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Shutting Down Blogging CMS
Ditching the CMS I was using for this blog is actually quite liberating. It means I don't have to spend any time trying to bridge the feature gap for what I need for a basic blogging CMS, and could focus on other projects. For example, I spent this evening working on "awstools": mainly coming up with a new name for it. I really can't use "awstools" as AWS is a trademark. Continue reading →
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Had an excellent design session meeting this morning, but after 1.5 hours of talking, my voice is absolutely horase. Might need to consider improving my speaking skills and possibly even my voice strength. A microphone or headset might also be helpful.
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Moving my work journal over to Micro.blog.
That blog has been bouncing around CMS’s for a while now, and there’s always one or two things I’ve found lacking. It got to the point where I’ve began building my own CMS, and although it’s closer to what I’d like for this work journal — and includes a few features that other CMS’s lack, like private posts — I’ve been thinking about what’s missing, like image hosting and syndication, and realising that spending the time to build them would just be time I don’t spend on other things.
And honestly, the reason why I’ve been unhappy with all the other CMS’s I’ve tried is because I was hoping for something which easily supports posting short updates with the occasional long post… something similar to Micro.blog. Well, something like that already exists, and it’s called Micro.blog.
So I’m going to do the “kill your darlings” thing and try having this journal hosted here for a while. Sure it will mean that I don’t get things like private posts (which were honestly the only unique feature about that homegrown CMS) but I can probably make it work. At least there’ll be one less distraction.
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Trying my Pixel 6 caseless for a little while. It was starting to interfere with swipe gestures which was getting a little annoying. Might be some other benefits with no case, such as being able to carry a physical notebook again.
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Went to see Hamilton at Her Majesty’s Theatre last night (a little ironic, I know). I’ve seen the Broadway recording, so I didn’t come in “cold”. But it’s nothing compared to seeing it live. Absolutely faboulous. Highly recommend.
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How is it that I can make a change in one area of an Android app, like add a new fragment, and a completely unrelated area of the app (the DB models) decides to stop building correctly? Sometimes it feels like the whole dev. environment is held together with masking tape.
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I’ve turned off analytics for this site. It’s been more than a hinderance than anything else. It got to the point where I actually stopped visiting my own site just to keep my visits from showing up the data. How crazy!
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The Feature Epic (Featuring the Epic Feature Branch)
Here’s what’s been happening at work with me recently. I write it here as an exercise in how I can learn from this. They say that writing can help in this respect so I’m going to put that logic to the test (in either case, just having this documented somewhere could prove useful). We’re working on a pretty large change to the billing service powering the SaaS product sold by the company I work at. Continue reading →
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Given how often I’ve been typing it recently, you would have thought I’d know how to spell “Los Angeles” by now.
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Hmm, the folio keyboard I’m using for this iPad is starting to flake out occasionally. Sometimes when I unfold it, the iPad doesn’t recognise it and throws up the on-screen keyboard. Restarting the iPad seems to fix it, so I’m not sure if it’s a battery age thing. 🤔
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Got offered a free sample of a “lamington scone” at the bakery I went to today. Tastes pretty much as you’d expect. 😋
Good to see that there’s still room for innovation in scone technology. 😉
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Spent all frickin morning in meetings. Hardly got any work done — ironically the type of work the business is hounding me to get finished ASAP.
Going to have some lunch and then I’ll be turning off Slack notifications so I can keep my head down. 👨💻
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Woke up to my devices being unable to connect to the WiFi. It must have gone out during the night somehow. First time that’s happened in a while.
And yes, turning it off and on again fixed the problem.
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End of sprint ceremonies today. Could have gone better.
We failed the sprint quite hard. Not entirely our fault: we actually got a lot done, but we couldn’t deploy them until we got the go ahead from management. This meant we couldn’t mark the tasks as complete and get the points for the work. This bought the mood down somewhat. The retro was also a bit… sombre? Maybe sombre’s not the right word but there was a general feeling of things not going as well as they should.
