S02E11: Part 2

We also served

Go to Bletchley Park. Do it at once. It has had love and money thrown at it in equal measure, and it shines through. There are fifteen separate high-quality exhibits, and I cannot stress enough how very, very brilliant they are.

You will need at least four hours. Really, you should take six.

Go and see the replica Bombe machine. It clacks merrily away in a room full of machines that were used in this quiet corner of Buckinghamshire to win a war. It’s explained by a cheerful old fellow⁰ who patiently explains the Enigma’s encryption process to a room that is split, 75/25, between eagerness that borders on fetishism and polite bemusement.

Seriously, this is extremely cool

That talk happens in a two-storey converted house, and the upstairs contains real former employees talking about their experiences on video scattered through impressive visual displays.

Do get the multimedia guide, because it’s absolutely riveting. A huge amount of research has gone into it, and experiences from veterans who served here have been captured for posterity. My favourite was an extremely upper-class woman: she talked nonchalantly about working alongside these fellows who were very close to genius, but seemed close to homicide when asked what they were like: “very untidy!” was the curt response. It also comes with a pair of natty headphones that give you an immensely jaunty air:

I cannot express how much I look like my dad in this photo. You’ve probably never met my dad, but at least now you’d recognise him in a crowd.

Do not go to the shop if you like both books and a full bank balance: you will leave without one or the other. For me, I chose books.

I chose…wisely

I’ve come away with a spectacular haul of slim puzzle books, a thicker puzzle book, and The Code Book by Simon Singh. I can’t commend it enough: it’s fascinating and completely absorbing. I am entirely hooked, and I offer any one of my readers the opportunity to commune with me via Vigenère cipher.¹ My inbox is open.

Throughout the site are various exhibitions designed to get you to understand how Enigma works. I was about three hours through before I felt reasonably sure I got it — there was an immensely enjoyable 3-D X-Ray rendering of the innards of an Enigma machine and it sparked a lightbulb moment. It feels as though everything is designed with that sense in mind: a feeling on the part of the people who built these exhibits that they themselves could barely believe that this had happened. The massive concentration of brainpower that was unleashed there is really quite something and it’s testament to a principle I cling to today: free up people to do good work and they will stun you with their brilliance.

They will also sometimes hurl coffee cups into the lake rather than return to the canteen, where their thought processes will be interrupted by people talking to them. Accept that as part of the cost of doing business.

There is a reek of privilege everywhere. It really can’t be avoided — as much as it’s played down, the people who were recruited were those privileged few who’d had the opportunity to learn German, Japanese, Italian and so on at school. Daughters of aristocrats were the first called up to support the staff because “We can trust that sort of person to keep secrets”. It’s a sign of the times: today, all three branches of the security and intelligence agencies are making massive progress to recruit more diverse individuals.

Let me close by saying that there’s a restaurant in Hut 4 that serves incredibly tasty, fantastically cheap food to refuel you after the literally tens of kilometres you’ll walk. And if nothing else it’s a lot of fun to walk around and, with hundreds of other people, quietly mutter

Hang on, say that bit again?


⁰ Don’t expect to see many women. Although there are many fascinating exhibits about the Wrens —members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service — there wasn’t anyone presenting that wasn’t a robot or a cheerful old fellow. It was a bit surprising, and something I hope will change soon.

¹ I’m sort of tempted to build a decoder based on the fascinating methods contained in the book, but I fear it has both already been done and would be of interest only to arch-geeks like myself.²

² To be fair, this is also a point in its favour.

S02: E11 Part 1

The National Museum of Fish

On Thursday my partner and I headed to Milton Keynes to spend a long weekend GEEKING OUT. We went to Milton Keynes for its proximity to Bletchley, the historic home of the Codebreakers.

There are two interesting places on the site of Bletchley Park. The first is Bletchley Park, and the second — hidden away at the back — is the National Museum of Computing.

I’ll start with TNMOC, as they like to call themselves. They give you a map at the entrance, and it sums up entirely, in a single image, the entire spirit of the place: earnest, geeky, and lacking in polish.


There is so much that’s glorious and good there. The depth of knowledge the staff have is unparalleled, and they are incredibly willing to share stories and explain complex ideas patiently and, in my case, multiple times. Apparently the following was a key understanding in how to break the complex Lorenz cipher:

A + C = F

F + C = A

but I’m afraid by the fifth time I was too scared to ask how and just nodded sagely. Answers on a postcard please.

