On Monday I woke in Sofia and went to bed on Tuesday in London. Still reeling from that change. Said several hurried "Goodbyes" after lunch, and then after getting a row to myself on the plane, said several-more hurried "Hellos" in London before dragging some people to see Jurising. Great concert and friendly band. Should have skipped the chuhi.
OK now that I've padded out the word-count for previews, I shall attempt to bury the lede: I experienced a close loss this weekend and it's still sinking in. What's most painful is not having said goodbye.
One of my teams had a team-day this week. I missed the retrospective because it was in the morning, but got to join in with the session around reviewing the mission and trying to write some team behavioural principles. We wrapped with Umberto hosting a game of Would I Lie To You, where I successfully(?) managed to convince everybody that I was lying about bringing a backup sandwich to long drinks and parties. What did you achieve this week?
Thursday marked Anna's leaving drinks and presentation, before her last day next week. Presentation was nice and included forking over the least stressful leaving homepage ever. Lots of copy, and it turns out that software designed for newspaper layouts is much better than trying to bodge it in digital design software which on reflection is not surprising. I think we'll keep that change. The drinks were great: We played 21 without any booze. I'm not sure who won.
Gave a short talk on early efforts to share UI between product teams on Friday, which involved trying to glue a narrative about business context ("Why? Why now?") with an analogy about how shared UI is generally a good problem to solve and is readily approachable. Not many questions, but I saw nodding in both the meatspace and cyberspace audiences and got some walk-ups/messages afterwards.
Friday evening and Saturday morning were a mad scramble to re-assemble some USBs for CDJs. It means using specialised software (Rekordbox) to analyse music, and to then actually store the music and that analysis on the USB stick. Doing it on a slow computer, it took about 6 hours!