Mixed this in with some concerns about a feature we are responsible for that was buggy and was blocking a release of another teams that had to go out today. It’s never a good feeling when you had to roll something back. Much less so if that thing is something that no one really has a good grasp on. Lot of trying to work out whether it was even safe to rollback.
This feature has been a huge pain for us for the past several weeks. It’s one of these things that is so fiddly, never quite finished, always getting kicked back to the devs because the QA team has found something else that’s not working quite right. I don’t fully blame the team for this either: it was handed to us from another team with the belief that it would be relatively straightforward to finish, which proved not to be the case. Also not fully appreciated is the amount of time it takes to become familiar with a piece of code that you have had no real hand in developing yourself.
I think me being a little hands off on with this feature was a slight mistake. There were other things that I was focused on — and I’ll be honest: it’s hard for me to keep my focus on something that I felt was less important than the thing I was working on. I thought that letting those in the team most capable with doing the work, and just letting them get onto it, was the best approach. I try to take this approach with most things: I know for myself that I can’t stand having someone breath down my neck while I’m working on something. I don’t know: maybe I should have had more of a finger on the pulse. Just a light one, so that if others need to know what’s going on, I could answer them.
Yeah, I’m loving squad leadership. 🙁
At least the demo went well.
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I’ve been finding myself using Day One for general note taking, like ideas, things to remember, etc. I think the reason is because it’s on all my devices, and it feels a bit like a permanent record. Google Keep feels more like a scratch pad. Shopping lists, etc will remain there.
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🎙️ No Mercy / No Malice: All Ears
First one of these newsletters that I actually listen to in podcast form, and I really enjoyed it. Happy coincidence that the subject today probably explained the reason why.
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🔗 Google loses two execs: one for Messaging and Workspace, another for Payments
Two thoughts I came away with after reading this.
The first is an attempt to understand how Google can think that they can put out anything — the version of US Google Pay app for example — and expect people to flock to it. I no expert, but I’m not sure why the physics of user adoption should be any different if you’re a multi-billion dollar company. People will use your software if it’s good, and they won’t if it’s not. And if you force people to change their habits because you want to completely throw out your existing version for “reasons”, you’re giving users an opportunity to choose whether they want to even continue using your stuff.
It happened to me when they shutdown Inbox. I had the opportunity to change to something else, which I did: Fastmail. Since I was forced to change my habits, I may as well have changed them for the better.
The second — and this is probably obvious — is that the a good indication of the health of one of Google’s app is how often they rebrand it. Since it’s launch, Gmail has always been Gmail. I can’t even name what Google’s messaging app is called now.
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I’m personally a bit of a fan of unit tests (at least when it comes to writing code for work — for my own stuff… not so much), but I can see why people are put off by it. Apart from being a little tedious, it really does slow development down.
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The amusing thing about turning 37 today is that it felt like I’ve been 37 since maybe September last year, so all in all I don’t feel so bad. Just need to ride that feeling for the next 12 months. 😏
(Not helping is that I missed-type 37 as 38 twice while writing this post).
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I’m finding that more and more of daily workload in my job is less software development and more about making sure a team of people can get software develop. I’m guessing that this is a natural shifting of responsibilities from being an “individual contributor”, as they like to say nowadays, to being a team leader of sorts.
I wonder if there’s a way to arrest and reverse this trend.1 🤔
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I mean, without completely blowing up my career. ↩︎
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Arriving Late
I’m going to have to tell my boss today that the stuff my squad has been working on is going to arrive late. To much needs to be fixed or reworked, and there is one or two things that have been missed alltogeather. I think the biggest problem is that the thing we’ve been working on got into testing far too late — only a few days before the deadline — meaning that there was no time left for fixing things. Continue reading →
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Just got a flu shot. I asked about getting a second COVID-19 booster but I’m not in any priority group so that was a no-go unfortunately. Even so, glad I got the flu shot while they are still free.
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Here’s an idea for a competitive sport: a race to see who can first merge two Git branches that have diverged significantly. The difficulty can dictate the number and types of conflicts that need to be resolve. Can also spice it up by breaking or not including unit tests.