The year that was, 2022

Well, it's the end of 2022 and I've got an odd feeling. The last few years I've started by expressing relief that the year is over. For the first time since 2015 I'm not going to write some variant of "thank goodness this year has finished". It has been a difficult year at times, but overall I think it has worked out well. I have certainly (once again) worked far too much, and I ended the year with COVID but overall I give this one a passing grade. But what did I actually do other than work? Well, let's find out. It can't all have been Elden Ring and Deep Rock Galactic (again).

• 12 posts on this blog (13 including this one) - down on last year, but eighth consecutive year of a post per month
• Another year of the Year in Pictures - eighth year and we're up to 39 photographers
• 316 Github contributions - up from last year
• Wrote RPG Sword Forms application
• Wrote a simple guide to upgrading to Rails 7 (which apparently GDS used - gosh)
• Replatformed all my apps when Heroku stopped doing a free tier (guide to come!)
• Completed Elden Ring
• Beat Malenia, Blade of Miquella without using any cheese or summons (I'm proud of myself...)
• Lots of reading
• A full year of solid exercise with a personal trainer
• Established a good physiotherapy regime
• Made some recruitment videos - this is work, but the important point is my video editing is now smooth enough to focus on the output rather than having to look up every last interaction
• Went on a date!
• Another year of the Saturday morning exercise class
• Built a LEGO Infinity Gauntlet with lights
• Learned to carve letters in wood
• Summer baking and BBQ cooking classes
• Made a picture for my Mum
• Yet more instagramming
• Loads more photos on my Flickr stream
• I also turned 40, which included a lovely trip to Pembrokeshire

Resolution count - 5.5/10. Down on last year, AND I worried I'd made them too easy!

It has been an odd year. Very tiring in places, and once again I've worked far too much. I didn't feel I'd done anything and my resolution count is going down, yet the list above is much longer than usual and I don't think I've scraped the bottom of the barrel pulling it together. So I'm clearly doing things, just not the things I intended. I can live with that, but I would like the things I do to have a greater impact on me so I actually remember them. Interestingly, unlike other years, the above list is spaced across the year rather than being loaded into the last three months so maybe I've achieved something approaching balance? I also didn't have three months off work and still did Many Things so clearly I've started recovering some energy to be able to do them.

Speaking of balance, we should definitely take a quick look at work. I spent nine months as a contractor before formally being appointed to my first full director role at Macmillan Cancer Support. After 2021 that was definitely a good boost for my self-esteem! I also helped set up the new version of the London Data Board, then got myself appointed onto it. This coming year, I need to grow into this new form of work - looking ahead to decide what I need to learn to be better at it.

Looking forward to 2023, I'm going to write the same thing I write every year. I need to spend less time working and more time living. Last year I stated my intention to do more creating "things" and the above list shows I made a decent go at that. I want to do more again in 2023 - ideally maturing those skills I've been picking up the last few years so I can be more excited about the things I'm making. I also want to get out and about somewhere - I'm not great with travelling off my own back so maybe I can change that.

More than this, I want to revisit what I wrote at the end of last year's summary. I have starting pulling together my sense of wonder and continuing to restore my zest for life is going to be the main focus for next year. Hopefully this will also be reflected in my writing on this blog too. Less of the "this is hard" and more of the "this is interesting".

2023. Bring it on.

Well, I had COVID

It has been a quiet month. Nearly three years after the world first shut down, I finally caught COVID. I'm writing this as a reflection for future-me just in case I ever think about getting it again.

The short version is that I don't recommend it.

The week before was a long, tiring and frequently cold week that ended with some very lovely but early morning / late night festivities. So come Friday, when I was feeling rough and exhausted, I figured that I needed some sleep and relaxation. I even cancelled my Saturday morning exercise so I could sleep in. Good choice since I woke up that Saturday morning with my skin and joints screaming, my head swimming and a bad reaction to the cooler air outside my duvet. That was a bad day, where walking the 10 paces to the kitchen was hard work.

Fortunately, the fever broke overnight and the next day I woke to find I could move more easily, although even with a heavy dose of paracetamol I was barely functional. My COVID tests had all dried up, so I dragged myself out to the local pharmacy for another batch and some flu medication - a 15 minute round trip which utterly wiped me out for the rest of the day. Got that test in and yes - positive. Sigh.

Thus began a week of sleeping and basically going nowhere other than a short walk around the block every few days. Coughing to the point of struggling to breathe, throat pain, photosensitivity and brain fog were the main symptoms along with utter exhaustion - it has been a long time since I've had so little energy. Each day consisted of a few hours awake, mostly spent watching things on Netflix and playing some videogames. Food was less than ideal - eating whatever would stay down did involve a significant increase in pizza and chocolate...

There were some positives. I watched all of Sonic Prime (enjoyable), Dragon Prince series 4 (good after a terrible start), and Wednesday (great atmosphere). I completed all my Christmas shopping (online). And as I got better I also wrote the first pass of an engineering strategy - although I haven't read it back so there is a good chance it is a terrible product of a malfunctioning brain.

