Weekly 2023.13

This is the 13th weekly of 2023. It is Friday the 14 April after my two week break and I'm back to provide some insights and reflections of the past two weeks. So, admin, let's get that bad boy out of the way. As you may have noticed on the videos, last time I introduced more graphics and visuals to the content, I felt like it was more assistive, more supporting, but again, it was a bit more extra effort on my part. But I'm hoping it actually provides a bit more context to what I'm trying to what I'm working through at the time. I know this is pretty standard for most YouTubers that do this. I'm pretty new to it all, obviously, and I am curious whether it helps or not. If there's any suggestions or feedback to make it any better or worse, do reach out and let me know what you think. Obviously all the comments will be useful. You can comment on the YouTube video itself. I'll put the link in the show notes. But yeah, just curious to know what you think. And again, with this one there'll probably be more visuals. Again, I just want to know if I'm doing the right thing or not and how I can make them any better. The one thing I just want to call out Descript is okay at this sort of thing, it's not the best. There are obviously better tools in the market for video production, but as my editing suite and my toolkit for actually producing this content, it makes sense to keep it there. For now. I'm looking at how to template things a bit better as well. So I know that it's a bit more consistent and a lot easier to kind of recreate the content on a weekly basis. So that's one of my actions for this week is to understand how the templates work in Descript and how I can maybe use them better in the future. Right then, work. So yes, it's been a bit of a weird one the last couple of weeks actually we had the Easter long weekend so two days lost for that, but all for good reasons. And actually this week I've not been around work much at all because I've had family things going on. But prior to all that we did, our tech develops. Day. One of the benefits we get for working in tech at Azos is once a month we get to down tools and do some self learning. For that I actually got back into some engineering and code. I put the engineering back into Engineering Manager. It was quite enlightening, it was quite enjoyable, quite frustrating in ways. But it took me back to my old engineering days trying to understand how the tools and the processes that are in place now. So the reason this came about, we've got an internal tool called Team Designer. I'm not going to give away too much, but it's basically an inner source project that was created by a group of engineers that anyone can contribute towards. What we're trying to do is introduce petals to the tool, to the inner source project and ideally allow our teams to own their content and ratings more regularly, but in a more convenient place. Now, I've got some ideas about how I want to build this, and some of the other engineers have already built this sort of stuff. What I wanted to do was contribute towards that and as an inner source project, it was quite easy for me to do that. In theory, anyone's capable of doing that, as long as you go through the typical processes of speaking to the maintainers, raising pull requests, checking the pipelines and all the different test environments. And to be honest, it was quite nice doing all that. But what my point was on this was the fact that I was able to contribute towards an inner source project, which I think is quite a common approach across industry. I'm not sure how many organizations encourage this or even adopt InnerSource as a theory. I'll put a link in the show notes just to explain it a bit more, but I really would highly encourage any organization to create some inner source projects for engineers and others to contribute towards. It's a great way to kind of build stuff together. It might not necessarily be business focused, it might not even be for customers or whoever you build your products for, but it's a great way to all kind of contribute to a single code base, using good practices and actually encouraging engineers to do more innovation. They might have an idea for something they want to build. Great opportunities to do that. And as I say, we're doing some really cool stuff at Azos that eventually we will share an open source on these projects. So side projects pretty big week for me actually. So make Life Work podcast concluded a couple of weeks back. Did the episode with Andy Clark and Dan Davis, and I really enjoyed doing that. But as that concluded, I decided it was probably the end of Make Life Work as we currently know it. It wasn't really an easy decision to make. I had lots of ideas and thoughts about this and I even spoke to a few people about it as well. But as I went through the process of thinking about it, I realized I'm probably best to end it as it is and maybe revive in the future if I feel inclined. I blogged about this as well. So I wrote a very lengthy blog, 2000 words of the journey I've been on with Make Life Work all the seasons. I mentioned all the thought processes that go behind it and some of the challenges I've faced along the way. So that's the decision made and I've posted it, so I'll commit to it. But I am considering making another final episode to go out on the feed just to read it out. Basically, we go through that narrative as a voice, add a