It’s Tuesday, the sun is shining, and I’ve got the whole week off work. I’ve been pretty bad at writing these on a Sunday of late: probably because now that the weather is nicer and restaurants/pubs/gyms/etc. are open again, I’m out and about doing other things. Oh well.
I got vaccinated on Wednesday! I had an appointment at Westfield Stratford and got Pfizer. Seeing everything spring into action was cool. They’d split the whole place into two halves: AZ for people returning for their second dose, and Pfizer for everyone having their first. The whole thing took about an hour and a half: they said it was their busiest day by about 2x. It feels great to have it (half) done. Please enjoy this selfie of me in a mask – 18:54 was the time I was allowed to leave after 15 minutes of ‘observation’:
Besides that, the week was pretty uneventful: I’ve been writing more code in work, and it feels productive. The past 2⁄3 weeks have been planning/design heavy: scoping out projects, working out what the slices are that we can ship independently, writing up proposals – work like that. It’s nice to get back to some more extended periods of writing code.
I’ve struggled a bit in the past year with feeling productive as a tech lead: the feedback loops on prioritising work for the team, or shepherding the design of a system (it’s not necessarily my job to do the designing) are much longer. With a pull request, you get as-good-as-instant feedback: “this abstraction feels weird”, or “you’ve got a subtle bug here”. I’m slowly learning how to feel productive with the longer-term work: getting early feedback (and being proactive about asking for it) has helped, but I’m still getting used to it. For now, a solid day of coding feels great.
We finished watching Mare of Easttown last night. I’m a sucker for a cop show, but this isn’t your usual one of those. Best thing I’ve seen on TV in a long time.