It took about a week of being basically incapacitated before anything started to shift. There was a step change in the exhaustion, which stepped from "basically unable to move" up to "short distances are achievable with enough planning" and the coughing improved, although continued. However, the positive tests continued so I remained isolated.

Also, it's worth remembering that getting hold of a doctor to be signed off work is not easy. I called my surgery on the first day I was ill and the first appointment was thirteen days away - notably quite some time after the five days self-certification.

A couple of days into my second week, around 9 days after my first positive test, I had my first negative test. This was a huge relief as it meant I could go and sit in a coffee shop and actually see other humans from a distance. The short walk did, of course, completely exhaust me requiring an extended lie down and a snooze when I got home but it did help me stop going slowly mad. Symptoms continued to improve slowly, but didn't go away. The worst was the brain fog. Living alone and doing very little meant I didn't notice it so much, but any time I spoke to someone I realised that talking in complete sentences was a challenge. I'd frequently start talking and forget what I was going on about.

By the end of the second week I had returned (gently) to remote working. A few hours a day Thursday and Friday were enough to completely exhaust me again, leading to a weekend mostly asleep. The following week of lighter hours was another step better, but still struggling with some photosensitivity, ongoing exhaustion and brain fog. By this point I'm also having complications with fading fitness - three weeks off exercise and eating rubbish is not good in general. More significantly, any kind of illness like this triggers depression in me and the time of year (dark, cold and mostly wet) don't do much to counter it - so in addition to not wanting to get up because ill, I'm also not wanting to get up because depression. Of course I'm also still taking a heavy dose of paracetamol.

I'm really glad that the first week back was the run into Christmas and so quieter than it could have been otherwise. It also means that as I write this I'm holiday so I've been back off work for a few days recovering again. I'm certainly feeling better - my brain is clearing and the rest is very helpful. However, I'm still low on energy and coughing extensively. I'm hoping that next week (in the new year) I'll be well enough to start some proper exercise again and begin the slow rebuild of fitness. Either way I'll be back at work, trying to fight through all the email I missed while off.

Worse than this is the effect on my mental health. Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows I suffer from bouts of depression, and while right now I'm feeling ok I also require very little self-motivation and I'm "ok". I'm worried about myself for when I go back to work and have to push myself again, so I'm going to have to keep a close eye on myself and ensure I'm embracing sources of energy and joy as well as pushing through the energy-sinks and also the ripple effects into other parts of my life, such as maintaining exercise and cooking properly.

I appreciate this hasn't been a very interesting post, but I did want to document how I felt through this. I certainly didn't have the worst COVID, but I did seem to have a nasty dose of the simpler version and I'm not keen to go through this again. So, future-me - stay well.

Another year, another post about fire

My favourite annual festival is bonfire night. It's an event which knows exactly what it is, hasn't really been corrupted by commercial interests (cough Christmas) and is very local - that is, it's done at a village level and keeps its small-scale feel. It also comes with fireworks and a bonfire. I love it.

Every year I look forward to heading to my parents' village for their event (living in a historic city, there isn't much taste for huge pillars of fire ... go figure) and every year I take a load of pictures of the bonfire, trying to capture the flickering tongues, the heat and the evocative nature of a pile of burning wood in the dark.

This year, we had the fun of the bonfire going up rather quicker than expected resulting in a huge cloud of steam and smoke washing over the crowd then a fireball which was gloriously hot before the marshals hurriedly made us retreat, pushing back the safety rope.

For the photos, I tried a variety of approaches. I wanted to capture the moving tongues, so shooting a fast moving target, but it was all at night so I needed to be mindful of light capture. This year I got best results with a high shutter speed, to freeze the movement, and then countered the limited light by pushing the ISO up to very high levels to pick up everything I could. Obviously the flash was of no use and there was only so much I could do with a wide aperture.

I was pretty pleased with the results, and I always enjoy the technical exercise of trying to figure out how to set up the camera to take these shots as effectively as I can.

I also took a few with my phone, which went with a similarly fast shutter, but instead of pushing the sensitivity just applied AI and fixed it up in post. I think. Pixel photos are somewhat magic.

Anyway, here are the results:

And if you're interested, this is last year:

Which was set up in a similar way, although using less of the extreme settings.

Maybe one day I'll figure out how to capture fireworks.

Give me a task OR a problem

I was speaking to a colleague recently who was feeling very anxious. They were trying to lead a major organisational process - something well within both their job description and individual capability - but they were feeling awful about the whole thing because of a strong sense they were not doing the right thing. We dug into this, and as far as I could see, the problem came from feeling a general expectation they own this problem, while they were also trying to meet their delivery goals in specific ways. So wide responsibility with diminished agency.

When in a position of authority and / or leadership, we need to be constantly alive to the effect of our actions on those around us. When delegating, that means trying to cleanly delegate either a problem OR a series of tasks. Both approaches have their place, but going somewhere in between creates all manner of anxiety.

