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Reflections

The last few weeks have been … Odd? Insightful? Enjoyable? The fact that I haven’t cobbled my weeknotes together points to the month being busy, at least. As with all useful practices, writing about your own thoughts is often hardest just when its most useful. So I’m going to aim for a write-up that balances brevity with truth, as much as I can with Minecraft noises in the background and a quick journey West to prepare for…

To describe the last few weeks would be something along the lines of: I realised that my mind is inherently busy. I realised I’m in the patterns I’ve built up for myself over the past 6-7 years. I realised that there are different ways to see why you do what you do and that we can stick ourselves to particular _why_s as a form of identity. I like the pressure of doing things certain ways now, but at the same time I feel like I can also relax a bit and give myself permission to relax.

I finished reading Transitions and one question triggered quite a deep response: "What can you stop doing?", or what do I no longer need to do? This threw me, in that it made me reassess my relationship with coding in particular. I’ve been identifying as a "coder" for a while, I guess because it gives me a sense of purpose and of modernity. But coding is also quite scary currently – I feel like quite the beginner again, among all the new frameworks and languages which develop rapidly. A bit of me was holding on to that definition as coder, and then feeling slightly inadequate in the face of all this learning – which I don’t necessarily feel much passion for, as it stands.

However, when I dropped the idea that "I must be a coder", a lot of pressure dropped away. It allowed space to think about what I do want to do – the more creative aspects, perhaps, experimenting, chaos, and organising little projects for myself, setting Things in motion. Ironically, this has always been what I’ve done, looking back. I’ve always found coding without an end goal to be fairly tiresome, and technology has always been a mean to an ends.

So perhaps I was sticking to this idea of being a "coder" for some other reason. Some sort of continuity in career or – more likely – a confidence that I can bring in income because People Pay For Code.

There are at least 3 reasons for doing what you do: Money, Duty, and Interest. Those are subjectively of different importance, depending on your upbringing, but I suspect I list those in ascending order for me.

Over time, I’ve also become increasingly interested in the reasons for code – that is, broader systemic design. And learning code doesn’t fit into the excitement of learning about the system as a whole, not just yet.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time on other things, more in the "Interest" realm. I’ve been:

• Attending webinars on sustainable computing – one on measuring cloud computing, by the Green Tech South West group who seem really nice, and one on venture capital funding (which might not be for me)
• Writing and rewriting my own offer to people, as a way to practice describing it to people when they ask me what I do, or want to do
• Learning related skills by working on my own systems. I’ve been figuring out structures for energy reports, tools for power and load assessment in Linux, plugins for optimising WordPress performance, sampling energy use daily, etc.
• Picked up markdown-styles which took 5 minutes. Also spent a while looking at Google’s Lighthouse tool which is daunting, useful, and enlightening.
• Hanging out a bit more in the ClimateAction.tech Slack to continue conversations

Chatting on Slack, I kind of accidentally invented a new job title for myself. On one hand I’m not too fussed about titles. But when you’re adrift and figuring out how to describe your role, it’s actually quite useful to imagine yourself ‘as something’. So I have this internal title of "Energy Designer" at the moment, which just sort of clicked when I wrote it. I’m not convinced it’s very helpful for anyone else, but it gives me an overall idea, and I can imagine specific subsets of "energy" which are more useful, such as "website energy", "team energy", etc. I like that there’s an overall, systemic, generalist aspect which I can then break down as needed.

Other stuff I’ve been up to includes:

• Taking my mind off things by asking around to see if any parents wanted tech support and ended up cloning a broken disk drive full of family photos, cracking open the back of a 5K monitor, sorting through some old laptops and testing a hulking great LaserJet printer.
• Ringing up HMRC for the first time, to register as self-employed. I tried doing it online but it got "messy" and, depsite a small wait, was so much easier and friendlier over the phone.
• Had a chat with IT4ARTS as part of my Writing Our Legacy position. IT4RTS is a subgroup of the Company of Information Technologists](https://www.wcit.org.uk/). It was nice to hear about livery companies, which I hadn’t come across before.
• I also chatted with Liz and Sam from Tech Resort in Eastbourne who are doing some simply amazing stuff and providing a bunch of laptops for families now that everyone is remote schooling.
• Catching up with Steph Gray over a coffee was lovely, and it’s great to have someone else trying to figure things out while also wanting to repair broken things at the same time.
• Poking GB Studio with a stick to figure it out, including looking at sprite editors and tile editors
• Chatting with an old colleague on freelancing, swapping ideas, etc.
• Experimenting with how to indicate presence on Twitter using IFTTT and desaturated avatar images.
• Had a great catchup with Drew at HACT after far too long.
• Publishing the new edition of Beamspun.

