A short week this week, but a week full of talking and thinking. And revising. I’m writing these in a break from revising block ciphers and cryptography generally.

This week has been a really mixed bag. I refactored a big chunk of stuff at the beginning of the week, documenting as I went, but not deploying. I’ve been on study leave since Thursday, and I don’t want to deploy something on a Wednesday and get called about it on a Thursday. So this will be the first test of my documenting: will I still understand the code when I come back to it?

The refactoring is pretty simple. It wraps up an existing capability with a nice interface, breaks it down a bit, and I think should make it easier to extend with new functionality. However, I’ve also had to add tests as I go, and that means that right now I don’t have high confidence in the refactoring. The long and short of it is that it’s possible the first thing I do is start from the beginning again. My job is mostly about learning how to do a really good job as cheaply as possible.

I’ve had conversations where I felt like I was adding value, but that won’t manifest for weeks. I’ve lined up more conversations in the coming days, and signed up to a couple of conferences. I’m feeling more and more like I’m settling into this new role, which is a great feeling.

I’ve also had some really challenging conversations this week in my voluntary role. That seems to be a theme – or at least, a common enough refrain that I can remember putting it into other weeknotes. I’ve also noticed that as these challenging conversations become more frequent I feel the urge to be less open with my stakeholders. If I give people less information, they’ve got less to argue with me about. I need to keep fighting that urge and keep being as open as I can be. And I also need to remember from my time in retail that generally complaints come from about 10% of customers. Most people are generally happy, and those people generally won’t tell you that they’re happy. The people who are unhappy: they will tell you they are unhappy.

It doesn’t mean they’re not unhappy or that their unhappiness isn’t without merit. It’s just a reminder to me that a couple of really frustrated people doesn’t equal everyone being mad at me.