Delegating a series of tasks means telling someone exactly what you want. You retain the ownership of the problem and tell other(s) what you need in order for you to solve this problem. Importantly, that means you're are retaining responsibility for the end product and various aspects of quality control along the way. No matter how clear your definition of the task (an entirely separate post...), delegates will need to check in to find out if they are doing the right thing. Certainly, you can expect the individual to use their initiative within those tasks - essentially you've delegating a series of micro-problems - but you are retaining responsibility for bringing it all together and need to make sure the person receiving the tasks doesn't feel that responsibility.

This approach is best used for your own direct deliverables, or in short-term scenarios such as "we need to achieve X by next week, so I'm taking direct control of this process". The trade-off here is that you're keeping direct control at the cost of putting more of your own effort into the process. You get to have ongoing input on how something is achieved and retaining the definition of done, at the cost of having to spend your time doing this - something which can be very difficult dependent on your own availability. It withholds agency from those receiving the tasks so the more senior you are, the less you should use this approach as you've presumably appointed clever, able people around you and want to make use of their talents.

The other option is to delegate the problem. In this case, you set out the direction and the parameters for success and let the individual work through it and solve the problem themselves. This approach empowers the individual, giving them an opportunity to stretch themselves and learn. It also frees up your own headspace, because someone else is now handling this problem and you only need to check in with them from time to time to ensure they have the support they need. However, the trade-off here is that you're empowering another at the expense of your own direct control. You don't get to dictate every step of the process, which means you need to accept that they might do things a bit differently to how you'd have done it. Likely, this doesn't matter but it can certainly be difficult to let go. The emphasis on you is to create an environment where the person can flourish and feel confident that (assuming a decent level of communication to keep aligned) you will support them.

I'm labouring this point because it's all too easy to end up taking the middle ground. Trying to put someone in charge of delivering something, expecting them to make the decisions and for it to happen - but expecting it to happen the way you want it, and them to make the specific decisions in your head. Obviously this is impossible - and just as obviously, nobody does this deliberately - but it happens all the time and for the person on the receiving end it creates an environment where it's impossible to perform. If they are any good they want to do a good job, but in this case the definition of "doing a good job" is being hidden. The point here is stunningly obvious, but can cause severe anxiety.

However, this is not just something for the leader to consider. The individual receiving the work should also be aware of their situation and force some clarity. What are the expectations here? If it seems I'm being given tasks can we please talk clear definitions of success, and about regular check-ins? Or can I own this problem, and solve it my own way? In which case, back off please leader and let me do my thing. Especially if this problem is something that my department / job title should own.

When this is decided, both parties needs to work to the chosen paradigm. If it's a task, the leader needs to get the information required to move things forward, but shouldn't expect the delegate to take the lead of the wider problem. If it's a problem, the delegate needs to take proper ownership and not ask so many questions of the leader they are making them do all the thinking. However, the leader needs to support the delegate. Whichever, both parties need to keep sufficient communication to ensure things are progressing the right way, and all parties can work with confidence.

By this point, we're leaning into the territory of our personal relationships with our colleagues and that is a very different post. I've certainly worked with people I can trust to work very much at arms length, and others I've needed to spend more time directly supporting. The same is true of my relationships with The Boss, at different times in my career. Like so many things, confidence (and better mental health!) comes with clarity more than anything else.

Built to last

I spent the week in Pembrokeshire, exploring the coast and visiting various old and ancient places of interest. There was a bishop's palace (around 200 years old), a reconstructed Iron Age village built on the site of the original settlement (2500 years old) and a Stone Age floating stone dolmen (5000 years old). These are all astonishing examples of technology from the past. Did you know there is no smoke hole in an Iron Age roundhouse because it created a smoke ceiling that was useful for smoking meats and then the tar deposited as the smoke worked through the thatch helped insulate and keep insects from nesting in the roof? The design of the house was such that with a correctly sized fire, the smoke ceiling stayed well out of the way of the inhabitants. This created a beautiful ecosystem using all parts of the fire and this was 2500 years ago.

On the other hand, we can't build an HR system that works properly.

One way I like to expand my thinking about the tech industry is by learning from other walks of life. Tech is a very young industry and while some of our challenges are unique, many have come up time and again and we really should learn from others before attempting to reinvent the wheel. Usually I look at modern industry like manufacturing, supply chain logistics, beer brewing, food packaging, game development, forging and so on but sometimes we can gain inspiration (or at least be humbled) by looking much further back.

So let's look at Pentre Ifan, the neolithic dolmen.

