sometimes several colleagues from your team are out of office...This is the time when if you have a task that depends on a work done by a colleague left for vacation...most of the times there is little chance that you can complete your work...and you might end up blocking others...and so on.

This is the least productive period of the year.

Maybe it would be better to just call the period...and abort the mission of delivering something significant.

This would lead to less work to fix later...and less frustrated colleagues.

Just accept that there are times when is better not to commit anything....and no worries...things will be finished eventually...when everyone is present... physically and mentally.

Can you be a specialist or everyone is a "Jack of all trades"?

A specialist is someone with a focused knowledge in a domain. The level of the knowledge is not mentioned usually...and so nobody can challenge the specialist status....so it's mostly on you to call yourself a specialist.

So if you know something just a bit better than something else, can you say that you are a specialist?

Let's say I am a Java specialist/expert...is this enough for me to design and write a network application...and deploy it? ... Or do I need some knowledge about deployment and network architectures?

...or if I am Spring specialist/expert than is that enough to know how to deploy my microservice to a Docker container? Or should I know how to write Docker files...and use Jenkins to build the image for me....

You can be a specialist in a technology...framework...whatever...but you also need to know tons of other things too...to live in this IT world.

...but if you know so many things...than there is little chance to be specialist/expert in all of them...right?...unless you are Tony Stark.

...than can you look in the mirror ...in the morning...and call yourself a specialist/expert/senior developer? ... than why the titles in the email signature?