But on the other hand, everything is very slapdash. For example: they have a series of wonderful collections of automatic calculating devices that appear to have simply been thrown into a cabinet together. It would have been wonderful to see the evolution of these fascinating machines from slide rules to the modern calculator, but instead it was just a mess of wonderful, unstructured pieces.

With that being said, the display and explanation of the Tunny and Colossus machines were worth the price of admission alone. They are incredible feats of love and dedication. Since they were used by secret organisations, both the machines and their designs were all (supposedly) destroyed at the end of the Second World War. By virtue of sheer determination, a group of hobbyists, amateurs, and former engineers have recreated these remarkable calculating machines.⁰ Colossus in particular is an incredible machine; an early calculator that could do addition of five-bit binary words at an incredible rate for the time.

The guide spoke assertively about the machine, and then gave us all a little slip of paper to translate. For fun, here’s the slip:

Ooooh, mysterious!

It uses the five-bit ITA2 code to encode Roman letters to dots and blanks.

It was a really pleasant way to end the exhibit and a lovely, tiny peek into the work of the machines and — more importantly — the human beings behind them.

The most pertinent example of this allowed for the creation of these incredible machines: a single mistake by a German officer allowed a brilliant mathematician named William Tutte to divine the structure of the encoding machine without ever seeing it.

This is an absurdly impressive intellectual feat. Completely, utterly, mind-bendingly impressive.

It is approximately equivalent in my mind to seeing a single drop of blood and then deducing the entire structure of the circulatory system. Of an alien.

But I digress. TNMOC is a diverting couple of hours and the massive machines are brilliant. But Bletchley Park is far, far superior. So I’m going to dedicate an entire blog to that subject.

⁰ I will be writing more about ciphers and cracking these the moment I actually understand them

S02E10

I have two new colleagues on short term contracts — loaned from the Civil Service. One immediately went on annual leave, while the other has been hard at work. It’s been absolutely eye-opening. As they’ve grown into the project they’re working on, they’ve freed up a huge amount of the mental energy I didn’t even know I was expending on it. That, in turn, has made me so much better at my job.

My point is probably that if you get to the point where you say “I’m too busy to hire someone”, you should hire someone.

So: Monday I had a one-to-one with my colleague. I ask the colleague to come with an agenda and share it with me ahead of time, so I don’t get blind-sided by big questions. So far the approach has been effective; my colleagues are thoughtful and honest, which has helped guide the way I do my job. I’d like to learn more about ways to improve them, so if you have suggestions please throw them at me and I’ll try to collect them.

It was the last week of term and the UCU strike had ended, so I had my last programming class before the exam. It was a valuable session; I’m still getting to grips with Java but made some progress. I am still entirely confident that it is a terrible, horrible, no good language, but it’s helping with the very good Scala course I’m doing. It’s on Coursera and it’s created by l’École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and if you’re interested in functional programming I recommend it.

In job news, I found out that a position I’d applied to had already been filled — but would I like to meet the director to talk about joining a different team?


Tuesday was backlog grooming, which the aforementioned colleague facilitated, and customer problem solving. Backlog grooming is an opportunity for the business side of the operation to come together and argue priorities and roadmap. It’s really helped to get the new colleagues up to speed and helped me sharpen up the product’s vision, because new colleagues have a tendency to poke holes in assumptions you didn’t realise you had. If you don’t have any new colleagues to hand, you can always borrow some from a neighbour.

I applied for a job that required me to take a situational judgement test. Situational judgement tests ask you to image yourself in a situation and then evaluate four responses to the situation. Apparently you can automate cultural fit now, which I have two conflicting thoughts on:

  1. Tech bros hiring for cultural fit⁰ is a contributing factor to the lack of diversity in our industry. By writing down what your culture is and letting a computer check if people react in the same way as you to the same situation, you can remove some bias you would have for or against that person. But:
  2. Culture is mostly unwritten; the people who commission and input into this software don’t deal with the day to day culture; the idea that you can neatly encapsulate vast, unspoken cultural stuff in 15 questions with four answers is patently absurd.