The top stone was originally a larger rock which was split by craftsmen and now weighs around 16 tonnes. It is balanced on the tips of three other stones, high enough for a fairly tall person to walk under without stooping. In person, the effect is actually quite eerie - it looks like a strong wind will knock it over. What we see here is very simple, yet elegant design and a very high commitment to engineering excellence in order to execute it properly. It was believed to have been winched up a little at a time using ropes and pulleys, with supporting boulders put in place each step. So iterative construction with solid testing at each stage (with failed tests resulting in a 16 tonne boulder falling on the workforce...). They had to create supporting structures (the smaller boulders), which were later discarded when no longer required.

They put in the work to make this last (last 5000 years, as it happens). It even has a small environmental footprint since the materials are locally sourced. So is this pinnacle of sustainable development?

Well, not exactly. That means building for the future - creating something simple and well documented so we can maintain and make use of it going forward.

Thing is, we can't maintain or extend this dolmen (ignoring the protected status for a moment, and the sheer horror of using a 5000 year old monument to build "something else"). For this to be useful, we need to know what it is for. Is it a doorway to a tomb? Some kind of temple or altar? The real problem is around knowledge transfer. Where is the original documentation telling us the core purpose with notes about how it was built? The fact it predates writing in Britain by around 3000 years is no excuse!

Plus, while the design is elegant it is not intuitive. If it were, we'd be able to work out what it does and how to use it. More UX work required here, I feel. Whatever it was, it has outlived it's original purpose and has clearly missed its (admittedly impressive) maintenance cycle, which would have had it replaced by a modern equivalent a few thousand years ago.

This post needs to end. Somewhere in all the above silliness are some solid points, honest.

Pentre Ifan itself is incredible.

Can we actually do sustainable working?

Ok, time for another rambling post about mental health.

Over August I took a week away from work, and I came back feeling so much better. I was away from Bath for a few days, and the change of pace and change of environment was incredibly refreshing. I felt ready to face some of the challenges that only a week before were making me want to hide, and for the first time in ages I didn't feel a sense of gnawing dread at having to face work again.

This is all great, and we all know about the healing power of a break from work - and why it is so important that the break is a proper, clean separation and not just answering emails in a less convenient way. A break always make me feel better, helping me recharge my batteries and replenishing energy to face the next days. However, this time, the change was dramatic enough to remark on it, which doesn't seem right. We talk a lot about sustainable working being an important part of a caring workplace culture but a properly sustainable working life should not really require holidays to recharge. Holidays should be a positive extra, enabling new experiences and life learning, not just a break between work-marathons to collapse and pull oneself together.

I've had seen this fatigue growing in me over the preceding months, and I can see it trying to grow again now I'm back. I am paid to work a certain number of hours a day, and (accepting that my role will require some flex in this) I should be able to enjoy the other hours in the day. However, if I am getting to the end of the day knackered and just looking to crawl onto a sofa and close my eyes that is not giving me any sense of life outside of work (and if it gets worse, it can knock on to bad behaviours like takeaway food replacing cooking, etc). This, for me, is where "sustainable" really kicks in.

Of course work is going to be stressful at times - that is pretty much a given. Also, I am certainly not currently in a strong mental state. I am very definitely still recovering from burnout and this has made me more vulnerable to mental exhaustion and less able to shrug off personal slights that wouldn't have phased me in better days. However, these things are amplifying existing problems, not creating new ones. Things that have been draining me for the last few months would also have done so previously, just less so. 

So what can be done? While I believe in trying to create a sustainable work environment, I also believe that many places of work are more about talk than delivery, and are unwilling to get under the hood of the problems. Often this is because it is the leaders who are talking about better working conditions, while creating the unsustainable environment. Where I am now, the leaders do indeed talk about sustainable working and energy ladders aaaand I'm one of the more senior leaders in my department. Damn. Better do something of that "modelling behaviour" thing.

There are infinite variations on a sustainable working environment, but they must address two core points. First, the number of hours worked. People working long days and weekends are not working sustainably and the obvious question is why is this needed? Are they under pressure from the organisation? I know I do not deliberately push anyone to working antisocial patterns (quite the opposite, actually) but do I create an environment where they have to?

This is a more difficult question. I know I work long hours at times (with no good consequences - see all the above) which sets a bad precedent. I know I need to model the behaviours I want to see from those for whom I have responsibility. I also know they have far too much to do, as do I - I don't work long hours for fun. So the problem is volume of work against capacity? At least partly - and for this we need to aggressively take an axe to the department "to do" list. We've already pledged to do this, and the hardest part will be gathering the information required to enable the conversation properly. This is, of course, more work...

The second point is the activity during those working hours. My current boss likes to talk about energy ladders and energy drains (disappointingly, not energy snakes). To put it another way - things that make us interested / excited / give us an energy boost vs things that sap our will to live. There will always be things to do on both sides, but the balance is very important. For me, I'm realising that my balance has been horribly off for quite some time. I'm also finding that things I've previously found ok are more draining at the moment.

