Tag Archives: weeknotes

S02E16: The week after the week before

Slowly getting there

Mental health update

Andy Samberg giving a big thumbs down

I am going through some stuff, so I’m going to mention mental health for the remainder of this season. It’s not sufficient, and I’m casting around for a therapist, but I want to get some of this stuff in front of me. Skip it if it makes you feel uncomfortable.

This week it’s been odd, seemingly trivial things that have triggered a drop in my mental health. At other times I feel like I’m doing better, until I catch myself feeling okay and worry that it means I’m a bad person.

I am trying to remind myself that bad people don’t generally worry if they’re bad people, because they think they’re good people. So I’m hoping that by virtue of the fact that I’m worrying that I’m a bad person, something bad people don’t do, I’m actually a good person. More or less.

Helena Bonham-Carter looking very confused

Eating has been better: I’m doing three meals a day again. I’m eating out more than I should, but it’ll be okay in the short term. And it’s for a good reason, good people have been rallying around me and encouraging me to do stuff and talk to them. Thank you good people. You are people and you are good, and you know who you are.

The week in brief

Monday was mucking around⁰ in a language called bash, with an aim to automating some of the tools we use.

Image result for automate all the things
AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS

I’m getting more comfortable in the team, and where I fit in. A good day.

On Tuesday I was working from home and did some remote pairing. Pairing is a process where two people work on the same thing at the same time. I was worried that it would be harder to pair without people able to see my pair’s face, but it actually worked out really well. My pair was really patient and helpful and I think I’ve now got a handle on how to solve a particular class of problem I’m working on.² I took the afternoon off to help a friend out.

London is the black hole into which all regional hopes and dreams tumble. The upshot of that is that on Wednesday I was asked by an old friend from uni — who now works for the same organisation as me! — to do a little video interview type thing. I hope I did well; everyone involved seemed happy. It was a nice little five minute session of being outgoing, which I do less of now that I mostly wrestle with computers. I don’t know if it’ll ever be published. If it is, I’ll put it in here somewhere.

On Thursday the community of technologists at GDS got together to look at the stuff we’re doing and where it sits on a spectrum of “we need to start doing this” and “we need to stop doing this”. It’s a “Liberating Structure” exercise, and looking at the page it looks corny as heck. That’s not to say it wasn’t valuable and effective, and I think the way it was adapted to the group helped. It gave us some good actions and reflections, and it’s certainly structured my thinking on where I want to start agitating for change³.

John Oliver waving a Pride flag. This symbolises my desire to agitate for change.

This sounds too aggressive, but it’s a fact that we always need to be changing. Deciding where to focus that is a necessary strategic decision because we can’t change everything.

I also saw fellow #weeknote-r Dan on Thursday. Dan is open in a way that aggressively breaks down typical masculinity, and I have a lot of love for him for that.³ It was helpful for me to listen to things he’s thinking/feeling/doing in a work context. We shared problems. I feel like I learned things.

Chris and Ben, characters from Parks and Rec, hugging

I also saw the ~secret~ underground passage from 1 Parliament Street to Westminster Palace, which was exceedingly cool. Thanks Dan.

Friday at last, and I had a brief objective setting meeting with my manager to talk about how we do things in my new organisation. I’ve got rough outlines and I’m immensely excited about all of them. I like objectives, or at least some structure around what I’m aiming for. It helps me keep my head up and prioritise my work.

In the evening I had an incredibly good dinner at Rosa’s Thai Café. Go, I entreat you. It’s absolutely delicious. In particular, try the ice tea: I’ve never had it before and it was a taste sensation. I was dining with a friend after doing interview prep; as before, my job was to ask tricky questions and imbue her with confidence. I hope it worked. She’d be excellent.

⁰ “Mucking around” diminishes and minimises what I do, and if I heard any of my peers or mentees talking like that I’d tell them off. I should do better at living my own advice.¹

¹ This was an extremely stream-of-consciousness sidebar. It’s meta, but I’m going to leave the original wording and this commend in for people to point to and remind me. And for me to point to and remind me.

² As an example of the mental health section above, I wrote “partner” instead of “pair” first. When I did that, it triggered lots of really unhappy connotations. So I changed it, and then I went for a walk.