In any case, the test identified me as a bad fit. It was a novel experience though, and gave me insight into a dystopian world of automated decision-making that can only be just around the corner.

UNACCEPTABLE

Wednesday passed without major incident, and I took advantage of the evening to finish up the work I was doing on my side project to make the algorithm work and the interface usable.

Unfortunately, it takes a long time to process the data, which means if I deploy it anyone who tries to use it is met with this page:

bummer

So: now I’ve got to write something fancy to move the data processing to the server-side while the client-side displays an animation to keep the user interested.

https://gph.is/2vGtaeV

I’m frustrated, but I’m also learning new things that I’m really enjoying. So that’s nice. It also works as long as you only ask for ten data points, so if you promise not to break it you can try it here. If you feel like a fun challenge, print off the data points you get and see if you can get better matches than the system.

(If you spot any horrendous results, please let me know!)

Thursday was my day off and my partner worked from home, so I made some fish with a dill sauce for lunch. Eating together is something we try to do as much as possible because we’re both so busy, and it was really nice to be able to do lunch as we wouldn’t have the chance to eat dinner together.

I went on to university in the afternoon. Information systems got a bit heated as we discussed ethics in computer science. There’s a whole thesis to be written on whether our industry ought to be regulated in some way, and now’s probably not the time.¹ There are also theses already written about the actions of Snowden and Manning, and the recent whistleblowing about the stunningly shifty activities at Cambridge Analytica². People have Strong Feelings about this stuff. It’s a good start.

Computer Systems was a blur of confusion. I’m going to be spending my (now free) Thursdays before the exam reading the textbook from cover to cover.

Thank goodness for student loans

Friday everything was on fire.


Customer issues came in from left right and centre. A client was accidentally missed off a mailer a couple of weeks ago and found out today from someone else in their industry. I’m really frustrated that we dropped the ball, particularly because this client has a unique insight into upcoming work that we really value. It also makes us look unprofessional and I really, really hate that.

I had to crunch through some tests for another client, and because computers can smell your fear that was the moment my laptop decided it was time to do updates.

COME OOOOOOOOOOOOOON

Matters were made worse by the fact that the afternoon was given over to the retrospective. Some tough conversations happened, as they should do, but I came away from it wondering how valuable my input was. I felt as if I’d done nothing but complain, and I don’t like that. There’s plenty of good to celebrate, but I felt like I was playing the bad guy. I’m going to keep an eye on this and see if it resurfaces in a fortnight.

Next week

Incredibly short week, so work will be crunchy as I bring everyone back up to speed. On the other hand, bank holidays are good and mini-breaks with your cool and awesome partner to Bletchley Park AND the National Museum of Computing are the absolute best. Next week’s weeknotes will feature many pictures of my immensely excited face.

⁰ Cultural fit is a phrase which here means “Are they, too, a tech bro?”

¹ Since you ask: pilots flying planes today rely heavily on software. Despite this, pilots are highly regulated and rightly so. But the person writing the software — who’s regulating them? As far as I know: nobody. And if that’s the case, it makes me nervous.

² This year’s favourites in the boat race against Oxford Analytica

Jobhunting

I’m going to preface this blog by saying: I’m really lucky I can write this blog. I know most people can’t. This is also mostly a way for me to frame what I’m thinking, because writing it down helps me and maybe it’ll help someone else.

This will probably span several posts. Sorry.

I am looking for a job.⁰ I’ve managed to save enough that I don’t need to take the first position I’m offered, and I’ve got enough time to think about what I want to do.

At the moment, it’s something of a mess. It means I’ve taken a slightly scattergun approach to job applications. I’ve nosed out interesting things and applied to the best of my ability, and then had valuable conversations with people who turned me down.

(I did have one conversation with a recruiter that I can only apologise for, because in the middle of a cracking answer about how I’d supported a member of staff to write their own web service an idiot in a low-clearance vehicle got stuck on a speed bump outside the cafe I was sitting in. And then revved his engine. And then I yelled ‘I can’t hear you, I’ll call you back’, which probably threw you a bit. And then I realised you’d called from a private number, so I couldn’t call you back.

The whole thing was a farce. I’m really sorry.)

