Week 166: Magnesium
November 6, 2021
- I have stopped being the tech director for FT.com and the Apps. I did that for seven months covering shared parental leave. I set out intending to avoid any major disasters, that was really the only goal. During this time the major thing that I did was write a funding proposal for an extra £2 million on top of our approximately £8 million, in order to invest in and shore up FT.com’s architecture. That didn’t happen in a vacuum, there were lots of people involved, sharing ideas with me, but together we got some more money and from now we’re going to start spending it to address some very hairy bits of our architecture that as a technical leader make me feel anxious, but as an engineer make me feel excited about the challenge and the possibilities.
- Now Anna has been back for a week and she’s already had about five brilliant ideas that make me think “yikes how many brilliant ideas did we miss out on in the last seven months?”. Best not to think about it.
- I have resumed the couch to 5k. The time it takes me to run 1km goes down each time I do a run, and Lachie gives me a strava kudos for every one.
- We finished Ted Lasso season 2. It wasn’t as good as season 1.
- In a very predictable continuation of “things just keep happening”, baby C now has a vomiting bug, also picked up from nursery. He has passed it on to Lachie, but so far nobody else has gotten it.
- It’s unclear why I keep doing this to myself but on Friday I ran another engineering team social and this time I decided to post everyone something. Because everyone likes post, right? Every time I run a large team meeting there is this excruciating part where I have to organise the people who show up into groups, and it’s just me faffing with google hangouts or slack or whatever, this time I decided to lean in to that part by posting everyone a zine. It had a wordsearch, a colouring sheet and a “join up the fact with the person” activity. I also sent sweets and a sticker. So while I was faffing, the team could try to work out which Customer Products engineer was on Bargain Hunt.
- After the faffing was done (and thanks Rowan for helping with that too) we played “Through the Keyhole” but with photos of people’s desks, and I got to gently roast everyone for their set up (my dream job). “This person has magnesium tablets… who on the team seems a little magnesium deficient?”… “This person uses coasters”. Actually everyone is a little magnesium deficient apparently. Something to post out for the next social.