Avocadia

The question in standup yesterday was “What’s your favourite tree?” And I said Treebeard. No one got it.

And then one of the team said they thought I would say something like binary search tree and I’m still mad that I didn’t think of that.

The speakers on Data topics tonight convinced me of something, the importance of keeping my metadata private. Or perhaps the folly of allowing data scientists to access it. I should stop Boosting and Liking on the fediverse, even, and keep it on my own site.

So glad @web_goddess found my good side at #sydtechleaders

Scene - Earlier today

me: Ok, fuck this, I'm going to fix the OpenTelemetry stuff. I'm sick of all the traces being lost. I'll just switch the config to what Honeycomb tells me to do.

<two hours of careful package updating (why are they all prerelease packages‽?)

me: Ok, that's done, just need to update the .env files. Huh, look at that, the honeycomb settings were all mistyped. um...🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Lol, the gall of the usual suspects who fought tooth and nail against any measure to control house prices now pissing and moaning at mortgage stress because median house prices are basically a million dollars.

• auspol

I was told quite confidently last week that my team of three react engineers and five PHP engineers should be able to turn a tech debt riddled 10 year old code base into a Canva clone.

By the end of July.

Narcissism is a hell of a drug.

Been an awful twenty four hours. I think I’ve come to the end of my tolerance for putting my anxiety and stress in the hands of a narcissist focussed only on his vanity project. And it’s perfect timing to change employers when there are so many layoffs occurring in tech, right?

Anyway, going to settle down with a relaxing podcast about (checks) the Life and Crimes of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Oh goody.

I flew from Los Angeles to Sydney, taking off at about 22:45 on Friday evening PST. So did I have a Saturday? At what time would I have crossed the international date line?

I’ve been in San Francisco since the 27th for an internal Product Engineering alignment thing. Did get a chance to tourist on the first weekend though.

The rest of the week was in Oakland in a conference room all day. Fewer opportunities for photos.

Shit is still settling down after the second round of redundancies at my employer in six months. Was giving some feedback to a be of my recent hires who took over my old team. For six months I had been cleaning up the mess of the first round by being people manger for the twenty people who lost their old manager, in addition to the then I already had. In giving that feedback I really saw clearly how much collateral damage was inflicted on everyone. Not a single one of the people I needed to support got my best; there simply wasn’t enough butter for all the bread. So people have missed opportunities for personal growth, or been left anxious because they weren’t getting enough help or advice or feedback. People have left. People who stayed are probably scarred. I know I am.

Redundancies in the name of Line Must Go Up are a moral wrong.