Last night I was feeling a bit annoyed by the time my work day ended, I'd been grinding on a bug for hours, had a most of the way there solution, only to discover I'd overlooked a comment on the ticket saying, hold off until XYZ happens.
There's a bias to feature-driven work which is to just continue building, but at some point you need to stop and figure out what abstrations are useful to extract, and that is hard to do at a system level. It gets harder to do when you are working on a system that hasn't had this refactoring work applied to it, it's like a car sliding out on black ice, but the car is also as heavy as the Titanic. What I'm trying to say is, if you let it, an app will spin out of control, just like the metaphor in that last sentence.
I walked the dog and decompressed, and got to the point where I wasn't mad about computers for a second. I got home, ate a fantastic dinner made by my partner Wryly, then scanned over open issues on the Ruby Style Guide. Saw one that had just been created that just needed a little bit of content, so I wrote it out and made a pull request. Then I watched Halt and Catch Fire for a few hours while I began writing my own static site generator script, using bash to script it and Pandoc to do the conversion.
Today I'm going to try to figure out how to get traction at work. I feel like part of my frustration lately has been in not getting traction and getting little feedback. Part of the difficulty in being remote for a company that isn't predominantly remote is the interactions you can have in the office are a lot harder to make work in a text-based medium. I've had an email I've been meaning to write for months about a conversation I had with the head of HR in January. You know, just to follow up, but if I were in the same building as him I would try to find a time to have a brief casual conversation, just because an email can inform, and maybe anticipate, but it has a damn hard time responding in the moment.
I'm going to keep doing these status reports… well I'm going to try to build the habit. I think the brain dump and the reflection is useful, and long form is something I stopped doing when I got addicted to Twitter. I think having a link to a post every day is a good way to keep me reflecting.
Oh, yeah, I struggled to get a regex working in bash for a couple of hours last night. And I think a large part of that is that bash is still intimidating to me because I remember how impenetrable its docs have always seemed, how any time I tried to find something online I'd find a bunch of examples not doing what I needed, how SO threads on bash seem to have this smugness about them, like, you don't know how to quux your widgets. Bleh.
I'm thankful for my dog Molly. She always seems happy, wants to hang out, wants every ounce of attention I'll give.
Happy Thursday.