This week the theme has been to figure out the first most important thing. I am not sure I’ve got it right, and I won’t get another chance. But that’s true also of the next thing I do, and the next. Life is just one long series figuring out the next most important thing and mostly getting it wrong. Read on. That’s the current next most important thing.

I’m almost a decade into my professional career now, and I’m starting to feel like I broadly know what I’m doing. I know this is a trap, but it’s very tempting. I had a couple of meetings this week where I felt like I was doing really well. I challenged some people in productive ways, and I used my experience from a decade of public service to have valuable conversations. I used my experience of twenty years of relationships and navigating the world as an autistic man to have sensitive conversations.

I am starting to feel like I know who I am.

Friends I keep asking you to stop me doing things and yet, here I am, doing things. I’m disappointed in all of us. Let’s try harder next year to stop me doing things.

Sometimes I can see when I’m pulling up roots, and sometimes it takes a storm for me to realise how shallow they’ve become.

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)

We’re designing a web-based API this week, and it’s reminded me that all design is inherently political. Specifically, we’re thinking about what data we expose. We can expose all of it, and let the people receiving it decide what to do with it. Or we can curate it, with the hope that the people receiving it have a better experience.

Which is better? Which is right?

This week I’ve been supervising folks writing code for our system, and reflecting on what would have been useful for me to do before then. I’ve also been narrowing down thesis topics. They’re all broadly security-related, and now I just need to read a lot. With luck I’ll find a paragraph at the bottom of a paper that says “We really wish someone would do this research”.

I’ve acquired a pen pal, and every time I receive a letter from her I burn with new envy. Her stationery is an absolute delight, and each letter I receive reduces me to a Bateman-esque character, almost swallowing my tongue as I congratulate her on the exquisite shade of green ink she’s picked; the elegant understatement of the paper; the personalised stamp.

Everyone should have, in my opinion, no more than three lovers and no fewer than one nemesis at any one time. I am pleased to say that I am currently achieving both of these benchmarks.

This blog is now on the fediverse. I wonder how it’ll turn out.