Other people have taken me up on applications. Those conversations have been enlightening too. I spoke to a startup founder who admitted that at one point in the last week he’d been awake for 44 hours.

https://gph.is/2aAbLbU

Another is looking for a CTO to do the technical stuff and eventually manage a department. For the moment, the founder’s brother had promised to lend a hand. I asked what Twitter thought of this.

Then of course there’s the other end of the chaotic-lawful axis: a return to the Civil Service. It was always my plan, but in the year I’ve been away I have apparently forgotten how to write competency statements. I fear this is because competency-based questions are just a horrible way of trying to work out if someone is competent¹.

These two environments are wildly different, and yet I find myself drawn to both. The desire to build a culture from scratch because I believe I know best has more than a whiff of both despotism and arrogance. At the same time, I don’t think I’d do it if I didn’t think I was right.² That desire clearly steers me away from the Civil Service, where the organisations are too big to start a new culture unless you have serious clout and unlimited patience.

On the other hand: I know the Civil Service, and they are working on incredible stuff. It’s an incredible time, with genuine transformation going on all over the place. At the same time, all of the infrastructure — the HR systems, expenses, etc — are horrendous. On the other hand, there must be teams working to improve that stuff, and I really like finding problems and solving them.

And then of course there’s other stuff. More established start-ups transitioning to SME status; consultancies that aren’t the soulless Big Four; local governments, national governments; and odd corners of the business world that are suddenly transforming. And within those there’s such a depth of possibility: from apprenticeships to to Chief [sprinkling of letters] Officer.

I’m going to write up something else where I’m going to start thinking about those paths. I know I want to always be learning; to have a culture that reflects stuff I care about; to be creative; and to solve interesting problems. Let’s see if I can find that stuff anywhere.

⁰ If you’re thinking about a vacancy that I might be good at, I’d love to hear from you.

¹ Ironic, right?

² So said every despot ever

S02E09: Why do you write like you’re running out of time?

Introspection and honesty

Also chocolate. Like a lot of chocolate

https://media.giphy.com/media/vRB8FDt84uS0o/giphy.gif

What went well this week?

My partner stayed longer in Latvia than me and arrived back on Monday evening. We were both starving and in no mood for cooking, so we selected and ordered food that arrived at our house shortly after us.

We live in the future and it is unbelievably cool.

I finished one piece of coursework — it solves sudoku⁰. It takes less time to solve than it does to write them in. I think that’s a good metaphor for computing generally.

The reactions to my last weeknotes were really very positive, and Sam wrote something really flattering and also insightful, so you should read that. I got to speak to an extremely interesting CTO called David Carboni and fangirl² about organisational culture and programming languages while throwing serious shade at Java.

I was approached to write some software for a group of people I respect to help them achieve some awesome user needs and felt bad about charging for it. I would like for this to change, either by me becoming more comfortable with the value of my own time or the immediate implementation of Universal Basic Income so I can just do it for the love of doing it.³

A vast oversimplification but still a valuable tool, and better than the actively awful Myers-Briggs test

I spoke to my peer mentor Morgan, who is wise and brilliant. She put some pressure on me to reflect more deeply on why I’m leaving, and it’s been immensely helpful. She’s also suggested some avenues I hadn’t considered for new jobs. All this from a chalet in the Alps!

Finally: I made more progress with my side project. I’m making a pitch deck, because I figure if nothing else it’s good practice. Plus — and I have to whisper this –

I actually quite like slidedecks for transmitting information

For example:

Oooooh, mobile

Aaaah, numbers

What didn’t go so well?

Today — Friday — was a bit of a crush of different things. I didn’t get everything I wanted done because there was a lot of context switching. We’re getting back into our clients’ peak seasons, which means our customer support time suddenly picks up again. Normally we’d be okay, but we’re thin on the ground when it comes to staff right now and it meant I had to keep picking up the phone. No easy solution here — I’m just going to need to sweat it out until I get my new person trained up.

The approach to write the software I mentioned above came at the start of my lecture on Thursday, and I couldn’t focus properly on what was being said as I was thinking about database structures.⁴ That makes for a funny aside but it’s not easy work, and I need to be better at putting my stuff away and not being distracted. I’m going to try an old-school notepad approach for the next lecture to see if that helps.