³ I was nervous about using the word love, but fuck it. Loving your friends is a thing, a positive thing, and it’s a thing I feel we men should be more comfortable saying.

S02E15 : The hardest thing I have ever done

Hrrrrngh. Alright, let’s do this.

My partner and I broke up. There. It’s a thing that happened, and now it’s written down. And now I can talk about it.

It’s impossible to write about being broken-hearted without hamming it up, chewing the scenery like a Romeo who’s in it for the snogging. There’s such a weird depth of pain and loss and sadness that describing it properly needs music or arm movements or massive, unnecessary wars that will eventually spawn a movie starring Brad Pitt.


Describing it improperly is easy. I’ve been doing it all week. I’ve been “sad”, as if with three letters, with one syllable, you could express the feeling of walking through life with a hole where a person used to be.

It was, in the parlance, “amicable”. There’s a difference in where we see our lives. We did the right thing; the grown-up thing. The hard and horrible thing. I don’t recommend it. If you’re going to break up with someone, do the right thing. Commit some heinous sin. They will hate you, but they won’t feel like this. And that’s probably better. In the grand scheme of things, the amount of sadness will have reduced a little.¹

Other things happened this week, but I need you to understand that this was the screaming backdrop against which the following things happened.

2nd Troy GIF

I tried to learn Ruby as I’m in a team that works entirely in that language. Cue scenes of panic as I attempt to speed read Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.

It is not a book you can speed read. It is barely a book that you can read. I am perplexed that anyone who’s ever read it can still speak English, let alone program in Ruby. Here’s a quote picked at random:

One day I was walking down one of those busy roads covered with car dealerships (this was shortly after my wedding was called off) and I found an orphaned dog on the road. A woolly, black dog with greenish red eyes. I was kind of feeling like an orphan myself, so I took a couple balloons that were tied to a pole at the dealership and I relocated them to the dog’s collar. Then, I decided he would be my dog. I named him Bigelow.

Perplexing.

I got a sticker at just the right time. I needed this reminder that being generous with myself is an a-okay thing to do, and I am writing this sentence weirdly because even expressing that sentiment makes me feel like less of a man so let’s get to the end of this sentence quickly thank you.² Credit and love to Sam Villis for the lovely sticker.


I finally got to meet Jess Neely, whom I’ve been coaching in the mysterious art of confidence. I come into this as a middle-class white man, so I’ve got an absolute lifetime of experience of people assuming I’m more competent than I am. I’ve done my best to spread this amazingly mundane superpower around. It’s too much power for one man to possess.

I organised many things, including exciting meetings with people I deeply admire. I had lunch with another former Fast Streamer, bumped into someone I went to uni with, and generally tried to fill my time with useful things. I’ve literally just lined up a meeting I’ve been trying to get for three years, and I’m absolutely over the moon. I’ve already got a corporate objective in mind. Watch this space. Watch it. Waaatchhhh iiiiiitt.

I wrote this. And it was really, really painful. A bit good. But painful. And you read it. Thank you for doing that.

¹ I really can’t stress enough that if you take advice from me, a guy with a shattered heart, you are in for a really bad time. Please do not do this.

² The patriarchy fucks up e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e

S02E14

Our house. In the middle of our street.

This week in funemployment news: my partner and I are going through the process of buying a property.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Buying a property is a good demonstration of how rich people stay rich. It’s also a great insight into a system that has a lot of moving parts and a user journey that looks like a rollercoaster had offspring with Escher.

It has also entirely validated my use of Trello. ORGANISE ALL THE THINGS.

We’ve been scouting a newly built flat for while, looking to prop up the London housing bubble by using Help To Buy. We’ve been shopping around and settled on a two-bed, so we can have a home office. With any luck, working from home is going to become more and more common, and it’s nice to be prepared.

Help To Buy ISAs seem like a con, by the way. You save in the hope of getting a 25% bonus from the folks in government, but you can’t use it at exchange when you hand over the deposit. The deposit, which represents 5% of the total value of the property (in London). This is easily the largest amount of money you part with, but you can’t use your ISA for that. You also can’t use it for anything else. The idea seems to be that you spend it on the property at completion. Which is…frustrating. The barrier to people buying houses is scraping together £20,000 for a deposit.

