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Journalλ︎

A journal of thoughts and experiences from commercial work and community projects powered by Material for MkDocs

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The king is probably dead, long live the king

Quote

You are only a leader if people are willing to follow

It has been hard to shake the concern that my current commercial role has not worked out, probably not really been working for quite a while in hindsight. Was it ever really working?

Some aspects have greatly improved but there are some fundamental communication constraints that I really didn't understand the cause of (plenty of assumptions, but not enough communication or time to really address these challenges).

There are the common systemic challenges that come from working at any startup that is working hard to establish itself as a long term sustainable business. This was a given. A new person coming into this environment that has been running for many years leaves a lot of context unknown and typically unspoken.

I continued to try identify the causes throughout the week and trying to evaluate if there is any appetite and opportunity to address these within our typical schedule. It did feel that the more I tried to connect the quicker the feeling of connection slipped away.

I believe my frustration and disappointment have been leaking out over the last month, which I am disappointed about as well.

It is always a challenge for an engineering manager to identify where they can add value. For much of the current role I never seemed to connect with the team at a deep enough level. It is too easy to feel I am simply not needed by the team as the communication has been very limited. In once exceptional case, it was easy to feel my presence was simply not wanted.

Tuesday I was really exhausted, partly because of the continued cough but also the concerns that I still wasn't able to break through to the team (especially if they feel unsafe to ask questions). I am not sleeping well and need to find energy to exercise more.

Wednesday I made time for self-reflection as part of the company feedback initiative. I did struggle to quantify to myself what I had done. In hindsight I should have spend more time on this and consulted my journal, although I still feel I would come up short of my own lofty goals for the role.

Friday was the end of my commercial current role.

The title of this article is from the first episode of the first series of the Black Adder TV show. There were quite a few Shakepearean quotes used for comic effect.

The wonderful complexity of people

A Tail of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Johnny Stevenson (maybe others)

People are wonderfully complex experiences

My feelings of disappointed with my current commercial role are returning to the forefront of my mind. Many aspects of the role and company seem to be clear in peoples minds but not always effectively shared. I think I understand the role and then something else happens that makes me feel I don't. I believe something will need to change soon for the benefit of all.

There have been a few highlights with the role, but I expected more of myself and the company. I do set high expectations for myself, although have learned to be more kind about what I can realistically achieve and 'which battles to fight' (figuratively speaking of course).

During this engagement I have continually reset my expectations about what could be achieved and what I could realistically achieve. There are a couple of peers where there has been conflict without understanding of why I am seen as the cause. I have tried to explore but if people do have issues with me its not clearly being communicated to me.

In hindsight, many opportunities to get support from my manger and peers were missed. Mostly as we had so many challenges to discuss and partly due to pressures of delivery.

When a person doesn't have clarity around a problem then there is very little they can do to resolve or adapt.

A self-reflection review is in progress and its is a good opportunity to take my own time to reflect on my current role and if its still the right fit for me.

Back to work

Busy week at work getting ready for a new team member. I spent Friday afternoon building up a relationship and getting accustom to spending time working together. Several weeks of work had been done to get ready for the new starter.

One of the interesting challenges for anyone starting a new job is to ensure too much enthusiasm doesnt lead to missing important steps. It will be a good first check-in with the new starter to see if they have been too enthusiastic or taken a more measured approach.

Current issues

Holiday in Paramout Plus

After being ill for most of the week I am finally starting to enjoying my second week of holiday, binging on some Paramount+ and having a lazy Sunday enjoying the extra hour in bed after the end of summer time.

Updating Practicalli Journal and Clojure CLI Config repositories, fixing links and markdown issues from the Megalinter reports.

Updating to Megalinter 0.8.1 GitHub action on Practicalli repositories as I work on them. The upgrade will include each repository in the Grafana dashboards for Practicalli projects.

Issues

Hacking on Practicalli content

I am enjoying my 2 week at home vacation (stay-cation) and have already completely rewired my desk, laptops, Monitors and NAS storage devices on the electronic standing desk. It feels a lot more organised and easier to find everything as everything has its place.

Now I can focus on getting lots of Practicalli content done (as well as catch up with shows on Paramount+ and maybe a little Polybus on the Playstation4 VR headset)

I am interested in switching to the Hyprland, although its changing fast so I dug out an older laptop and installed Arch Linux with Hyprland using the archinstall tool. Unfortunately the laptop I used doesnt seem to support Hyprland or something is missing from the install.

I am taking a stay-cation as I am still recovering from Covid and the weather is also quite grim. I am getting out for walks each day and on Friday I completed a short cycle ride as it was nice and sunny outside. Unfortunately my chest started feeling like it was on fire a few minutes into the ride, so I slowed down and limited myself to 10km.

I was feeling really sleepy after the ride, so I kept myself awake by sorting through the cardboard boxes in my attic. Many boxes made the ultimate sacrifice (for an uncluttered house) and went to the recycling service.

Practicalli content planning

Hyprland promises to be a great experience but also a potential time drain, so will save most of the investigation and further configuration until the winter break (or if I need a little distraction of the new shiny for motivation).

Taking two weeks off from work and have some time to work on Practicalli content.

Linux Wayland Compositor & Hyprland

A friend recommended Hyprland window manager which is similar to i3 window manager I currently used, but more optomised for the Wayland compositor.

Practicalli currently uses Regolith Desktop, a complete Linux desktop that leverages Gnome and i3 tiling window manager.

Regolith Desktop provides quite a rich experience using the regolith-desktop Debian package. I have not had much success with Regolith when running with Wayland (specifically Sway).

Sway compositor is an implementation of wayland for i3 window manager. Some of my applications do not see to play nice with Sway (e.g. chromium browser scrolling, simplescreenrecorder cannot run on wayland).

OBS did seem to work okay on wayland, given a sufficiently recent version.

A friend recommended Hyprland, a tiling compositor that provides the latest Wayland features and lots of eye candy. Its pretty easy to setup on Debian, although there is much additional setup before it would be comparable to Regolith Desktop.

Neovim Grug plugin is being considered as an alternative to the Spectre tool for search and replacing across a project.

MegaLinter Grafana Dashboards

As Practicalli projects are being updated to Megalinter version 8 it seemed a good time to try the Megalinter API reporter to publish data to use with Grafana. A chance to learn more about creating Dashboards and if Grafana is any easier than DataDog.

Megalinter not publishing logs on Grafana yet

Unfortunately I havent been able to make the Megalinter API Reporter work with this journal project, Clojure CLI Config or a new megalinter-test project I created.

Health is a little better after resting over the weekend, although still have lots of symptoms.

Megalinter Grafana dashboard example project

Practicalli Megalinter-Test

NOTE: I am trying to diagnose why this project does not seem to be sending logs to Grafana.

Megalinter 8 and monthly version updates

Megalinter updates to version 8 using the megalinter runner tool, adding a Makefile task to simplify the command line (so I dont have to remember the command).

Material for MkDocs provides a nice diff view using the diff language for a code block. Add or copy a diff into the code block, ensuring the - and + signs are included and the diff is automatically highlighted. See the Megalinter section of this post for an example.

Feeling quite low the last few weeks, mostly due to continued Covid symptoms, low blood oxygen and lack of energy. Waking up I feel like I have experienced carbon dioxide poisoning (which I have experienced working on a mushroom farm). I am disorientated, dizzy and feel quite terrible.