NC

Week Notes #5

Posted on . Tagged with: week-notes.

  • Some things are a blessing in disguise: we started the week blocked on our current piece of work, which after the hectic week previously really helped,
  • This was because we were blocked on everything as the feature we’re working on depends on an API, which depends on the release of a service rewrite and the next (and final) bit of work is the same as we’ve already done. We could certainly do more but also achieve less, it’s a tough one but was the right call,
  • Tuesday morning was entertaining: the combination of a strong headwind and last weekend meant cycling was the worst it’s been in a very long time and I barely could get up the hills,
  • I finished the first pass at some tooling I’m working on to improve my maintainer workflow. It allows you to check out a contributors’ pull request in your local clone, whilst maintaining your ability to push changes back to their branch. I need to write it all up yet and give it a spin for a couple of weeks to check it works well but so far I’m pretty pleased with it,
  • This week, I started on an bike interval training regime as I try and build up my bike fitness. Unfortunately, this means I won’t be running again for quite a while (trying to fit both in is …not practical),
  • On Thursday, I overzealous in merging some work I’d been working on without getting it QA’ed. It did, of course, break. With it being both paired on and test-driven, I came at it with a lot of confidence that it’d be fine. Our bit was, sadly the requests it makes goes to a service not quite as reliable,
  • I enjoyed reading Andrew Hao’s High Output Management for (Non-managing) Tech Leads this week. I find a lot of leadership/management articles useful in a consulting context (although, often with a bit of a leap and with the passage of time). As a consultant, I’m always on the look out for work of high leverage (especially when this means ignoring fun but not-valuable work). Similarly, the questions to ask around output indicators are helpful (e.g.: “What do you care about seeing?”, “What worries you the most about our team?”)