Gang, I’ve just seen ‘The Roses’ and I’m going to deploy my degree. Read on for analysis but also spoilers, in case you haven’t read ‘The War of the Roses’ or seen ‘The War of the Roses (1989)’.

This has been a really anxiety-inducing week and I can’t much talk about it, which leaves me wondering just how much value these notes will be for me in the future. Let’s see. Perhaps there’s something in how I’m managing it that might be worth revisiting.

I’ve been multipled by 1, lads. A process has happened but I’m still the same, though in all honesty it’s hard to tell. This week: misremembered philsophical conundra, a review of my performances, and an attempt to remember everything I’m doing at the moment.

I’m doing too much at the moment.

I am unhappy about this fact. Summer is awful: a stark, staring presence that overhangs everything, that intrudes at my window and turns gentle shadow to sharp line.

It shortens my temper and ruins my focus. It is focussed by the places I love, turning a city of glass and steel into a maze of scorching, blazing beams. It turns what I love into something I can’t stand.

Anyway, the sun has got his hat on. Bastard.

Ah, but to follow the process, young one, you must first find the process.

I’ve been in a lot of meetings this week. We’ve got a deadline coming up, which is helping to focus the mind. Actually, there are a lot of deadlines coming up. Oh no.

I’m on leave for a week. I need it. This week has been intense; absurdly intense. The team will be alright for four days, and if they’re not, we’ll have to fix that. I’m reviewing this week in my head, and I think there’s been progress in places and in other places – just tactical fixes. Let’s see what we’ve got.

Sometimes I get a week full of people telling me what they see, and it is very often a pleasure. That has been this week, more or less.

My old – very old! – corporate objective reared its head again. Working on a single codebase that’s closely coupled to policy has been a fascinating journey, as I’ve watched it become more and more out of date. It was, once upon a time, policy as code. The policy is different now and, knowing how slowly policy changes compared to the real world, means the code was probably out of step before the policy was changed. We might have noticed that the policy, and hence the code, needed to change when people started trying to use the system in a way it’s not designed.

I’m thinking about this a lot at the moment, actually. There’s something about writing a lot of policy and then letting it out into the world that tells me a lot about the way the world is changing, and that’s even within the microcosm of the little corner of the world I inhabit. Is it better to write a policy that describes ‘as-is’, try to change behaviour, and then inscribe that? A kind of ratchet that means we can’t go backwards (although we can, of course), and where the iterations track the maturity of the organisation?

Another mode of thinking says that policy is a behavioural change lever. We write things down and then we use that to try to push people upwards towards the bar. Then we inch the policy up again.

Both of these are kind of bad. I think both of them are bad because the POSIWID. If the system you’re trying to police – the verbal form of policy, I reckon, is police – is doing things that aren’t in the policy you’re facing the possibility of having to change the behaviour of many, many people who aren’t incentivised to change. That means the beatings have to continue until the behaviour changes, and that’s not good for anyone. That means the first approach will result in a policy that never goes anywhere, because the organisation isn’t going to change – but it also means the second approach is doomed at once because the organisation isn’t going to change!

There are lovely, easy bits of policy – sometimes. A policy that I can implement as code becomes part of the invisible nudge of the system. If it’s easier to go along with sensible security defaults, and it’s as quick as not securing things, then folks will never complain and will generally thank you. But sometimes I need folks to change the way they do something that will slow them down, and I have to sell them that this is somehow a good thing.

And if the POSIWID, and what the system does is ‘get shit done’, it’s all kinds of hard to convince them not to do that.

I’ve got a new job (perhaps there’s something in the air) and I’m doing my best to write my stupid thoughts for my stupid mental health. I’m trying to navigate what I can talk about in my new job, and what I have to keep to myself. I’ll probably be more risk averse, at least for the first little while, and err on the side of sharing less. Luckily for you, that means more nonsense, and less work stuff. Hurrah!

I found myself quite lonely this week, on a couple of really interesting axes. The first was in myself. I’ve had a couple of home-working days when all I’ve been doing is writing policy, and I’ve found it incredibly hard. No meetings meant little human contact, and I found myself spinning my wheels. This is particularly odd for me, because I can (and have) gone entire weekends without talking to anyone at all. Work, it seems, is something I can’t do in absence of others. Books on the other hand: leave me well alone, thanks.

I suspect one reason I’ve only just realised this is because for the last two years I’ve been solidly plugging away at my MSc. Right now my grade point average is 0.74, which means I’m on track for a Distinction. I’ve still got to write my thesis, and that means sitting down and actually figuring out what the hell it is I actually want to spend 6 months on. At the moment it’s software bills of materials, but it may turn into any number of other things. I have too many damn ideas.

Coming up for breath out of that intensity has made me realise that my partner’s done the hard work of building a network in our new home, while I’ve just got more anxious about the network in our new home.¹ I’ve now got to get out there and find people who do the kinds of things I like to do, which itself prompts a reflection: what are the things I like to do that aren’t work?

Oh, my friends, the brevity of that list.

It’s a joy to enjoy your work – a joy and a privilege. There is no doubt an element of autistic focus in this: I have found my special interest and have made it my entire personality and managed to get paid for it, which is a huge win. But it means that I don’t know what else I like. Still, there’s a list, and I’m going to start working through that list. Top of that list is speaking and performing. I am an absolute maniac for performance, and am nearly feral for performances about performances. I’m signing up for Toastmasters, which feels a teensy bit culty, but could be a good way to meet people who are interested in similar things to me and get an interesting qualification. There’s also a great little network of French speakers here, and I’ve found a Russian class that I could start next year.

What do you mean, “that sounds like more studying”?

Oh. Right.

1. This is a fun little joke. The network is fine. ↩︎