I've been sympathising a lot with Dina Asher-Smith this week - trying to do any sort of vigorous exercise while you're having your period is quite lethal sometimes, argh.
It's really annoying when you're on a really good running streak, getting consistent times and even better times each time you run the route... and then... you have to miss that week because your body just won't cooperate with you. Oh well...
I've also been very pulled towards reading poetry (maybe my brain just wants comfort and nice things to think about)
I got two books:
"Outlandish" by Jo Clement. I saw a poem in last week's FT and I really wanted to read more from this author—the poems have a very pictorical quality, and mystery and ambiguity, I feel.
"Gold from the stone" by Lemn Sissay. I found this author via a poem on the Underground, more exactly Dei Miracole, and I loved the rhythm of the writing and the curious alignments. I liked it so much that I wrote it down on my phone quickly before the next stop (where I had to alight)!
Some favourite lines so far:
"Secrets are the stones that sink the boat. / Take them out. Look at them. Throw them out and float."—Lemn Sissay
"Printer ink costs more per glass / than champagne, so I read poems / off my phone instead. [...]"—Jo Clement.
I've also been doing some more organising of pictures locally, using Digikam. Maybe I should write a longer post about it, but in the meantime:
I like that it's open source and available for multiple operating systems.
I didn't want to "marry" my photos to using the macOS Photos.app for that reason—I value portability and being able to move my data over the years to any operating system I like.
It doesn't have the most beautiful interface but it is functional enough. It's probably more functional than Photos.app so...
I haven't tested it yet but it also seems to be able to take a GPS route and automatically geotag pictures. This will come in handy as I like documenting the evolution of places and it's so much easier when you have geocoordinates :-)
It is also the only software I found who seems to be able to deal with network shares!
It can do face detection and duplicate detection. Exciting! It helps in sorting out pictures.
So far, I'm a big fan of it.
At work:
I wrote more code in Go! This time it was a small end-point in Go, although I am a bit reluctant to take the full credit as we were pairing A LOT to help me figure out things quickly, as this job needed a quick turn around.
Then I broke it, trying to refactor it.
Then we paired and tried to figure out what was wrong. Which we eventually did!
The good thing of breaking it is it created a very good opportunity to learn about the logging infrastructure and also to talk about the reason why it broke and how to avoid introducing similar bugs next time.
Moral of the story: many.
learn the idioms of a language and use them sooner rather than later.
don't try to be too clever (don't fight the idioms, they exist for a reason).
learn how to log things at the right level of verbosity sooner rather than later.
learn how to test and mock things in a new language sooner rather than later, so you can make changes with the confidence that you won't introduce bugs... or you'll introduce less bugs.
curl is underrated
It was a very nice experience to figure this out in company of this supportive team!
I also wrote a lot of tickets. Some people dread "seeing tickets come up", but if you decompose the work into suitable chunks and write good descriptive tickets, they make things so much easier for people to work together. (Of course you need to understand enough about the problem that you can sequence the "solution" :-)
It's going to sound a bit bananas but I enjoyed debugging the end-point with VSCode. It makes for a refreshing change from the "debugging by var_dump" that used to be the solution when I built back-ends with php. (I am sure things have evolved a lot on that front, don't @ me).
I hated Notion a lot less this week, I guess because I barely touched it. I instigated using Google Docs to write and share some documentation, and wow, that was night and day: being able to clearly set specific editing/commenting rights, a UI that works for multiple people editing and commenting at once, etc...
A Slack rant: the ability to create "pseudo channels" with direct messages between more than 2 people is nowadays' flavour of the root of all evils. It's so easy to do this, and it's also so bad for visibility:
People are worried that they'll "spam" a channel if they ask about XYZ in a given channel
Thus they "optimise" their audience, and create a smaller pseudo channel that involves just a couple or three people for that question about XYZ.
Later a variation of this group of people create another pseudo channel, to talk about XYZ too. A portion of the people are involved in the two pseudo channels by now but not everyone has seen the same questions and answers.
With each new pseudo channel about XYZ the chances for misunderstandings and confusion increase (so does my anxiety as you get questions and clarifications... multiplied)
What is a better solution? Post everything on the appropriate public channel, tag the right people that you think should be involved, and use threads (rather than opening multiple private conversations). Advantages:
You can link to earlier conversations
People that join later (the discussion or the company) can search them
People who might know better than the people that you tagged might jump to help you (bonus help!)
People who would like to be aware but play no active role for now might just read the interchange and be more informed
If someone is not interested they can unsubscribe from threads or from channels (or they can even leave them!)
I don't blame people doing this; it's a very reasonable behaviour to not to want to annoy people in principle. It is quite natural for me to "work in the open", but I worked in open source for a few years so I default to public discussions because I know they're more efficient on the long term.
Obviously, don't discuss HR or personal grievances on a public channel!!!!! ESPECIALLY if you're a manager!
Perhaps there should be some sort of Slack etiquette (slackette?) training for maximising collaboration... there were some Mozilla "remoties" tips and tricks that could be a good starting point, but as far as I remember they did not cover Slack as we were more into IRC by the last time I read those.
I'm just going to work one day this week as I'm going on holidays. I hope I don't get to break many things on just this one day, ha!
Speaking of, we're growing so much that I wonder how many new faces will there be by the time I'm back... (btw we're hiring... just saying!).