This has been a pretty intense week. I’m going to try to extract the things I’ve learned from it, like juice from an orange.
Alright, first fun things first.
I made a little robot. I wrote its code myself. I fought the deployment process in AWS, but managed to get it in and under the free tier. And people are using it.
And I did it because I realised I didn’t know who wrote weeknotes any more, and because my virtual friend Coco reposted her talk about how fun should be taken seriously, and because if you build it they really will come, and if Jukesie can bludgeon his Mac Mini into coughing up some code I, nominally a software engineer, should be able to do it too.
So that’s been quite good and fun. I deployed something small into AWS and proved to myself I can still do enough with code to be quite cool.
Alright, now the less obviously good. I was supposed to be on leave this week, but I was called in today (Thursday) to deal with something urgent. Urgent things are now my domain, and this was a very urgent thing, so I will have to move my day of leave to another day altogether. I knew this kind of thing would happen when I signed up to do the job. Not this specific thing, you understand, but there will be things over the next five months and two weeks where my plans will go sideways, directly into the shredder.
I’ve been trying to manage a fairly difficult emotional situation in my team today, while working at pace to respond to a couple of really big asks. It’s a very strange experience, and I’m trying to figure out the balance between taking care of the team and taking care of the work. Trying to do both simultaneously means doing a bad job on both. I’m not sure I’ve got it right, but maybe there’ll be more chances again.
These are definitely learning experiences. Getting to see really professional people operating at my level is absolutely mind-blowing. A little while ago my manager said I was almost ready for promotion, but seeing some of my peers today has blown me away. It feels like I’m a full decade behind them, and that’s been humbling. What a cool experience!
I have otherwise been on leave, and that’s been pretty good. We’ve been eating fruit, and going on walks, and generally enjoying a the evenings more when we know we don’t have to get up too early.
I have continued to get up early, because goodness knows I know a good routine, but we are at least acting like I don’t have to get up early.
We saw a film on Monday: Death of a Unicorn. My overall impression is of a great cast entirely wasted, and a very silly film produced out of a lovely concept. The design of the unicorn in question is excellent, and the CG that gave it heft and motion was excellent – but overall, silly. If you want a silly film, you should see this.
I attended a salon with Alice, which is something I very rarely get to do because I’m usually working. We talked about a lot of things, and it was a genuinely uplifting and perspective-offering session. I recently presented a piece I’m working on and got some incredibly useful and powerful critique – critique that I honestly don’t think I’d have been able to receive from anyone except the very cool people who form the community and Alice herself. It is immensely grounding, and so valuable to me, to have something apart from work where I can do work I’m proud of. Not because I’m not proud of the work I get paid for, but because one day I won’t have that any more.
And on that day I suspect I’ll be glad to have this.
Caffeinated Punctuation 