So I need to cut back on the things that make me miserable, whilst maximising the happy. Fortunately, my job is supposed to be all about strategy and future horizon scanning. I enjoy this. Unfortunately, we've been mired in tactical decisions and putting in the foundations to enable The Future. I usually don't mind this, but at the moment a typical working day is emails, then unbroken meetings for 6 hours, then more emails asking why I haven't answered the first emails. No matter how interesting the meetings (and some are great ... some) I find remote meetings exhausting and full days of the things are lethal. I can feel this affecting me. So I've decided to make some changes. I've blocked out a lot of my diary to get things done. Now people are complaining they can't get hold of me, but it's better than complaining I haven't done something.

So will this help? Can I make my own working life sustainable, let alone help anyone else? That remains to be seen, but I am sure that pushing away from "survivable" is the right thing to do.

Why hire a Head of Community?

One of the hats I have worn during my career is "Head of Community" for Software Engineering. A few years ago, these were rare roles but these days we're seeing them pop up more often. Since we at Macmillan are currently recruiting for one, I thought I'd write a bit about why they are a Good Thing, despite the rather strange mix of requirements. This post is not sponsored!

So, you have a Software Engineering group. Why should you hire a Head of Community? 

If you've hired developers and other technologists, you know they are hard to bring in and retain. A typical developer role last to about three years before they move on and when they do, they not only take their professional expertise they also take all the knowledge of the organisation's technical estate and business problems that has accumulated in their heads. This is expensive for a variety of reasons and surely we can do better? 

Your organisation has almost certainly been describing itself as proudly investing in its people (everyone does, whether it's true or not). If we care about people, why are any initiatives done as extra work by people who have a heart for that kind of thing? Why are these extras the first thing to go when time is squeezed? Why is there not someone with clear space to think strategically and holistically about essential problems like careers, recruitment, support, mentoring, and so on? These often are shunted off to organisation-wide initiatives, which is good as far as they go, but these areas require specialist knowledge born of experience to be credible.

A Head of Community role brings together professional expertise (and another senior technologist never hurts) with the mandate to improve the lives of the technologists in their community. Happy people are less likely to leave, which obviously is a good thing for retention. They can devote time to finding diverse sources of recruitment and reaching people who might otherwise be overlooked. Furthermore, getting the basics in place across the whole organisation saves considerable effort in recruitment and performance management and enables a consistent experience for all those working there.

Fundamentally, Head of Community roles are about putting our money where our mouth is when we talk about valuing people.

Ok - you're a lead developer, or an engineering manager or some other technical leader. Why should you consider being a Head of Community?

Personally, I see it partly as giving back. Everyone with experience in technology has had to gain that experience somehow. We've all had our first job, made our junior mistakes, and so on. This is not an easy process for most. Technology is a famously hostile and toxic field, and some have it far worse than others. And yet, technology underpins most of the modern world. There is no shortage of work - there is enough of a shortfall in people to do the work that the government set up the Institute of Code to look at the problem. But Computer Science graduates struggle to find work. Why is this? Why can't people get into an industry crying out for workers? 

As an industry, we can do better. We must be thinking about the next generations of technologists. It's as important to the sustainability of the industry as making sure our code is well written and understandable in the future. Roles such as the Head of Community roles are created to give space to enable specifically this - to grapple with problems like "how do we recruit juniors in a safe way?" or "how do our people grow?".

Maybe this isn't enough - you'd rather be writing code. Understandable, but what about in five years? Ten? Do you want to be hands-on your entire career? If not, what is next? If you want to progress into senior leadership you need experiences beyond the hard technical. People-oriented roles such as a Head of Community enable broader learning, dealing with HR challenges and issues, line management and operating at a wider scale through people. However there is still a requirement for technical understanding, so do not require stepping entirely into a different career. For someone who wants to be a Director or CTO, this kind of experience can be extremely valuable.

If all this sounds interesting, a reminder that we're currently hiring a Head of Technical Community at Macmillan.

Kind helpfulness

A short muse ... what does kind helpfulness look like? I've been pondering this question as I've been thinking about how to help people develop. When someone is struggling, there is a natural tendency to help shoulder the burden. Sometimes that is the right thing to do, but is often a tactical solution and in the context of work is that helping the individual or myself? It's the shortest route to making the problem go away, and has the highest likelihood of getting the result I want. But there is the cost of the individual losing a learning opportunity, or worse feeling disempowered.

I started consciously thinking about this some time ago when playing some Dark Souls 3 coop with a friend. The Dark Souls games are famously difficult, and are pretty much defined by learning and overcoming challenge. However, someone dropped into our game and ran around killing enemies, pointing out secrets, and generally paving the way to a very easy experience where we were tourists in our own game. He was certainly helpful, but he completely robbed us of challenge, accomplishment and learning our own way through the game.

This comes up all the time in leadership. Someone asks for help with something complex like recruitment, so I step in and then they don't learn for next time. There is a learned helplessness in teaching someone to reach out for the solution instead of working through it and for technologists there is a longer term rot from not letting individuals own (and solve) non-technical problems, as this is where we struggle to get experience in the day to day job which then blocks moving into more senior roles. Very much "teach a man to fish" territory, although of course it needs balancing with not leaving people helpless and floundering.

