Spitchell

Week 8 2024

It's a bit of a red flag to me that when I come to characterise my week it's heavily skewed towards work. I feel like my personal life (my real life?) ought to be more… prominent?

Work

I'm not 100% comfortable with the concept of "good stress" but I can't think of a better way to summarise week 8 at work.

There was a non-trivial sprint goal, a day in Endiburgh for Firebreak presentations and a somewhat bizarre cookie modal bug in production.

Firebreak

I've been pretty unhappy about firebreak over the last few weeks, but the feedback session went a long way to justifying it retrospectively. I'm still not convinced that we have clarity on the week's goals or execution, but there were definitely some good and (to me) unexpected outcomes.

These were teams of 4 - 6 people working, often, outside of their discipline. They didn't have access to all the skills they might normally expect, and they were attempting something ambitious in a short timescale.

The volume and quality of the work produced was really impressive. I believe this is a result of the talent and creativity of the staff being channeled by the working conditions.

Not having time to worry and overthink. Not having SMEs available to feed in. Not having multiple contexts and workstreams to juggle. Getting It Done is the single, most important thing, and that's what's missing from our normal sprint cycle.

Good things

Life

I'm struggling to find a way to say it delicately, so here it is: the kids have been hard work this week. Every time we get into some unreasonable conflict I can feel my energy bar dropping like a stone. It's like I'm in a pokemon battle getting hit with a super-effective attack.

Maybe I'll illustrate that.

Anyway.

Good things

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