This week: Finland were robbed; the MSc churned out new ideas; I wrote some code (that unwrote some code I’d previously written); and I serendipitously did not miss a train.

MiSc

Here are my notes from this week. There are a lot. In fact, this is not all of them, because I’ve additionally updated some older pages. This is one of the huge advantages of treating my notes like a wiki. They’re not a linear list, because that’s now how knowledge works. It’s a network of connected ideas, and an update to any of them could flow through and affect something else.

This week we’re thinking about security and how we try generally to fit the person to the task. A lot of the readings have suggested that this comes from the military, and there’s certainly something tragically…old-fashioned masculine about a lot of security people. The existence of the phrase ‘kill chain’ for an exploit that results in a security incident is one half of the entire problem with the industry. The other half? That’s it’s copyrighted. Hiding security materials behind paywalls is so silly.

So instead, this week we’re being encouraged to think about security not as the primary reason that we do our jobs, but a secondary factor. Instead, our job (like the jobs of management, HR, and payroll) is to enable folks to do their jobs and provide guardrails to make sure they can do it safely.

Work

My two new folks are settling in really well. They’re fixing up little things in the dev experience that have bothered me for a while, but I’ve never got round to doing. I’ve been splitting my time between two things: first, refactoring some code I wrote last week to make more extensive use of our event-driven architecture. This should protect us as we scale further, as well as enabling us to plug in more applications as we go.

I’ve also been onboarding our new contractors, who are doing some fascinating work into the directions we can extend our platform. I’ve had good feedback on the vision-setting I’ve been doing, but equally I need to do a bit more management at the same time as the leadership. There’s administrative things that need to happen that won’t happen while I focus solely on the team experience. That is to say, both are important, and they are not the same, and they both require my energy and focus.

Other things, like team weeknotes, have been slipping while I’ve been onboarding. I’ve restarted them, and they serve as good canaries to tell me when I’m overwhelmed. If I’ve got too much on to talk about what I’m doing, that’s a bad sign.

I had another really productive one-to-one, using the pattern of:

• 5 minutes for upwards updates
• 5 minutes for downwards updates
• 15 minutes for career and progress discussions

I say another, because I really enjoy my one-to-ones and I hope my manager gets something out of them too. I am a delight to talk to and a genuine pleasure to be around, and he always seems to change his mind at least once during the meeting. I think this means I’m being Helpful.

A tiny meta note: I am purposefully being over the top in my fulsome praise for myself, because ironic self-deprecation can sometimes be the slippery slope to genuine self-deprecation, and I am not at home to that this year.

Mentoring

This week mentee #1 and I spoke in person and I got to understand her better. I’m continuing to push her to apply for roles that are not her dream role because:

1. when you only apply to your dream role and you don’t get it, it’s that much more crushing, and;
2. if you want to get your dream role, you need practice at interviewing, because interviewing well is a skill and like all skills must be practised

This isn’t to say I’m encouraging to waste her time, and the time of hiring managers. And we’re going to do practice interviews. Nonetheless, as someone who’s fallen into a couple of jobs he didn’t expect and still learned a lot, I am firmly in the camp of “apply to things that make you go ‘hmm’ as much as the things that make you go ‘oooh!'”.

We’re having a vote on changing the camp name next week.

Mentee #2 grilled me on the difference between synchronous and event-driven architectures this week, which was unexpected and exciting. We have really interesting meta conversations about programming and every time I go away from the call with the vague urge to pick up Scala again. But I don’t have time. I don’t. I don’t have time.

Come back next week to find out whether I have time.