In the first week of July I seemed to be really tired. My notes say: "9pm hits like a psychedelic sledge hammer and sends my brain spinning. I’m not sure why I’m so tired this week, but then I think back – not at what I’ve done, per se, but at how much my brain is pinballing. Between people and comms channels and kids and social media. Between my own future plans and things I’ve said I’d do for people and projects and ideas. Between games and books and magazines and webpages."

I pinballed in this way a fair but when I was working, but not in such a disconnected set of worlds. The joy of being paid to do something is you have an excuse to focus on it and block things out, let people down. When money and clients aren’t involved, it’s much harder to scrape together that sense of singularity. I need some sort of guiding light that becomes my "thing", for a week at a time maybe, that serves as orientation. Either that or just get more sleep.

On another level, I have this suspicion that I’m also adjusting to this disruption in my "challenge/reward" loop. After 200 sprints and working in a busy team, you get "acclimatised" to some fairly fast feedback loops. When I was picking up coding tasks, I’d spend a day or two tackling a problem using known skills and a familiar codebase, and that would get delivered fairly soon after, with a chance to discuss it with colleagues and show it off and feel proud.

I’m missing pretty much all that structure now, and a large chunk of the adrenaline/dopamine cycle that went with it. I guess I need to both adjust my subconscious reward narrative and find new ways and new places to get the same sense of satisfaction. Everyone thinks stopping the stress means you get to relax, and sure we do need that, but there are reasons we do what we do, and the "luxury" of having "nothing" to do is outweighed by having a purpose in life, readily achieved (especially if you’re something of a game player like me?)

Over the last week though, I’ve managed to indulge a bit in this idea of ‘chaotic creativeness’. I’ve accepted that I don’t need to focus on one thing, but can have 2 or 3 things I work on in a week, with a bit of rough structure around certain days. I’ve liked this the one week I got to try it out, although another one was torn apart by that phone call from school, and a week remote schooling #son2. And two weeks later (now) it’s school holidays and all bets are off again.

Things I’ve been Reading

Guardian: Amazon rainforest ‘will collapse if Bolsonaro remains president’: "It is either the Amazon or Bolsonaro. There is no space for
both."

UK Post Office criminal convictions overturned by judges

The life-long art of making friends

Transport Decarbonisation Plan: Six key takeaways for civil engineers

How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s complicatedstory

Some Chinese shun grueling careers for \’low-desire life\’

Disrupting Ransomware by Disrupting Bitcoin

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. (Been wanting to read it for ages, but it finally ties in with Sky: Children of the Light so I thought it was a good time.)

I’ve returned to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (book 2) after a bit of a break.

Things I’m Playing

Mostly Super Mario Oddysey and Sky: Children of the Light, both on the Switch. I’ve parked Breath of the Wild for the mo, but have this feeling I’m in an Inception form of exploration games, where I’ll start playing one, switch to another, then to another, and pop back up through each when they get finished.

No running day-notes this week. It’s easy to slip out of habits once you’ve got used to them – evidence, perhaps, that they were novelty routines rather than subconscious habits.

Either that, or I’ve been busy. Too busy, maybe.

I feel tired, but I can’t quite work out if that’s from what I’ve been doing the past week, the last month, or for the last decade.

This week I’ve been flitting about a lot. I’m jumping between emails and comms for different charities, for setting up my own future, for catching up with old friends, and for just seeing what’s out there. I’ve attended and caught up on various videos and events (list below) and hastily written up thoughts about downtime as a productive thing. The writing course has come to an end but I’m a few days behind. Sometimes it’s too easy to multitask.

At the same time, I’m aware of this tug in the middle.of my mind, the plughole around which a lot of my thoughts and actions are circling. Somebody mentioned a person taking 2 or 3 days to rest after finishing up a job, to reset and get a new rhythm. I’m not really letting myself rest, I think, and even if I did, it actually feels like it will take weeks, not days, for me. After 1 week travelling and 2 weeks off, I’m only now dimly aware of things being processed properly, like I’m falling down through layers and layers of expectations and routines.

My wife reminds me that I had plans to rest, and I guess that, now I’m actually living the time, I’ve put those plans to one side, or pushed them there by a fear and a lust to Get On and be productive, creative, GTD, etc. The sense that I have a stand-up meeting at 10 o’clock is only just residing (hey, I got through 200 fortnightly sprints, so maybe another 2 weeks to adjust to that change is only natural).