Lastly, I got feedback that I am sometimes so blunt as to be unpleasant. One of the reasons I blog is because with the space and time to think I (think) I can say what I want in a way that’s efficient and eloquent. When I’m pushed for an answer on the spot I tend to be abrupt, because I feel like my inquisitor wants an answer now. That’s an explanation of why I’m like that, but it doesn’t take away from the hurt I cause when I am like that. And I strongly believe in the principle that the more senior you are, the greater your responsibility to adjust your style to suit the people who report to you.

I’m going to work harder on this, so if you see me in the next four weeks and find me being unpleasantly blunt, I’d like you to call me out if you’re up for it.

I’m down in the bottom right. Where do you think you are?⁵

⁰ Japanese doesn’t really do plural nouns, and it’s the kind of tiny grammatical hill I’d die on¹

¹ sorry, on which I’d die

² fangirl is the gender neutral term, don’t @ me

³ fingers crossed for the second one

⁴ Database architecture is the most perfect in-between for people who like constructing theoretical shapes to solve problems and people who like making things. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen tables you’ve designed filling with neat, efficient rows of data.

⁵ This diagram is from Radical Candor. It’s a book with a whole host of questionable suggestions, and there’s plenty to argue about the extent to which vulnerability and honesty in the workplace is a good thing. All the same, it’s worth reading.

S02E08: What’s next?

This week was massively abbreviated due to being on holiday for a week. My only day in the office was Friday, and that was mostly about emails.

https://media.giphy.com/media/13bUdxDy4jJUR2/giphy.gif

I also had to come clean to my colleagues and, here, to you. I handed in my notice. I will, quite soon, be leaving my job.

Preparing for your own succession is very strange, because it feels a bit like what I imagine planning your own funeral feels like. You know that everything else will go on without you, and the first reaction is a very selfish “Why?”. It’s only fleeting, but for a moment you feel irrationally annoyed that people will keep coming to work once you leave. Clients will keep calling. New business will roll in. Things will, for the most part, stay the same.

My first instinct is annoyance, because I am obviously the centre of the universe and if there isn’t forty days of mourning and mandated black clothing then really have I made any impact at all? If there’s no fuss, have I somehow failed?

Then you get the wonderful second thought that says: if everything falls apart the minute you leave, then you’ve done a terrible job. If people can’t cope; if the team can’t grow; if clients will abandon the company without you then you have made yourself invaluable. And that’s bad for you, because you’ll never be able to leave; and it’s bad for your team, because they’ll never grow without you.

I’m proud that when I leave in May, I’ll leave behind teams and people who are in a better, more positive, more powerful place.

In the meantime, there’ll be a job advert and interviews, all of which I’m really excited to take part in. The best part of leaving a job is that you can drop back in afterwards and see how it’s going. That’s a privilege that’s unfortunately not necessarily afforded to folks planning their funerals.⁰

I may need to omit these things from my weeknotes, because they’re naturally confidential and sensitive. Instead, I’ll be throwing in more from my MSc and from my side project.

Describing this service as niche probably gives it more credit than it deserves

My side project is something that’s been bubbling away under my brain for a while, and I’ve finally pulled my finger out and started to design it properly. I’ve written about it before, but it’s always really been an exercise to see if I could code the problem. Proofs of concept¹ do not a service make, so I’ve started developing a front end to interact with it.

It’s really hard, despite the fact that I’m mostly cheating on all design issues by using bootstrap. Working out what users need to be able to do is just as hard as working out how to write the code, and writing the code properly — rather than as an incomprehensible mess — is really darn hard.

So what about real work? Well, I’ve got three months before I leave for good, and enough squirrelled away that I can be careful about what I do next. I’m getting a better sense of what I like doing² and how I like working³. If you’re interested in hiring someone a bit like me, you might well be in luck. Drop me a line and let’s talk.

Like the person planning their funeral, I can’t say for certain what’s next. But — and I hope I’m still saying this when I do come to that long-awaited day — I’m really excited to find out.

⁰ This is of course a personal view. Depending on your spiritual outlook, you may be able to come back and affect things, come back and just watch over things, or come back as a totally different thing and affect other things entirely.

¹ I think that’s right. Proofs of concept? Proof of concepts? Proofs of concepts? English is a mess.