That said, maybe we should lean into the Ron Swanson method for mentoring? "Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man and fishing is not that hard".

Of course not directly, but there is a point in there about being kind along with helpful. Kind helpfulness assists someone overcoming a challenge, but doesn't remove the challenge entirely. And the kind helpful leader makes sure where possible there is space for this process to happen - it takes time and safety for people to learn, after all.

Short post this month. It has been a difficult one.

 

Fun with email

I have a love / hate relationship with the cliche "work smarter, not harder". On the one hand, as a technologist it forms the core of so much of how I approach problems. "I don't like this weekly task" leads to "how do I standardise this to think less?" then "now it's standard, can I automate it?". Then, much later "how does this script work again?" but I'm going to ignore this last step.

On the other hand, when it's said out loud it tends to be by people who are responsible for pushing too much work on to the individual, then sidestepping said responsibility when it comes time to actually help them out. Often with a side-dose of being too stupid to actually provide the "smarts" to lighten the load.

With this in mind, I want to think a little about collective efficiency, and how we can all help each other out when it comes to email.

When I was a starry-eyed, enthusiastic developer at the bottom of the social totem pole, I learned to hate the "I have a reckon" emails. Typically, someone would dash off a half-thought about some kind of feature development in about 2 minutes and send them over. I would then have to spend half an hour working out what they actually wanted then another couple of hours writing some kind of considered response (usually attempting to shut down this idea). That's the afternoon gone, immediately. Thanks, important person.

Now I'm In Leadership I try very hard to avoid this kind of email. I try to create an environment wherein I can answer my own questions, without bothering people who have better things to do than answer my questions. If I DO need to ask someone something, then I do my best to ask a clear, answerable question to help the victim / recipient spend as little time as possible on me.

So - linking to the original point about working smarter. Everyone knows that at work you aren't working alone, you are part of a team. It is not you that needs to be efficient - it is the ecosystem. If you're highly productive, but you're wasting your colleagues' time, energy or will to live then you are causing a problem for the collective. This is true from large actions (eg how one manages a project) through to the tiny (eg sending terrible email).

But this is more than simply unnecessary email. When one sends an email, the context is all in the head of the author. If the recipient has to spend time actually working out this context, that is time thinking which is going to be far longer than time spent writing. Even worse, if it is forwarding a conversation thread so the recipient also has to read a multi-step conversation between two people with little to no context. Oh, and of course the thread contains 30 page attachment too. Because why not at this point.

So, the original email is "what do you think?" - 20 seconds work on the part of the sender. The recipient can take half an hour or more getting through the information to come to the answer "err ... about what?". Now, consider that the recipient is actually five people. That time multiplies up very quickly.

Imagine instead that the original sender spent a bit more time summarising the content and asking a clear question. Maybe a whole hour? That's a long time to spend on an email, but this is one hour with five two minute responses for a total of 70 minutes from the wider "work ecosystem". In the original example, it's 120 minutes from the ecosystem as well as five rather irritated recipients. This is without mentioning that tying you up for the time you are writing a better initial email prevents you causing damage anywhere else...

So that's email. Now let's talk about booking meetings without causing diary conflicts...

(From Oracle Calendar - screenshot from back in 2011 - apparently I have been irritable for a long time)

"Gosh, that is an inane post" I hear some people crying. Yes and no. While the email example and numbers are clearly fabricated, this is a real problem. I've written before about writing well being a highly important skill and this is a variation of my usual comments, going beyond "clearer communication" into efficiency. As leaders, it's important to consider how much damage our actions can cause without any intent or us even realising. Our role is to empower our people to be the best they can be, and being considerate of their time and helping them be on the front foot is an important part of this.

I believe someone once wrote "do the hard work to make things simple"!

Speaking the right language

We've been deep in discussion around the way for a technology department to talk to the rest of the organisation - going into enough detail to engage in a conversation, but also keeping it interesting enough that they want to.

We've got a drill, and we think it will help. It's a Bosch, developed to the highest standards of German engineering. It is a hammer/drill with an 18V brushless motor, able to deliver over 110Nm torque with 0 - 31,500bpm and variable speed and power with a precision clutch. Also, good news! It only weighs 1.6kg (without the battery), has KickBack Control and can connect to the Toolbox App for customisation. And our other tools are also made by Bosch, which helps. Actually we have a few drills - we could go into detail about the others too?

Of course what they actually WANT is a hole, measuring 15mm diameter, created on the correct day...

It is no secret that we technologists speak our own language, and people talk about "learning the language" in order to understand the technology department. However, it is really our responsibility as technologists (and especially those in positions of leadership in technology) to solve this problem. We need to go to our colleagues, not expect them to learn our world. In tech, the thing we're delivering is a piece of technology and so when we talk about our work it is easy to end up talking about that thing. But the technology is worthless in a vacuum - we are working on it about it because it solves a problem and it is in that context we should be engaging with others. That is where the common language sits, and we can do the "translation" ourselves. We should talk about what the best hole looks like, rather than how we drill it.

