I was getting annoyed at myself for dropping things so I’ve started putting them onto a kanban. Time will tell if I can keep it up to date, but I’ve definitely found it useful in the past. It’s done for me the thing it always does for every team in which I’ve introduced it, which is stun me at the amount I’m actually trying to juggle at once. This is good. Explicit is better than implicit. Also, if you add a 🎉 emoji to a column in Trello, you get a little confetti shower when you move a card into that column. Tiny moment of joy (which doesn’t make up for them breaking my poweruser flow)

This has been a short week. I took Friday off to continue working on my literature review. There’s not a lot of literature in my chosen area, but there’s enough to keep me busy. The citation style I’m using is IEEE, which means many of my sentences now end like this [1], [2]. It’s not as pretty as superscript, but it’s what’s expected in this field. Every time I delve deeper into this, it becomes more and more fractal. It’s a nice metaphor for the problem and for all problems and also it’s just the nature of the thing. As an example: software today might be deployed in containers. Those containers might be deployed into software-defined infrastructure over a software-defined network. Precisely how many layers deep should a software bill of materials go? What does it matter if your software is secure when it’s dropping data into a database so old that it demands punch cards?

At the beginning of the week I went down to that London for a directorate-wide away day. We had a really useful discussion about how we’re going to be working – the directorate is aiming to move to a focus on products. We’ll be using Objectives and Key Results and borrowing Amazon’s working backwards idea – where you start from the press release and figure out the dependencies from there. The fact that Amazon’s approaches (the one-pager, six-pager, backwards press release) play to my strengths as a persuasive writer has no bearing on how excited I am to being working this way.

Oh, and we were invited to do lightning talks at the end, which I understood to mean “try out that tight five you’ve been working on”. I had the room in stitches. It felt good.

The coding time this week was given over to bits and pieces of infrastructure as code, still. I was also dropped into a very minor incident that turned out to be because Google sets defaults on its groups that I wasn’t expecting and so I missed a very important email. All is calm now, but I spent time and energy putting out fires that shouldn’t have caught in the first place.

My literature review is inching along. I’m now at the stage where I’ve read everything and I’ve got headings and bullets, which will slowly morph into prose. I had a call with a fellow student who’s become a dear friend and we went through her work – she’s got the kind of brain that can spit out 2,000 words in a few hours and will then freeze for the next 14 because she forgot how to spell ‘humanitarian’. Brains are weird, and I seem to always fall in with people with weird brains.

Finally: I bought myself a new computer. I spent a joyful day setting it up, and then an extremely unjoyful half hour creating new encryption keys because I lost the password to my old one. Very stupid behaviour. New key fingerprint is 833C 01A0 A501 868B 7174 76E1 F6B0 0820 EA62 3463.