Decided to try writing weeknotes again, this time following a bit more of a structured approach inspired by Andy Callow.
What would you have liked to do more of?
Contributing to the opportunity overview for one of the potential projects I’m involved in starting up. I think I can make some really valuable contributions to writing the overview document and it’s important work but other bits of urgent work keep getting in the way.
What did you learn
Attended a webinar on finance at work, learned about profit and loss sheets, balance sheets – what they are useful for, how to read them as well as more about our budget process.
What did you enjoy?
Hammering out some documentary evidence for my leadership course. I’ve got so much going on but often don’t take the time to reflect and write it down. I should do this little and often.
After working so many hours in recent weeks, taking a half day on Friday to celebrate Hugo’s birthday gave me a nice bit of mental space from work. A half day Friday tricks me into believing I’ve had a three day weekend!
What did you achieve
Cleared my review backlog to zero – I’ve failed at keeping on top of this work in recent weeks, which is frustrating because I know it has a big impact on our cycle time, I don’t like to be the cause of blockages.
Worked on our draft project proposals for our next financial year. It feels like my role this week has mainly been challenging projects and ideas. I’ve dismantled one project we won’t have time to finish this year rather than putting it forward to the next – negotiated reallocating a third of the work to other budgets and moved the rest to our backlog. Our budget for technical debt / platform engineering has been under-spent this year, what has been spent has been done rather ad-hocly. I’m determined we should be more organised in future, and have kicked off a quick consultative process to decide on what we should be prioritising.
Worked with a colleague from another team to refine the UI they’re working on, somewhat hamstrung by the underlying API not being expressive enough, but I think we’ve iterated to the best solution, considering.
What are you looking forward to next week
Planning a show ‘n’ tell for the feature flagging infrastructure I built recently. We had merged some features we then wanted to postpone launching due to covid-19. I quickly designed and built a feature flagging framework and and applied it to these features, whereas in the past they’d have been reverted and potentially bitrotted. I’m now keen to explain to the wider development team and product owner what we have and when we should use it. Just sad with it being a short week that I won’t get to run it until the week after.
Introducing a new colleague to a high level view of our system and getting them started on our new starter training project. I think this will make a real boost to their knowledge of our platform and give them the ability to take on a wider range of tasks.
Interesting Stuff read/consumed:
- Martin Fowler’s encyclopedia of branching patterns we are very much a feature branch shop, trunk based development has interested me lately though and i’m interested to see how it could work for us.
- Being Glue by Tanya Reilly has struck a bit of a chord. I do sometimes get a nagging feeling that I spend more time on glue work than might be wise.
- I started reading The Last Emporox, the third installment of Scalzi’s interdependency space opera
Dean Sas 