This week has been like sex when camping: fucking in tents. There’s a lot here, and some really big lessons for me. Let’s get on. I should say first that I had a significant falling out with someone I love, and that really sucked. And it was both of our faults. It’s not a terminal falling out, I hope, but it’s still a really significant weight on me, and probably will be for a while. This isn’t an invitation to my pity party, but just to say that I think this week’s reflection is light because introspection is tricky right now. And also to say that relationships are hard, and we’re all doing our absolute best, mostly, and I’m proud of you for whatever you’re doing to maintain the relationships that are important to you.

Okay? Okay.

Jobs and doing them

Last week I talked about a role someone approached me about. I had a chat with the person I’d be reporting to, and I think I’m less keen. I don’t know if they meant to or not, but they talked almost boastfully about letting people go. I get it: it’s a really hard thing to do, and when you have to do it you should be proud of doing it well. But I think it’s a weird thing to say in a chat with someone who’s interested in working for you. I dunno. Maybe I’ve gone soft from being in a cushy job for too long.

Speaking of my cushy job. Last week I mentioned that my senior is leaving, and I wasn’t sure whether I’d apply for their job. In the end I did, and I’m almost certain I borked it up. I got way too in my head about it, and rewrote my cover letter three or four times. I’m out of practice at this sort of thing, so I’m thinking to practice a little more with a role that’s just re-appeared. I applied to it last time and didn’t even get past the sift – and yet it seems nobody else managed to secure the role either. So it’s worth another attempt, I think, even if it’s only to sharpen my application skills more generally.

In my day-to-day I have been surprised, and annoyed at my surprise, at the impact documentation has. I wrote some using the Sphinx library, and then the next day my senior used the documentation to test some work they were doing. It’s that easy. I should do it more! I probably will not do it more. But I should.

In other current job news, two of my side projects hustle along quite nicely and offer much opportunity for ownership and leadership. The mentoring software I designed to match mentors and mentees has enough backing for a little money to be spent on putting it on the Internet, so now I need to work out how to do that. The other piece of software I designed, which matches graduates on our graduate programme and the roles they could be placed into, is also slowly generating momentum: we have a show and tell soon where we’ll demonstrate how we’ve reduced 2 weeks of staff-time into less than a second of compute time.

If you’re thinking to yourself that these things sound very similar, you’d be right: I have precisely one trick, but by the gods it’s a good one.

House news!

The news is: I may finally sell the thing. This will make an awful lot of people very happy, and one person slightly wealthier. So let’s hope it happens, eh?

Learning and development update

This week’s readings have been focussed on how things move around the Internet. It really is fascinating, when you aren’t distracted by the authors of the course text offering their opinion on things, like:

Views that are publicly posted may be deeply offensive to some people. Worse yet, they may not be politically correct.

Tanenbaum & Wetherall, Computer Networks (Fifth Edition), 2010

Fun comes in too many ways to mention, plus some ways that are better left unmentioned

Tanenbaum & Wetherall, Computer Networks (Fifth Edition), 2010

It’s just so tiring.

Nonetheless I’m continuing to plug through, and although I have a lot more to get through, I am actually feeling okay with this part – so far. I also re-learned about implicit trust, when I finally solved the mystery of why my boiler has not been boiling (has not even been gently warming, actually). My boiler (it is technically a water heater, but so is a boiler, so there) has an element. The element is a solid piece of steel, and into it fits a giant copper knitting needle. A massive current is applied to this needle, which then heats up the element, which then heats up the water around it, which then heats up my body, which is freezing, because comrades I live in Manchester and it was a frosty -2 degrees today.

This copper needle has been replaced. Today a nice plumber emptied the entire water tank – some of it onto my floor – and replaced the element. There was still no joy. We scratched our heads. We dug out the manual. We spotted the problem at once.

Somebody, two years ago, had wired up the copper needle back to front – live to neutral, neutral to live. Three different people – two electricians and a plumber – had un-wired it, fiddled with it, and then replaced it the way that it was. Nobody had checked this very basic thing.

So the thing I am taking into the weekend is: what simple answer am I not considering, because I trust in what was there before? How do I get into the habit of checking whether (metaphorically speaking) the wires are right before I needlessly waste a full tank of water?