On the other hand, what I’ve done has been fun, and exciting. I’ve been developing short stories, playing with smart plugs and energy monitoring at home, watching indie game videos, and finishing and starting Zelda games. The potatoes are growing wildly, my childhood toy car collection is up on eBay, and it’s the solstice.

This week, I’ll aim to return to the plan. Writing up thoughts on downtime reminded me of someone saying that "everyone needs a duvet day every now and then". I think that’s true, especially among all the parenting and tidying up Pokémon cards and washing up as well. Duvet days are a form of decompression, and it’s weird being at a point where I can choose to do that.

When I’m writing a short story, I hit a wall when it comes to being outwardly emotional that I’ve realised I need to be brave and push through. The same is true of being restful.

Things I’ve been watching this week:

• Edafe Onerhime spoke about African and Afro-Futurism for Manchester Futurists – the session is on Youtube here.

• As part of the Freeplay indie-games festival, Mel Taylor gave a talk called “Pieces of Me”, about putting yourself into games

• Went along to an event put on by Brighton Library and [Writing Our Legacy]( as part of Brighton and Hove’s Refugee Week events called “Refugees are welcome here”. Featured Alinah Azadeh, Hong Dam and Naomi Foyle. Here’s a video of Hong Dam reading her poem about being a refugee travelling from Vietnam to Hong Kong, ‘Sympathy for the Dandelion’.

Lookahead

Looking forward to this week: Finding out what my brain is thinking, now that I have some time to listen to it.

Not looking forward to: First post-lockdown dentist appointment in a long while.

Monday 7th June

Started the week and ended the holiday with a cold shower. Not out of choice, just the result of a small water tank, but I made myself enjoy it. Not as cold or as salty as the sea last week, anyway.

Drifted back along the coast after seeing the centre of Bournemouth and various family members. This past week, I’ve been switching off a lot – in terms of plans and timelines, as well as expectations.

I wasn’t sure (are any of us?) if it would be weird meeting up with the wife’s family after such a long time. Some of them have moved house. The kids have got bigger. New roads have been built.

So I’ve just enjoyed seeing what turns up with each busy hour, then relaxing when I can. It feels like a long time since I’ve just settled into days like that. It feels good.

This week I’m signed up to the Writer HQ’s free course on short story writing, so I spent the evening reading and watching some short stories. I peeked a bit at tomorrow’s lesson and wrote some stuff down. Maybe I’ll wake up and feel like a fraud.

Tuesday 8th June

Blogpost Dharma Nerds: The Art of Seeing seems to tie nicely in with storytelling – we use words to set a scene, imply actions and emotions, and trick the brain into filling in the gaps. Perhaps the same is true for setting out bold visions and grand strategies which, after all, are not much except a structured story of a possible future.

First day of a new chapter and you can do anything. Where do you begin? (After making coffee, obvs)

Wednesday 9th June

I can’t remember the last time I had two days off off, like no pressure to do stuff, or even to enjoy myself. Decades. It’s therapeutic, I tell you.

I’m happy exploring accidental conversations and links which look like they might be relevant (hello again, Twitter and Mastodon!).

I’m also really enjoying the quickfire Writers HQ course: I’ve always struggled to "shape" a story beyond some initial paragraphs, and the exercises are pushing me to think much more about endings, and about "being interesting". In practice, that means being more interested in myself firstly, which I tend to deprecate because, well, attention is scary. But I love words, and being able to wield them better seems like not just useful for flash fiction, but for the story I want to tell about what I want to do next – and how I tell that to myself as well as to others.

Thursday 10th June

Okay, day three has been… Fun?

I woke up with a chunk of energy seeping through my veins. I tore out the old, towering broccoli bushes with dilapidated flowers, and trimmed the bush by the front door. I closed down some browser tabs to save a handful of Watts and brain cells. I started some networking, came up with a new google doc to structure my plans (in my head it’s designed in the style of a board game board, so has been christened The Big Board despite it fitting on one screen*).

I looked up some free online events to start attending (wow so many!) and carried on writing for the week’s course. Also managed to get to the dentist. Feeling good.

A few things I’m trying to consciously avoid:

1. Doing too little. Honestly, I do love slacking and gaming, and it’s too easy to just pick up Bomberman online and kill an hour. Save that for the evenings.
2. Doing too much. Fingers in pies and apps in groups make it easy to over commit and get fragmented and frantic. The gameboard doc aims to limit focuses-in-progress (FIP?) and – ideally – will let me keep a balance, but let me adjust that balance on a regular basis. Not quite sure how yet, but that’s the intent.
3. Getting lost. At least half of what I do should fit into some sort of longer term plan. Anything not part of a loose ‘roadmap’ plan should be kept fun, and not take over.

