Weeknotes: S02 E12 - What A Difference A Week Makes

Writing weeknotes is a cathartic process. Particularly last week where I’d logged off, convinced that everything had been bad, and then worked through events properly in my mind as I wrote things down the next morning. I still came out at the end thinking that I’d not had the best time, but something more balanced emerged.

This week things swung back the other way. Completely. There were still moments where I felt frustrated or had a little moan, but I stepped away at the end of Friday with a lightness of being, and a smile on my face.

I’ve been thinking about what it is that brings me satisfaction (or even joy) at work to lead me to evaluate a week in that way, and why my sense of where I am now can make me overwhelmingly happy at times. For me, I think it boils down to:

• recognition — both from others in what I do, and the opportunity to say something positive to other people about them. Being seen for who I am and what I can contribute
• confidence/self esteem — feeling on my game, on safe ground or realising that I’m improving in an area. This is also one of my areas of weakness as it highlights issues with my resilience
• creativity — either initiating something new myself or working with others to devise something. Finding beauty in the outputs of work. Feeling OK to go out on a limb with something different, or add thoughts to an area outside of my specialism
• relationships — making real connections, with colleagues and customers. Changing day-to-day interactions into more than just transactions. Bringing something extra to the exchange and taking away something too, even if it’s just a smile from a bad joke (I have many)

I was pleased to see these chiming with some things I came across online about this topic. There’s also a (non-Buzzfeed) quiz to measure your happiness at work, if you’re feeling brave…

What did I learn about Agile this week?

That creativity extends to developers — what may be a constraint for one is an opportunity to innovate for another. A few more heads involved helped us crack an issue for a customer that we’d thought was unsolvable. Much love to the dev that ‘had an hour at the weekend’ to pull a proof of concept together to demo it to me on Monday morning.

We managed to pull a major release out of the bag this week which was bigger than anticipated, and even a minor release as well to sort out some urgent issues. All the while working on The Project On The Side and knocking it out of the ball park.

We’re starting to ask some questions about backlog grooming and if we’re doing it as efficiently as we could. There are some bottlenecks that could be eased if we gave the wider team more responsibility. Some strong personalities at play that need to be considered in any change, but I think there is scope to improve here.

I’m yet to fully understand the intricacies of git branching, merging and releases, being that bit removed from the code, but it’s coming slowly.

It was great to push out a new approach to technical documentation that was simple enough to follow, lets our developers focus on facts and not language, and brings our Product Trainer in at the right point to develop drafts into the final output.

ChatGPT and me

I’m still getting a mild thrill from using ChatGPT in a work setting to do some thinking for me, solve a problem that google searches would take an age to do or being a bit creative. This week’s use cases:

• Instructing it to ask me a set of questions to answer in order for it to devise a range of names for a product idea we’re kicking around. The outputs were universally awful but gave colleagues a laugh and led to a bit of ‘real person’ creativity kicking in (not that these were any better).
• Getting it to take a long table of information organised under one set of headings and sub-headings, and having it reorganise and collate bullet points under just the sub-headings. Then you realise it has an output throttle of 400 words, and used ‘intelligence’ to reorganise some of the data into the headings it thought were more appropriate…
• Another Jira JQL query to shape a report output, which I shared with my teammate and thus forever punctured my reputation of being a technical genius

I’ve also used it (wholly unsuccessfully) at home to try and get Docker, Jekyll and GitHub pages to play together in putting a local development environment together. YouTube was far more helpful, but I still failed (real person help here gratefully received btw)

So it’s a mixed bag. I’m going to keep plugging away at it as there is a sweet spot somewhere out there.

Quick thoughts

• So impressed and touched by our CEO reaching out to me during the week to check I was OK and giving me some nice feedback. Organisational values are more than snappy slogans that you push out on email signatures — they are in behaviours and leadership
• I realise I now have a ‘work wife’ as I had five meetings with the same colleague in one day (and four the next)
• I’m wondering if my love of writing story tickets is becoming an offshoot of my creative side. They really shouldn’t need chapter headings, should they?
• Google Tasks is my saviour
• My initial year-long wait for an ENT appointment turned out to be just 8 weeks after all. Always under promise and over deliver I guess

Spot of the week

Despite fresh water always being available, one’s preferred drink of choice is the weed-infested, slimy hole that is the mini-pond