² Systems design, writing code, solving problems, coaching, mentoring

³ With autonomy, with responsibility for developing others, with freedom

S02E07: HECKING EXCITED

Short days, long week. Go figure.

Remember how last week I talked about how I was using Toggl to track my time?

Here’s this week’s approximate shape:

What is this, a graph for ants?

If you can’t see, it basically shakes out to about 25% each for sales, CTO stuff, and Product Owner-y stuff, with the rest given over to admin, customer operations, and eating lunch.

Eating lunch is important team. Protect your lunchtime like a mother bear protecting her cubs.

The sales part is because my boss is taking a well-deserved break, so I’m managing that part as best I can while he’s away. It’s a massive gear shift from CTO work and I can’t say I love it, but speaking to customers is always positive because sometimes they’ll have a brilliant feature idea that I hadn’t had.

I spent most of Monday on the strategy and budget for the next couple of years, as well as writing up a training agenda for a new customer that I’m going to see very soon. I wrote code for ten minutes, and as you’d expect it didn’t work.

I got a ticket to #ukgc18, which is SUPER HECKING EXCITING

This guy knows what I’m talking about

And in the evening I went to university, and I think I’ve started to get Java.

On Tuesday I spent half the day on a new guide for customers using our new, fabulous, mostly-automated, product-generating-machine. The rest of the day was a struggle, because my esteemed colleague Felix had secured himself a couple of days of user research training. I answered emails and fixed a particularly difficult customer issue, and since I was feeling pretty pleased with myself I reopened my pet project: software to organise the shuffling of people, when there’s people to be shuffled.⁰

And I got weirdly annoyed that you can’t specify the type of arguments you pass to functions, so I googled it and it turns out you can¹. So now my code looks b-e-a-utiful:

I’m using the Civil Service as a use case, but it would probably work anywhere

It’s good brain exercise, and maybe one day someone will find some use for it.

Wednesday is retro day, and I think this has been the most successful one yet. We came out with some really great metrics for things we could do better, gave each other meaningful praise, and generally came out as a better team.³ It was a good feeling. I love retros, but to be fair I’ve said that a lot before. I do. Continuous improvement forever. Continuously.

In the evening I developed my software’s logic a bit more. There are a lot of things to check. I suspect I may need a data scientist before long.

On Thursday I went to uni, finished my coursework, discovered the administration office for my program and had my first Computer Systems lecture, where I learned that the average mark was 49% and a pass is 50%.

https://media.giphy.com/media/F8deaO3psSKiY/giphy.gif

It’s a day that starts at 1330 and ends at 2100, which is just incredibly unfair. All the same, what I’m learning is incredibly cool — although I’m still struggling to link it back to my day-to-day.

If I’ve made a mistake, it will at least hold the record for the most expensive mistake of my life to date.

Friday was an office day, and Felix and I finally got to check in. I had a preliminary chat in the morning with a potential new employee — my first in this new role — and in the afternoon did some pairing with Felix. We did sprint planning just before we went home, and the team talked me through what they’re going to be doing next to meet the sprint goal. It was non-stop, and a couple of my meetings ran over. They ran over because there were important things to discuss — is there any way to make that kind of meeting run to time? Help please.

If you’re going to be at #ukgc18 tomorrow, give me a wave. Some of us weeknoters may be pitching on this very subject, so…watch this space?

⁰ Okay, this is a weird obsession of mine, but: a number of graduate programs rotate their grads around departments, business areas, planetary moons, that sort of thing. They do this with the aim of turning out all-rounders. Unfortunately it’s a thing that seems simple and turns out to get trickier quickly, and I’ve been trying to convince HR teams to use computers to do it. I have been doing this approximately forever. I’ve now given up now, and it’s turned into an exercise to see how pretty/artful/efficient I can make my code. I’m now down to 23s to match 500 candidates to roles, with each candidate getting a match 80% suitable or better.

¹ Java man, it creeps up on you. It’s a gateway language, before you know it I’ll be functional programming and ranting about monads.²

² Wow, that is a specific joke

³ Metrics are important, as long as they can be linked to an actual outcome. When faced with a meaningless metric ask why until it goes away or you understand it.

