I was looking at my stats the other day, and I saw someone had stumbled into some of my old weeknotes. Back at the beginning of season 8, actually. I went back and read them. They’re really good. They’re really good. They’re so much more bold than the insipid, high-level nonsense I’ve been pushing out for the past quarter.

I think I’ve been scared, because I got a couple of knocks to my confidence, of putting my entire intense self out here. I also hit 25 whole subscribers, and I don’t know – I’m suddenly more aware that people read these things I write. But they signed up for a reason and this aint it.

So. Back to basics. Back to proper work.

Onwards.

This week has been a struggle. I think it’s been difficult on a couple of different dimensions, and they’ve all added together into a struggle.

I mentioned recently that we had a couple of new people join my team. I am struggling with having new people on-board who don’t have my context. It means I have to slow down and re-explain again and again. I’m also noticing that folks don’t always pay full attention the first time. I think this is one of the difficulties of video meetings – it’s so much easier to get distracted and zone out when I’m just one screen of many. Nonetheless I’m finding it quite frustrating.

They’re also asking good questions about the platform, and I have been finding myself getting defensive about the perceived shortcomings. Now, this is in part a failure of my stoicism. The question “Why don’t we have x?” or “Why do you do y like this?” are just those questions. But I’m finding myself reacting as if my colleagues are saying “Oh god, you don’t have x? What kind of amateur operation are you running here? You do y like this? What are you, an infant?”

We’ve also had a week of problems spawning more problems: we identified an issue with a synchronisation task, which led us to a problem in the querying task, which revealed a memory leak bug, which…you get the picture. It’s been very tiring, to chase down lead after lead, and it’s also been slightly embarrassing, I suppose. Because again, I’m doing this in the company of new people, and even when they’re not asking anything I’m hearing them ask “why didn’t you bother fixing this before?”.

This is an interesting thing to note about myself, and I’m working on getting better at reacting to the question that’s been asked and not the question that I’m hearing (and also unpicking why I keep hearing the wrong thing…)

Finally: the difficult thing with new team members is watching them do things that you don’t think are the most important. That’s a relaxation of control I need to learn, because it’s possible:

1. that my understanding of the next most important thing is right, but too complex for them to handle right now
2. that my understanding of the next most important thing is right, but I’ve not communicated it
3. that my understanding of the next most important thing is wrong

That’s not to say there haven’t been some wins. I chaired a meeting of my division and people enjoyed it. One person even mock-complained that it had been so engaging that they hadn’t been able to half-listen while working on something else. I think that’s a compliment? And I bit back the urge to tell this person that meetings are work and if they’re not engaged in the work they should leave.

We call this ✨ GROWTH ✨

The MSc has also been difficult this week, as we move from people-centric security and ethics to internal control and yet more standards, yet more documents written by lawyers, yet more fitting people to tasks. I’ve only done about 10% of the material this week, and it’s Saturday. I feel behind, and I feel resentful that this is what I’m being forced to learn. Particularly when I discovered recently that my local university does a similar course except it sounds way cooler.

I also got my results back for the most recent set of exams, and they’ve dragged my GPA down by four points – from 0.75 to 0.71. It’s still Distinction level, but only barely, and it will be a miracle if this current module doesn’t drag it down further. Still: next term is cybercrime, and the term after that is software security, and so if I can’t get high 70s in both of those I will be amazed as they’re kind of my whole thing. Nonetheless, the results on top of the work on top of the boredom/frustration of the current module…all of it is piling into a struggle.

Writing things out like this help to give me perspective. Firstly that the feelings I have are valid, in that this week there has been a lot that’s been difficult. But also how temporary all of those things are. The new folks in my team will get up to speed, and we’ll get better at creating a team understanding of the next most important thing. We’ll move on to things in the MSc that I enjoy more – and presumably other people will enjoy far less! This struggle is only temporary.

That doesn’t lessen it. It just gives puts it in perspective.