Anyway. The way round this we found was asking our solicitor to negotiate the deposit down by the amount we’d have in the ISA by completion.

PSA: You can negotiate everything when you buy absurdly expensive things. Nobody expects you to pay the sticker price. I would love to know where that line is. I wouldn’t negotiate a bar of Dairy Milk (£2.00) but I would negotiate a flat (£450,000). Somewhere between those two data points is “the line at which this item is so wildly expensive I feel comfortable calling your bluff and making a case that it cannot possibly cost as much as you’re asking”.

We’re buying “off plan”, which means “based on drawings”. That’s enough to make a person nervous, but there’s a mirror-image of the building already built that we’ve seen inside.

Then there’s the paperwork. It’s not a well designed system. I’ve clearly been spoiled by GOV.UK, but I’d really like a friendly page. Here’s one I made earlier.

NOT REAL. Made for fun.

The most difficult thing is choosing the right mortgage broker and solicitors. With a new build the developers will have set up one each of these, because of course it’s in their best interests for you to move quickly — they generally like to get to exchange, when you hand over your deposit and are contractually bound to follow through, within 28 days of reserving. Yikes.


So we’ve had to move quickly. There are plenty of comparison sites out there, and they do a great job. Somewhat too much of a good job, perhaps, since my partner and I were completely paralysed by choice. We’ve gone with companies that will remain temporarily nameless, depending on how well we get on with them. So far so good. Both our solicitors and mortgage brokers seem quite experienced, so that’s a bit of a relief.

There’s still a lot of paperwork to sign. I’m glad we’re now at the place in time when I can use my phone to scan documents and email them back, but I can’t help thinking that we’d be in a better place with an encrypted signature. I won’t get onto a soapbox about state-implemented public-key encryption here. Suffice it to say: there is a better way.

So now it’s Friday. Two sets of processes are crunching along. We’re going on holiday tomorrow and taking a laptop in case there are any last minute emergencies. We’re hoping to come back to green ticks, or thumbs up, or whatever measure solicitors use to tell you that everything is going to plan.

I have some recommendations for culture this week:

HAPPY! is messed up. It’s also the best thing Christopher Meloni has ever done. It also stars Patton Oswalt, whose stand up show Annihilation remains the only stand up show that has made me cry tears of sadness. Catch both on Netflix if you’ve got it.

Our little community seems to be expanding apace. Keep your eyes on that twitter hashtag. My favourite from recent weeks has been this, from Nour Sidawi:

View at Medium.com

That’s all. Next week will see beaucoup d’un lovely city, and hopefully a call from my new team. I’m so excited!

S02E13

Technically underemployed

Warning: fire-hose of consciousness coming at you below. Buckle up.

Monday/Tuesday

I didn’t have to get up for work today.

Instead, I read my sister’s dissertation. I made a spinach and filo pastry pie and, in trying to do both, emptied a quarter of a pot of cayenne pepper into it.


In the afternoon I went into town for a final interview with a government department. I don’t know how it went. I am naturally pessimistic, but at the same time there were points when I had to say with honesty that I didn’t know the answer to a question.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing, but I made sure to ask the panel for the answer. I’m hoping “ignorant but curious” is better than “ignorant”, and almost as good as “knowledgeable”.

I also did a code challenge which I’m still puzzling over and playing with between lectures. I only had 45 minutes, but I can still remember it well enough that it’s been on my brain all day¹. Like a brainworm.

It was modelling a checkout. NEVER HAS A CHECKOUT BEEN SO COMPLEX

Immediately after that I had a call from a recruiter, who said I had good feedback from an interview last week. I think I’ll have another interview this week, but I find the velocity with which recruiters want to move off-putting. I appreciate that what they’re selling is almost certainly a perishable good, and I think it’s fair to say I’d struggle selling an opportunity that other people were trying to sell as well.

All the same. Let me have a couple of hours to think about things?

The sticking point I’m finding with many of these calls is that everyone, as far as I can tell, wants a full-time worker. There is not as much provision for part-time work as certain sources would give credence.