S02E06:

Feeling of the week: non-stop

To counter this feeling, or just to get to grips with where I’m spending my time, I’ve started using Toggl to track my time. I’m trying to keep it high level for the moment: just whether it’s product work, strategic work, or customer operations. All of these have value, but I think with my new role I should be skewing towards the strategic.⁰

Song of the week: non-stop

Monday I spent the morning training a new team on our flagship product, filmapp. There were a couple of minor things that I should have set up beforehand that I’m absolutely kicking myself about, but they were fixable in the moment and the rest of the presentation went smoothly. One bit of feedback was that the system was “intuitive” — which is absolutely my favourite kind of feedback.

Back in the office I caught up on emails. Since logging my time I’ve noticed I spend at least an hour a day on emails, so I’m going to make a concerted effort to do that in blocks rather than in blobs. One of those emails was confirmation that we’ve secured two more Fast Streamers starting in March, and I’m absolutely over the moon. We’ve got a number of juicy opportunities for them and I absolutely cannot wait to meet them.¹

Tuesday I got to do some coding!

I was digging out some numbers about users and applications to support a decision about scaling. That meant writing database queries, and man alive there’s no better feeling than just getting stuck into a couple of hours of data munging.²

Who’s with me?

We had our monthly SMT meeting and everything appears to be going well. I’m aiming to increase our staff by two in the next three months: one junior developer and one customer operations team member. “Customer operations team member” is a horrible mouthful, so they’re going to be COps. Specifically a COps practitioner, who’ll eventually lead a team of COps. Hard-bitten, user-focussed, problem-solving COps. They’ll drink tea like it’s water. They’ll get to the root of a problem like armillaria ostoyae that feed exclusively on problem trees.

I said armillaria ostoyae. *taps mic* is this thing on?

We closed out the day with backlog grooming. More hard challenges from my colleagues that ended in really fruitful discussions and a rejigging of future priorities.

Wednesday a big meeting was canceled, which on the one hand was a massive bummer — we’ve been gearing up for it for a couple of weeks — but on the other gave me an opportunity to talk to the dev team about upcoming work. They’ve started to limit their WIP at my gentle prompting⁴ and have had real success. Among other things there’s been an increase in team communication, since if WIP is full you have no choice but to go unblock it before starting anything new.

Yay for WIP limits!

I had a great check-in with another new client, who’s expecting to go live very soon. There are a few tweaks to be made — local by-laws that applicants need to be aware of, for example — but they’re otherwise ready to go.

We also tried out our totally new, totally awesome automated instance generator. It works in a totally boring, plain English, exactly how-it’s-supposed-to-work way.


Boring is brilliant when you launch a new product for the first time. It’s exactly what you want. I am very nervous of people who like being in chaotic situations.

Thursday back to uni, and an in-class test. But time for a coffee with one of my oldest mentors⁵ first and a discussion about an MBA. She’s set me some challenges for our next meeting. If anyone has recommendations of finance books for manager types, please put them in the comments!

Friday I worked from home on the technology strategy. Coincidentally, the Government’s Shared Services strategy was launched at the same time. It’s a joke of a document that literally puts user needs last…


…tries to plan the next ten years, and is rammed with nonsense jargon that sounds like it came directly from a consultancy.

Still, it was helpful in showing me what not to do, so there’s a silver lining there. It also hints at what systems government might be buying in the future, so that’s a good market signal to build in to analysis.

As the afternoon rolled around I got a chance to preview some technical debt. It’s some really great work that improves the speed of our service, and I’m very excited to get it rolled out next week.

I ended the week on a massive high: I headed to see my sister’s new flat, and took along an enormous tiramisu made by Antonio, who owns an Italian store in Lewisham. It was decadent. Go there. Buy some. Tell him I sent you.

⁰ I’m absolutely willing to be proven wrong on this

¹ Full disclosure: I was a Fast Streamer and I had my issues with the programme. But I can say with honesty that it consistently turns out thoughtful, curious, eager people who learn quickly and get stuff done. If you’re interested in offering a secondment leave me a comment and I’ll dig out the email address for you.

² I looked up “munging” out of idle curiosity. I do not recommend you do the same. The definition starts “Go to a graveyard” and let’s face it, there’s no way it’s going to get better after that.³

³ How on earth munging can be associated with data and the definition above, of which we will not speak, is totally beyond me.

