Hello. it’s hard to type this week because my hands are slippery with sweat. It’s hot where I am. Stiflingly hot, but these two weeks have been good, excellent, interesting weeks.

The last thing I wrote was a pretty good poem, and this will not be as good. It can’t be gold every week, team. Sometimes you just get stuff.

We have an offer on our flat, which we’ve accepted. There’s a few more things to do on the buyer’s side, but I think it’s actually happening. We’re going to be leaving London. It’s a weird feeling. I’ve been waiting to do this for such a long time, and I cannot wait to get started on a new adventure. You hear horror stories about things going sideways at the last minute, but I’m quietly confident. There’s no chain. Everything seems to be progressing. We’re going to be all right.

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My team. My friends, let me tell you about my team. What a team we have. I am boggled always by the compassion, and patience, and wisdom of the folks in my team. We are at that interesting, starting-to-stick-together phase of a team. I feel delight when I sit down with them and we start to think about what we’re going to do next. Isn’t that rare? Isn’t that delicious? That I delight in my colleagues.

Our standups are getting tighter. Agile, for me, is about trusting each other. Trust is mostly about proving trust, and you do that best in small increments. As we get more mature, standup becomes less a discussion about the work and more a discussion about what we do with the work next. Are folks blocked? Do we need to cut scope? Do we need to refocus on something? And this means things that aren’t blocked, that are just progressing, just…continue to progress. It’s brilliant. It’s so…effective.

We had our show and tell today, which might be why I’m buzzing more than normal. The audience for these has grown, little by little, over the last couple. Three people stood up and showed something that was a bit rough but still working. Imagine that! The psychological safety to stand up in front of your peers and say “Yeah, it’s not finished, but it works a bit and That’s Good,” and for them all to applaud you and say “Yeah, mate, that’s Great Actually.”

Sure, I’m buzzing a little because I was compereing. My autism loves rules, and structures, so compereing is awesome. I hate being the centre of attention in unstructured formats (like birthdays or stags, where anything could happen) and fucking love it in structured formats (like standup, acting, or emergency response). I bet you’ve always wondered that. Well, there you are. Me, autistic: great in a crisis. Terrible at small talk.

Yesterday we had our second retro. A few things have slipped, and a few new things need to be tightened, but it was still a fun thing to do. I’ve been in retros that are very obviously slogs, where folks aren’t present, and ours are not like that. I was supporting our project manager in our last one, and this time she absolutely knocked it out of the park. I think she’s amazing. I think my whole team’s amazing.

And, finally, my MSc is paid. So now I’m committed. I’ve been making good progress on an hour of study before work, and having completed a fundamentals course I feel more prepared. More terrified, obviously, but also more prepared.

Onwards!