Week 203: Pleasantly adversarial

July 23, 2022

There are some very shy baby newts in the pond.
A couple of greater spotted woodpeckers visit the bird feeder daily. Those guys are nuts for peanuts.
Obviously it was very hot this week, not really in Brighton though. Got a lunchtime sea swim in this week which was incredibly nice.
This week, 52 weeks from the last time this happened, a juvenile seagull fell off the roof and then its parents started kicking off. After last year, I knew not to go into the garden to investigate. While the parents were circling overhead I watched a fox pounce on it.
My driving lessons continue. I’m on about 20 hours now. I have a pleasantly adversarial relationship with my driving instructor. I’m OK at driving but get overwhelmed easily. Very good at parallel parking though.
Matt Jones did a lecture back in April which he has written up here and I found very interesting. I liked the FEAR/HOPE/DESPAIR/GREED grid as applied to climate tech so much I copied it into my notebook (lol, dork). I’m really excited to see what someone like matt (one of the smartest and most charismatic people i’ve ever worked with)(sorry matt I hope you aren’t reading this) does at somewhere like Moixa.
I’ve started a book club at work. Since I moved back to principal engineer-ing after my stint as tech director I’ve decided to JFDI with more things, especially around team cohesion. Weeknotes in the API rationalisation team is one thing, and this book club is another. I did the basics: picked a book I thought would be sensible for the team, checked in with someone in the PMO that they would reimburse people for buying the book, and then let the delivery managers know I had set up a book club and some of the engineers in their teams were about to get real smart 🧠. 23 people came to the kick-off meeting, and since the chapters in The Pragmatic Programmer are discrete treatise on a particular topic, I hope we’ll be able to sustain a fairly robust crew.