⁴ Read: me furiously limiting my own WIP and suggesting it as an experiment in retros.

Spectre and Meltdown

You are probably aware of two high-severity bugs that have recently been made public. We want to reassure our users that we are following instructions from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and our suppliers.

What we’re doing

We will be patching our servers over the coming weeks. These patches will require reboots, which we’ll carry out between 0400 and 0500 UTC. For our US clients, that’s between 8pm and 9pm Pacific, 9pm and 10pm Mountain, 10pm and 11pm Central, and 11pm and 12 midnight Eastern. We hope that this will ensure that the impact is as low as possible on your business.

Early reports indicate that there may be performance issues once these patches are rolled out. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the system’s speed following the patch: if it is severely hit, we’ll be prioritising work to decrease that impact in the next couple of months.

What you should do

There’s nothing you need to do at the moment with regards to Apply4. However, we highly recommend installing updates to your browsers and machines when they come.

For further information, please take a look at the NCSC’s webpage: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/

S02E05

What day is it?

Monday threw out my mental model for the week. I’ve talked before about how m’colleague and Fast Streamer Felix gets a day off a week to do training and work on his final project. These are normally Monday, but this week we planned to close the office on Thursday and work from home on Friday — so he switched his training day to match.

Long story short, every day felt a day ahead all week and left me with a migraine and a permanently perplexed expression.


I spent some time with a mountain of paperwork for a client. It was a nice throwback to my days in government; reams of paper and questions that have never been tested with users. It was a struggle that would dog me for the rest of the week.

Tuesday: This was mostly taken up by backlog grooming. I also talked through my suggested sprint goals for the next few sprints, and got some really good, hard questions from the team. I know I mentioned this last week, but this is sort of in the opposite direction: it’s so good to have people who can quiz me on my thinking to help me clarify it for myself.

Still, it’s also very stressful. It’s a difficult line to walk between honest, helpful critique of someone’s thinking and making them feel like they’ve not done anything right, and that difficulty is compounded when the presenter themselves struggles with their own authenticity. I’m trying to decouple my opinions on what we should do with the emotion behind it: the fact that I’ve worked really hard on some plan doesn’t automatically confer brilliance on it. Smaller feedback loops help with this — putting just enough effort in it to make a skeleton plan means I’m less emotionally invested in it.

Plus if it works I can do a skeleton dance

Wednesday was a good day. I moved the dev team over to Scrum when I started back in season 1. For the first time I’ve given them two high level sprint goals and asked them to talk me through their approach to meeting them. The response was really very positive; I talked last week about how taking agency away from workers makes them feel shitty, so it figures that the inverse is also true. It’s also less stress (but also slightly more?) on my part. I don’t need to spend as much time writing out tickets and explaining my thinking; instead, I ask the team to come up with the approach and then think through it and make sure it reaches the goals. In Russian, this is Доверяй, но проверяй: Trust, but verify.

This excellent working day, where I think I demonstrated strategic thinking and an eye for detail was somewhat kiboshed by an email from a supplier of Christmas presents, who’d be shipping a gift I’d selected. I had, for reasons best left unconsidered, put in a postcode that did not at all resemble my own. So it’s almost certainly not going to arrive, and I’m going to look like a turnip.

It’s my go-to insult at the moment. Gender-neutral and meaningless, but with a good mouth-feel

Thursday was, as ever, my day off. I went to locate presents: two were cloistered at the local delivery office, and three had to be purchased from central London. It was…a challenge. The jewelry shop in particular was rank with the smell of fear and Lynx Africa. There’s not much more to say about Thursday, aside from the fact that emails were building up ominously. If this were being shot for television¹ then this is where we’d cut between a dam just beginning to burst or a support starting to creak and splinter and me, mundanely fighting through the crowds on Oxford Street.

Friday and my last day at work until Wednesday. I learned more about our CRM, answered an absolute flurry of last minute emails², and talked to Felix about deploying his extremely impressive piece of software onto the interwebs. And then I clocked off at four thirty.

And then I came back, because the US still had a number of hours left before they clocked off and the paperwork from Monday needed a couple of minor tweaks that had to come from my brain.

And then I really did clock off.

¹ Sorry, when

² and received a positive avalanche of out-of-offices from people who’d set up automatic forwarding to people who’d also gone on leave