I had a surprisingly enjoyable technical interview with a multinational professional services company, so we’ll see how that shakes out.

Wednesday

Hitting that refresh button on my inbox. Day three of purposeful unemployment and I’m climbing the walls, when I ought to be revising. I’ve secured a second interview tomorrow — Thursday — with an interesting organisation that is probably the most diverse I’ve ever had the good pleasure of applying to, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for that.

A good friend of mine thought of me and passed on details for a young company looking to do data analytics: an exciting prospect so coffee has been organised, again for tomorrow. If I’m going into town I may as well go into town after all.

I’ve also received confirmation that I’m through to the second round for the multinational company, which means 4–8 hours of unpaid labour. It’s a bit frustrating, and deeply problematic. I’m entirely able to do this work because I’ve got no job, but for someone working a full-time job with dependents I imagine it would present a massive barrier.

It is an interesting puzzle that has been presented to me, though, so I will do it — even though it feels like a betrayal. Capitalism puts you in this sort of spot: principles are all well and good, but won’t pay the bills.

Thursday

Was offered, and accepted, a new position. Had a Nepalese to celebrate.

I’m trying to be cool because I don’t “have” the job until various things have been done. I also hope that my new manager is cool with these notes. If not — well, we’ll see.

I’m starting in June.

By the way, the offer was only the second proudest moment of the day. This most dad of all dad jokes was the number one:

I got him. I got him good.

Anyway. It was a day full of stress and minor anxiety as I fretted about turning down interviews. I am a hoarder, and that includes opportunities: I’m not as bad as Chidi Anagonye, but making big decisions is something you don’t really get daily practice in, unless you’re somewhere senior — which of course is the last place you want people who are practising making decisions.

To choose is to destroy an entire universe where I make a different choice. I can’t deal with that on my conscience.

Friday

Made quiche. Struggled with Java. Didn’t do the code challenge for the multinational. Did watch Thor Ragnarok. Feeling like this:


Java

I am learning it. I am aiming to finish the course this week and be awarded a shiny certificate, saying that I completed a beginner-level course in Java in French. I’m really genuinely excited about adding it to my resumé, but I’m currently stuck on modelling an employee.

Update: programming is the absolute most frustrating-slash-enjoyable thing in the universe, so I’m glad I’ve accepted a job to do that.

¹ If you give me a task and 45 minutes, it will haunt me forever that I didn’t complete it in that time. You can — and the interviewers did — stress that it’s about the decisions I make, about the way I communicated, and in absolutely no universe, discovered or undiscovered, can this task be completed in 45 minutes, by anyone. I’m still going to come away frustrated I couldn’t complete it.²

² Can anyone spell “massive overachiever with imposter syndrome”?

S02E12

Radical freedom


Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a lot about being free. To whit: it sucks. This week I’ve mostly thinking about the fact that freedom is approaching me like a freight train.

Monday was a bank holiday, so I tried setting up an ISA. I failed. Bank websites are horrible. I’m completely bemused by how any institution with such clear and predatory competition can continue to be terrible. I also began revising hard for my Java exam with this very excellent free course from Coursera. It’s in French, which is good because I definitely need to improve my French.

I also read “Big Ball of Mud”⁰, which is an excellent paper discussing how beautiful software projects become jungles of spaghetti code¹. I really wish I’d read it sooner, and I’m putting it on my recommended reading list along with Boiling Frogs and the actual Agile Manifesto.

On Tuesday I had a very interesting interaction about IR35 and being a contractor. I’m considering it as part of my ongoing search for people who’d like to rent my brain, and that short conversation turned into a wealth of resources about being a contractor. It seems like an interesting life, but also fairly cut throat. If any readers would like to tell me why it’s the best idea/worst idea ever² I’d be indebted to you. I will of course write about it, unless I’m contracted to do work I’m not allowed to write about. In which case I’ll write about how nihilistic and existentialist media is³ currently in vogue as a reflection of our despair at the world.