This isn't to say all aspects of technical service providing should be hidden. That approach makes it very hard to talk about the complexities of maintenance or incident management - areas often ignored by the wider organisation. But even in these spaces we can talk about the problem space rather than the solution. We can talk about the desire for uptime, and online engagement patterns as ways to make deployment and incident resolution matter in context. We can talk about the organisation's need to be secure and be able to easily implement new business processes as context for explaining the need for maintenance and upgrade work. Again, stepping into the business context when communicating outside the technology department.

Furthermore, it's important the technical department shows its hand so decisions are made transparently, else the technologists end up hidden away in a shadowy corner making decisions nobody understands. This is not good for trust, as technology becomes something that is done to the wider organisation, rather than part of collaborative problem solving. Building open trust is important, however it can also put technology at a disadvantage - the greater need for transparency can easily end up morphing into a greater need to justify activities compared to other departments.

Discussions about technical decision making should be something that is available for those who want it, rather than the barrier to entry for any engagement with the technology department. There needs to be a clear and positive division between "you need to know this bit" and "you are welcome to engage with this bit if you want". This is especially important in this increasingly digital world where "engaging with the technology department" is analogous to "delivering any major project". It is our responsibility to make sure we are positive partners.

Couple of disclaimers - the drill / hole analogy is not mine, it has been around forever. And I know very little about drills.

Learning at the right time

A few years ago I wrote about practical life lessons learned from playing Dungeons & Dragons. Many roleplaying systems handle the advancement of character skills with a level system. Over time your character gains experience and when you reach a set threshold you gain a "level", which is a collection of abilities and skills. Your choice of character class defines the set of abilities you gain.

So far, so simple. Many years ago, I was playing in a game in which we were forced to enact a dangerous escape in a spaceship. My character was the most competent pilot in the group, which meant he had enough knowledge for the ship to not immediately drop out of the sky. A few very lucky dice rolls, and a suicidal ramming of another ship later and we limped out of the gravity well, escaping to hyperspace in what was left of the ship. Much fun was had, and I gained a level - which I used to improve my piloting skills. Immediately AFTER I needed them.

That scenario never came up again, of course.

In my experience, this is very common in roleplaying games - spend the time learning skills for a scenario that has already occurred. It's also something I see all too often in work. People learning about change management immediately after a change, for instance, or about HR processes immediately after struggling through a difficult piece of casework. In technical delivery, learning how to use a frontend framework properly after releasing an accessibility nightmare onto the public or how to monitor your service on $cloudProvider after implementing their new and shiny features and deploying using it.

I've done this myself many times. So why is it so hard to look forward and learn skills ahead of time? The broad-brush problems should be very predictable. Technical strategy should show which skills are going to be needed in the next six months and longer. Moving into a management role makes change management and some kind of HR process work pretty much guaranteed. For me, there are a couple of problems at play.

Firstly, management work can be far too reactive. More than that - being reactive is actually very seductive as it feels far more productive. It isn't; but the feeling of being needed because you're putting out fires is highly addictive, especially shortly after coming from a discipline with a strong way of defining productivity such as development. I spent most of my early days after moving into leadership trying to force myself onto the front foot so I could actually think ahead instead of running around fixing problems and if I'm honest I didn't really want to make this change.

Secondly, even when there is a chance to look forward we often don't actually have a chance to act on what we see. I know that dedicating hours to studying various aspects of management and reading supporting books will help me, but I certainly don't have the time to do it without making serious compromises in what I have to deliver or just consuming my non-working time. Neither of these solutions are acceptable. Part of this is about having any spare time during the working day, and to study there is a need for some quiet reflective time which is particularly difficult when everyone is trying to reach you for whatever Opinion is needed at that time. But also, I need to give myself permission to study and acknowledge that this is part of the job.

What should we expect from leadership? There are times of difficulties and change, but in general I think it's reasonable for people to expect some form of considered development from their place of work. In these enlightened times, we've moved past "bring them in and use them up" as a management style (insert correct cynicism here) and certainly in a knowledge-based job like development, constantly building skills is essential for an individual's future, as well as of benefit to the organisation. Not to mention retention and in-house skill development is far more cost effective than hiring and firing in this sector. This leads straight to an obvious point - we should be building organisations which value learning, and that means making time and expertise available. For those of us who talk about taking on apprentices and other "learning" roles (which done wrong can destroy someone's career as it starts) the point is that much stronger.

So what is the key thing to learn here? Well, it's important to look forward rather than backwards when deciding what to study. Beyond that, it's a well-rehearsed refrain at this point. Scanning the horizon is fundamental to a successful leadership role. Acting on what one sees there is essential. Both of these require time and carving out time is hard. However there is an extra thought here - giving oneself permission to find and spend time on learning is an important step, and being able to do so is part of the organisation's culture. This is important for anyone, but especially in a position of leadership where one can have a strong voice setting that culture and enabling others to grow.