bit more context, maybe introduce a few soundbites from the episodes as I've recorded it. So I'm getting some great feedback from that post actually already. And again, as a tip, if you are going through this sort of challenge of is a side project dead yet? Have I lost the mojo? Is it worth continuing? It's worth writing down your thoughts. It's age old thing, right? If you've got thoughts and lots of ideas going around your head, write them down because it will help kind of really structure you over those thoughts. And for me, it did help. As I went through the blog posts about the journey I've been on, it made me realize that it is the right time to do this. But at least I've got some good evidence underneath it to kind of prove and help me make that decision in the long term. A little pro tip there is to write down your thoughts, maybe even make them public as a blog post if you'd prefer as well. It makes sure you're committed to your decision as well by doing that. But I would love any more thoughts and feedback on this. Is it worth me recording the final episode? If it is, how would you like to hear that? Would it be good just as me talking or should I get more people involved just to kind of add to the narrative? Love your thoughts and feedback on this. Please send them in. And from a tech perspective again, I've not been able to do much of the last couple of weeks, but one thing I have realized as a quite a useful tool is notion. It's for note taking and it's kind of evolved over time. There's some really cool stuff coming out from them now actually and they're trying to use the GPT four language models to do some stuff for you. I'm not that bothered about that, but it has been quite a convenient tool for me to have on the web browser, on my iPhone, on my Mac, wherever I am. It's easily available there to just write down some ideas, make some notes. I even wrote my blog post and make life work on there because I knew it would be available wherever I am actually sitting or working. One thing I did notice though, as I was going through some other exercises, like with petals, I was trying to put a plan together. I'll get some ideas down and start brain dumping some thoughts on this. There is some sort of database logic in there to maybe even create a to do list or a task management little system. I wasn't convinced. I don't think it's the right tool for what I was trying to achieve. I give it a quick go just to play around, but it wasn't right for me. I've quickly moved all those plans out to a Trello board so I can actually use it a bit more conveniently. I like Trello. It's my go to place when I do task management as a project management tool. It's okay, it's not the best, I'll grant you, but at least it's another tool that I'm more familiar with. It's more appropriate to what I'm trying to achieve. And ideally, what I'd like to do with Petals is create like a public roadmap and allow people to kind of contribute ideas and upvote the features that were going to come later down the line. So, yeah, notion great for notetaking, not so great for task management, but I'm prepared to be challenged on. Let me know your thoughts. If you are a notion user, how can you make that task management part really work for you? And entertainment the final part. So, one thing I did catch on BBC last night was a wonderful, wonderful documentary on Mars. Professor Brian Cox was doing a documentary behind the scenes NASA on all the stuff going on with the Mars rover and all those projects going out there. It was a hell of an eye opener. I mean, they used a lot of genuine footage from the rover being on Mars and I also loved some of the discussions around the engineering feats that they've brought into play. One of the detailed plans makes you realize how complicated engineering can get at times. The rover that's on Mars at the moment is taking samples of the rocks out there, but how are we getting those samples back? So there is a mission, and a quite meaty one as well, to get those samples back. And when he talks through that process, he makes you realize this is a significant project delivery, this is not very agile, it can't go wrong. They've got software updates that go out more regularly, so they are trying to be bring agile ways of working into the place. But when it comes to missions like this, this is Big Bang waterfall. Pray, baby. And if it goes wrong, everything goes wrong. It makes you realize actually the differences between different industries as well. I'd love to see how those projects are managed, how the dependencies attract and how you get everyone involved. I can see a lot of passion in those projects. But yeah, he did say you're pulling together some of the best engineers in the world for this. So impressive stuff. Definitely recommend it. It's on BBC. I player now, ready to watch on playback. And I'll give that bad boy three stars. So that's it for this week. Back into the rhythm of weekly content. Hopefully this angle of giving advice and pro tips is more useful. And any feedback on the visuals, the templates and all that sort of stuff, really would appreciate it. Please leave your comments in the threads below. Send them in on the podcast channels if that's your preference or even just hit me up on Macedon managerialengineers. Net at psy email [email protected] or you can go straight to the website. Psychoblin.com weeklies. That's it. Until next week. Catch you then. See I'm.