Having vague plans and unstructured time reminds me a bit of my MSc days (except I’m my own supervisor now). Mental note to dig out those memories and channel them.

Friday 11th June

Channeled the Masters days by setting aside an hour after the morning school run to read something of interest, sat In a cafe. Really fascinated by this permacomputing article/manifesto which sets out a lot of where my brain is at these days.

Carrying the pro(ductivity/fessonalism) into the end of the week. The big game-style board sheet is my fitness coach and sounding board, and reminds to do what I should, not what I’d like to. For me, procrastination comes from fear, rather than laziness – especially fear of completing/finishing and opening up my own ideas, in case someone rubbishes them.

But the Big Board demands progress and so I neatened up my personal "business plan" document and sent it to a prospective accountant. Let’s get this ball rolling.

(The key thing to remember about Business Plans and Strategy is that they’re all made up, all stories dealing with the uncertain future, and just there as guides and references for You in 3, 6, 12 months. So they don’t have to actually be right, just they should make sense, and just writing one is better than not. So, scary-but-not-scary, and the completer-finisher brain needs to remember that a plan is never complete.)

I also dropped Marie Prokopets a personal development question on her ProductHunt AMA ("Ask Me Anything" – a chance to pick the poster’s brains on their experience). I focused on this time of personal transition that I’m going through, and she gave a lovely answer that reminded me that being scared is healthy – if change isn’t scary, it’s often not challenging or interesting.

And by happy synchronicity, a copy of Transitions, by William Bridges turned up, as recommended by Steph.

* Absolutely a Doctor Strangelove reference, well spotted. I’m happy running my life according to cold war paranoia rules.

Reflection

Do I know what my brain is thinking more now? Kind of. I think I’ve got a bit more confidence in the thoughts running through, and in myself. I know I just need to get out there and talk to people, and I’m getting some energy to do so.

Was the dentist as bad as I’d thought? No. Spent 5 minutes waiting, 5 minutes being checked over, and 5 minutes paying. Fastest £23 I’ve ever spent.

A catch up on some fragmented journal entries…

Weds 19 May – Buildings

First time of not being in a team member’s annual review. Not my team member any more. Whoa.

Finishing the day with a glass of wine, and this feeling that I’ve built something. Built a codebase. Built a product. Built a company. Built careers, lives. I don’t think its the wine or the covid jab making me feel giddy there, but maybe I’m getting some brain space back and actually realising just what has happened in the last decade – what has always been driving me on, and where it’s got to.

…

Would I go through it again? Sure, why not?

Tues 25 May – The Codes

I am mostly handed over now. My last code commits are probably in place. I’ve dumped as much of my brain as is feasible. All 1-1 notes are reassigned and I’ve had final chats with all of my own team. I still have a few hundred emails to go through, but I’m pretty sure most of them are irrelevant. Just clearing out some files and saying goodbyes after that, I guess.

I jokingly made a comment that handing over control of the git repos would be the most emotional part.

But it was only half a joke. The code I’ve written and that the team has built up is probably what I’m most proud of.

It is sometimes beautiful, often messy, but here are all these magic words powering what we do everyday. Each finger press of a keyboard key has contributed to people going about their jobs in a different way.

It translates into client training, user feedback, policy shifts and lifelong careers. It’s been amazing fun building that up, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to do something like that again. Who knows…

Thurs 27 May – Journeys

9pm after signing out signing out. Seaford sea front with the sun hitting the hills and radio masts along the shore. The smallest waves collapse leisurely into the pebbles, throwing up the laziest spray, while the ferry wanders along out at sea, way past the buoys. I guess I’m here. A day after a full moon (the biggest, brightest and reddest of the year) and that’s me done?

To be honest, I’m feeling a little bit anticlimactic rn, and I don’t know if that’s a delayed reaction, good preparation, right timing, or a forlorn sense of stoicism stemming from all that damned meditation. Or all of that. Everything feels… “in place”, as much as it can ever be.

I have no regret, no major concerns, and an eternal sense of pride, of appreciation, and of satisfaction. Things have momentum now, and can be left to their own devices. Maybe I’ve not been needed so much the last few months, or maybe “need” is a subjective perception, but either way it’s all planned and played out about as well as I could have hoped, and for now I’m pleased about where it leaves me, others, and the world.