So yeah, keep your fingers crossed for discussable topics

Ooh, and I offered to help Sam Villis make stickers which is an exciting little project. They’re going to say “Be generous”

At work I caught up with what happened last Thursday and started preparing for the objective setting meetings for my two Fast Streamers. I’m gutted I’m not going to be around to manage them through to the end of their postings; having had managers swap on me in posts I know how disruptive and frustrating it is. Leaving feels like a dick move.

I don’t have anything pithy here. It does feel like a dick move, and I don’t like it.

On Wednesday Spotify, a Swedish company, floated its stock on the New York Stock Exchange. To celebrate, the NYSE proudly flew the Swedish flag outside its building.

But before it did that, it flew the Swiss flag. Let’s not wonder for too long how or why this happened, but instead focus on the INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC INCIDENT that ensued.

I made some progress on an extraction-transformation-load project at work. It’s the kind of puzzle/problem/coding challenge that I absolutely love, so I’m trying to carve out time away from managing people to do this. Balancing this when I’ve still got new(ish) starters is tough as — at my insistence — I have a lot more contact time with them for them to identify problems. As they settle in I think they’ll get better at coming to me with issues, but at the beginning I want to be proactive and identify problems early. And then visibly act on them. Because:

Still, that cuts down on the coding/developing part of my job. I am currently finding that wanting to do both is hard to find in the job market: people tend to want one or the other. On the other hand, I’m finding it very hard to balance at the moment so maybe I’m the one being unreasonable.

Thursday is my non-working day, so I made approximately five kilos of ragu over five hours and it was absolutely flipping delicious. I also had a phone interview for a software developer role; way more junior than I am currently but the team seem really keen on personal development and mentoring. I’m really up for that: I like learning new things more than I like big salaries or fancy titles.⁴

In the afternoon I went to see the aforementioned Sam and we talked about fonts. Talking about fonts is brilliant, and if you like fonts⁵ then you should watch Helvetica. I refuse to link to the trailer because it’s terrible. The ratio of how bad the trailer is versus how good the documentary is can’t be understated. It’s terrible. Fine. Fine. Here it is.

90 SECONDS OF THE SAME, HORRIBLE, REPETITIVE NOISE. Oh look, Helvetica. There it is again. And again. And — yes, I get the point. Now we’re going to find out wh-oh, nope, it’s just another example. GET TO THE POINT.

My point, by the way, is that fonts are cool, and mint tea served in Grind at the Whitechapel building is exceedingly minty, and sometimes seeing a friend and talking about fonts segues into reflecting on what you’re actually doing. And that’s an analogy for weeknotes.

On my walk home a recruiter contact of mine got in touch, and since his building was on the way home I swung by. He’s in the Heron building. It has horrifying, outside facing, glass elevators. I hate them. I can feel my intestines trying to escape via my throat in an attempt to wind themselves around a nearby post and arrest my movement every time I approach them. But since his office is on the eleventh floor and I don’t do enough cardio to make that feasible, I clenched my everything and rocketed upwards.

Seriously, this gives me the willies.

He’s found a job that would suit me almost perfectly — and that sounds like the kind of coaching/developing role that I’m aiming for — and he’s going to Poland this weekend. We chatted about the role and I made a request for vodka. Keep your fingers crossed for the safe delivery of both.

I cannot undersell the gloriousness of this vodka. It is exquisite.

On Friday I chickened out of telling one of my Fast Streamer’s managers that I’m leaving soon, and I’m still trying to work out why. There was a perfect opportunity, and yet for some reason I didn’t. I’m going to think about why I did it over the weekend. It was weird. I still feel weird about it in a way I can’t really define, but I think it’s linked to what I said above: saying it out loud confirms I’m thinking about myself more than them. And that feels like a dick move.

I got confirmation for another software engineering role, although this is with an organisation that’s got mixed reviews from people I’ve spoken to. I’m waiting to reserve judgement, but it’s making me nervous before I start.

This weekend I’m finishing up coursework about a travelling salesman and a project called “Philip Hammond and the Temple of Glom”.

Like I said. Nihilism.

⁰ This is my new band name

¹ And this is our first album

² No equivocators please

³ Media is singular, don’t @ me

⁴ Although I confess I would very much like to become the world’s second Head of Data and Search

⁵ Weird-o

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

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.

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