Upgrading to Rails 7

I run some simple Rails applications which I keep upgraded. I recently upgraded Ruby and Rails versions and since it's upgrade season, I'm making a note of my experiences ready for the next application I do, and on the off-chance it can help other people get started. And a reminder that I do do technical things occasionally, honest.

To note - this is a very simple Rails application, so only covers the basic gotchas I experienced. It was an app originally written in Ruby 2 / Rails 5 and in this iteration is now being upgraded from Ruby 2.7 / Rails 6 to Ruby 3 / Rails 7. The code is stored in a repository in Github, with CI done both via Github Actions and Codeship and deployment to Heroku.

Ruby upgrade

Good news! The Ruby upgrade (2.7.2 to 3.0.3) caused no problems at all, although I did need to update my Codeship config to remove the explicit installation of Bundler in my setup script.

Rails upgrade

I made use of the Rails upgrade guide - in particular I bounced the version of Rails in my Gemfile from 6 to 7 then ran bundle exec rails app:update which introduced the usual ton of rubocop violations but also created some migrations acting on some tables which didn't actually exist.

These were ActiveStorage tables so I needed to create them with bundle exec rails active_storage:install then rearrange the migrations to get them to work (ie put the creation migration before the modify migrations). I probably could have eliminated the new migrations since I'm not using this function, but it seems there are other references to these tables. It looks like Rails expects these tables to exist, and the lazy option was to create it and be on the standard path. So I was lazy. Those migration do not include timestamps, so I had to add those to appease the linter.

Second show-stopping problem - Rails 7.0.2.1 was a trap. It turns out there was a bug in ActiveSupport which manifested in a variety of different ways. For me, it stopped almost all automated tests working. It was reported and fixed quickly but did manage to cost me a chunk of time trying to figure out what was going on... Anyway, the simple fix is to use Rails 7.0.2.2 instead.

Now fixing some deprecation warnings. action_cable has been renamed to actioncable and this will escalate to a breaking change in Rails 8 so this needs updating in app/assets/javascripts/cable.js.

Also, I was getting references to using older (Rails 5.1) CSRF protection behaviour. There are a load of defaults which are version locked in config/application.rb and these can be upgraded with config.load_defaults 7.0 as per the upgrade guide.

Locally, this was all that was required however when I deployed to production, the heroku build failed at bundle exec rake assets:precompile. Uglifier needed ES6 syntax enabling, with config.assets.js_compressor = Uglifier.new(harmony: true) in config/environments/production.rb.

And that was it! As I said, a very simple application so I'm sure I avoided much of the upgrade pain but I've noted my experiences here to help others get started.

All these changes are captured in a pair of pull requests:

• https://github.com/tomnatt/year-in-pictures-rails-helper/pull/88
• https://github.com/tomnatt/year-in-pictures-rails-helper/pull/89

Recovering a sense of wonder

For the last few years I've started the year with a post about how January is bad and I want to reboot the year. This year is going to be different. While I could certainly be having a better time (as could many) I'm facing 2020 round 3 with a sense of cautious optimism.

I spent a lot of time over the Christmas period reflecting on what has changed for me over the last few years and one thing that I think I've lost is my sense of wonder. That childlike sense of feeling the magic in the world, revelling in something small but infinitely complex, and enjoying the feeling that I can explore something and there will always be more to learn.

I say lost - I think I prefer to think "misplaced".

This isn't the kind of thing that I can analyse and come up with a formula for change. It is not something that will come from deliberate action. That said, while there isn't a "solution" here, some deliberate steps can lead in the right direction.

On reflection, what I'm really missing is what comes before - that level of contentment and general feeling of peace when I'm open to the world and new experiences. There are several active things I can work towards, but at the heart of it for me really is personal space. Odd to reflect on after nearly two years of being pretty much entirely alone. That space is better called "free time" - those moments when I don't have some pressure on me to do something. Pressure from real work, volunteer work, paperwork, need to write a blog post, put up pictures, etc. In those free moments I can pick something up (literally or metaphorically), look at it, turn it over and actually experience it. I can engage with something in more than a facile way before rushing off to the next thing, and I can take the opportunity to see the beauty and wonder in it.

So this year, I'm going to invest time carefully. I'm going to try to only do things I actually want to do, minimise the things I have to do and avoid being pushed into doing things I don't want to do. I want to keep my time precious, so I can put more space around the things I enjoy - and by that I mean take the time to enjoy things properly. I'd also like to actually finish some things. While I don't want to be ruled by todo lists, I do actually get something from completing a task and putting a line through it. There are some things on my "want to do" list that have been there waaaay too long and it would be nice to make some progress in the areas I've identified as things I actually want to do.

More than anything, I need to relearn how to Enjoy the Thing. Through that I think I'll start the see the beauty in the world again and that is the route back to wonder I feel.