Good Things
Distant friend is near
A very good friend has come back to Scotland from Brazil to help out during a period of family illness. Putting aside the sad reason for their visit, It will be good to see them and might even allow some on-to-one time, which we don't always get when trips are scheduled and itineraries are calculated and meetings are homogenous, mixed-company affairs.
Less time in Stardew Valley
It's been fun, but I'm losing interest in this game in a way I think is healthy. Although, TBH, it might have more to do with the finicky control stick than my level of maturity. There are some Hall Sensor sticks being delivered later in the week, which might start a renaissance if they fix the problem.
More Portal 2 with K
Speaking of finicky controllers, I got a taste of K's stick-drift woes when we played more co-op this week. It's really the worst game to happen in, when you're in a tractor beam together over a void, trying to drop hard-light bridges in the right place to block turret fire and the next portal in the right place.
Anyway, still good, and those replacement sticks are en route.
Free coffee
Got chatting with a neighbour on my way to Grain and Grind, and they told me I get a free coffee when I buy a bag of beans. WAHT?!
That and I filled up my loyalty card, so the next bag is free. Sweet.
Read some
I spotted Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas on a library shelf and I'm slowly making my way through it. I haven't read a new one of hers in years, apart from those kid's books that made me uneasy because they were too mature for K at the time.
Yesterday I went to the Library just for a place to go that's away from my horrible kids, and I started on Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem, another book by another of my favourite authors that I've never read.
Drew some
I sketched out some comic pages from notes on my phone. They're not great, but they don't need to be. I'm hoping when I ink it some kind of Quentin Blake scribbly loose magic is going to happen. Lol.
Played some
I picked up the guitar and spent 10 minutes hacking away at Nothing from Nothing by Quasi. It's not much, but I played! I also bookmarked a jazz chord video which, who knows, maybe I'll get around to at some time.
Lacto-reprieve
I got sad after seeing something alarming in my cauliflower and carrot fermentation jar but it turns out it's normal for garlic to go green or blue during lacto-fermentation. Phew!
New pants
I got sick of wearing uncomfortable boxer shorts half the time, so I just went to Morrisons and bought some new ones that fit. Turns out that's the kind of thing you can do when you're an adult.
Work
Research insights
I don't think this was actually in week 19, but I forgot to mention it, so I'll chuck it in here. I talked to the senior member of the Research Insights team and got a glimpse into their struggles when it comes to creating reports.
On one hand, it kind of put the kibosh on my idealistic notion that we can just generate reports in HTML using markdown and a microsite.
On the other hand, it clued them in that they can just put reports on the website as a downloadable word document, which is precisely what the accessiblity analysis recommended. So, that's good.
Being a good colleague
As well as cross-silo communications, I'm also feeling self-congratulatory about insisting that someone be brought into the Design System fold who was (accidentally, I'm sure) being left out of the conversations. It appeared to pay dividends immediately.
I also extended a general offer to "take heat" for another colleague whose manager's style I have certain reservations about. I doubt they'll take me up on it, but hopefully as a gesture of solidarity it will help them feel supported.
Rebrand released
The rebrand came out, I realised in time that I hadn't merged the entire rebrand branch to develop and avoided much wasted time and personal embarrassment. Ancillary sites were updated on schedule. Everyone seems happy.
Forms
We got onto this forms thing in the current sprint. Sometimes I feel like my whole working life revolves around forms. Our old marketing platform is defunct as of 16th May, so we need to build a new middleware application and integrate it with the new marketing platform's requirements, then rebuild the forms to target this new interface by release day on the 14th.
I say "we" — my contribution has been fairly small, but it's been good working closely with the backend dev and getting our ducks lined up. By late on Friday afternoon we had things submitting with properly formatted property names and the submission page redirecting on 200 responses.
Yesterday I sat down to get a head start translating the biggest form over and realised that it's much more work than I thought it was; I've been telling the PO it's a 5 minute job, and it's more like half a day because there's a ton of conditional UI behaviour I'd forgotten about.
Anyway, I've broken the back of it now.
Governance
At some point I need to air some grievances about the way this team's been operating over the last few sprints. There's been a pattern of unreasonable conditions since the CAP features were rushed out IMO, and it's a big part of why I've lost faith in the process and haven't bothered much with the ceremonial stuff.
Look at this sprint, for example: we're actually running two sprints in parallel, if that even means anything — a 1-week sprint taking us up to an interim release for the rebrand which occupies the first half of the larger 2-week sprint which culminates in a release to get all of our forms replatformed, working right and seamlessly cut-over to the new platform 2 days ahead of the old platform being switched off. It's bordering on farcical.
So I can't take it seriously when we're supposed to have a retro or there's a call out to analyse "what went wrong" with the CAP release like, a month ago. If we're expected to engage with these agile working practices in any kind of a serious way, then there's got to be some sort of high-level agreement between the business and the delivery teams.
I'm actually fine with chaotic working environments where you just wing it and firefight and everything's best efforts because that's all it can be. But I'm not fine with doing that and pretending that it's something else.
Conclusion
Well, I'm going to wrap it up there because it's come to my attention that the new version of muOS has been made available, and I'm keen to get it running on my XX+.
END