The ferry drifts from one buoy to the next. Its next stop is the sanctity of the harbour, and the off-ramp that leads home.

casting a rod
into a flat calm sea
sunset colours

Wed 2nd June – Fututes

Day two of being un/self-employed, although among all the traffic jams and family time, it’s been hard to tell.

One thing I’m really excited about is, for maybe the first time in my life, being able to set out a personal dream and turning into action. I’ve been thinking a bit about why I want to do anything, and Phil retweeted this thread from Vinay Gupta about the political and cultural narratives that Bitcoin and Ethereum are going through, or trying to go through:

”But if we don’t change the culture to focus on CREATING VALUE rather than just making the magic numbers dance up and down, one day people will tire of the hope of an infinite future, stabilised by smart contracts, and the speculative capital will dry up never to return.”

At OCSI (and before that, and in other parts of my life), I have to be careful in separating out professional activity from personal beliefs. I’ll still need to do that, but it feels, at least, that it’s much more up to me to decide where that line gets drawn. I can “invest” something very different into nt immediate future, something much more personal I think.

I’m excited about being able to weave together engineering with art and creative aspects more – while I have some aims for “building things” with an eye on computers and metrics, I’m finding it difficult to ignore broader questions and stories about what work is for – both for clients, and for myself. What’s it ultimately aiming to achieve? How does the nature of working compare to (overlap with, reinforce, block) the ideal outputs of the work itself? Can we actually separate how we work from why and what we do? All that kind of stuff.

Anyway, I’m going to drink Prosecco from a kid’s owl-emblazoned glass while I sport a natty Batman-logo temporary tattoo on the inside of my right arm now.

Hello there. I’m having a go at weeknotes again, to see if there’s any chance I can do it as I venture into a world of freelance where time is more under my control (?). I’m going to try to keep things lightweight – gentle thoughts, poetic reflection, and interesting links. There may be no pictures though.

Tues 4 May

Thanks to the Bank Holiday, the earlier day had been a hybrid day of Monday and Tuesday (Muesday?) and some of us were still groggy from the weekend and the wind. I bounced a bit between checking through company policies for risk assessment (relentless, but oddly fascinating), clearing some tech debt (fun, but never enough time) and running a 1-1. Halfway through the 1-1, I realised it was likely my last one with this person, which caught me off-guard.

Had a nice catch up with A via Signal in the evening, while discovering RadioReverb is now listed on RadioDroid (also on F-Droid), which is great news.

Video: An ROI-based approach to technical debt – how to review and think through what debt to attack. I suspect the same things can be said about other debt, too: effort vs risk and time.

Article: Having a Healthy Pull Request Process for Teams – or how to discuss your work with others professionally.

Wed 5 May

I hadn’t realised how much I missed travelling by train until the hedges started rolling past. Even the rush to get coffee and a ticket – a familiar and also novel routine now – hadn’t triggered any real memories. But as the leafy mallows and cow parsley slid past in the foreground, set against the faraway wind turbines, I settled back into that slow glide that blurrily marks the edge between home and work life.

Thu 6 May

Well, some celebrations in order. The job role was defined back in January. The ad went out in February. We had a few interviews, we went to a shadowing fortnight, we got feedback from the Board and the whole team, and today we made a decision. I have a … "successor". A new Head of Tech.

Looking back, I’m pretty pleased with how the process has gone. I still don’t know if it’s a hard role to recruit for, or if the ad was ‘good at filtering people out’, or if the time is just generally strange, or what, but it was fairly different to the usual avalanche of CVs that you get when looking for a juior developer.

But here we are, we have someone we’re happy with, and the future, as they say, lies ahead. I’m not sure how I feel yet. Some relief, some excitement, some awareness it’s just a beginning and there are now a few weeks of actual handover. But things are going along as hoped ("planned" would be too strong a word) and sometimes the line between luck, strategy and synchronicity just can’t be discerned.

Article: What does the Schrems 2 judgement mean for cloud computing – actually really fascinated by the state of international data privacy, even if I roll my eyes when I tell people I’m looking into it, and it means filling out risk assessments is tricky.

Fri 7 May

Caught a train into Brighton again. I’m picking up and returning a few bits and pieces from the office while I can, and took the opportunity to meet up with a couple of old friends and contacts from many years ago. I wandered through the north Laine as the shops and cafes opened up, and found it strange to feel so normal. I popped some film in to be developed, and popped into my old hairdressers to say hi. I chatted board games at Dave’s, and watched the world go past from a warm bench in Kemptown.

I even lay on the grass for 10 minutes and watched seagulls and pigeons soar past. It’s been a long while since I’ve done that. Far too long.