An exercise for the reader: if somebody used the phrase "driving the train" to describe the job of being head of the engineering team at a startup, what would you think that person felt were the challenges that the company faced, and what would you think that person felt was the desired behavior for other members of that engineering team?
It's funny to think that, going into GDC this year (and, indeed, after the first two days of GDC), I wasn't sure if I'd return next year: looking back, this year's conference has had an amazing effect on me. A long, deeply needed conversation with Michael Abbott and a completely unexpected talk by Brian Sharp have combined to significantly change my approach to one important aspect of my life a couple of months later.
I hope I'll be able to talk more about it soon. In the meantime: quite a ride.
My brain is in problem solving mode right now. Which can be a good thing, but I'm learning that it's a double-edged sword: I'm not at all convinced that the problem in question is one that it's useful for my brain to repeatedly remind me about. Sigh.
Still, interesting to watch. And a reminder of just how many suggestions my brain can come up with when it's in that mode. Given the right context, it's quite effective.
One optimistic spin to put on my thoughts from yesterday (spurred by a blog post I wrote yesterday): maybe I'm getting better at seeing textures, both in the existing behavioral space and in the possibility space. I'm not as good at seeing/navigating those spaces as I'd like, but still: improved vision is a plus.
If, of course, I'm not deluding myself, which is always a possibility! I'm certainly more tired than I'd like to be right now...
Been thinking a lot recently about how to best approach a situation at work. I have some ideas about where I'd like it to end up, and some idea about short-term steps that I hope will lead in the right direction, but it's not adding up properly, there's too much worry. I think that I should focus on the short-term steps and not get too wedded to specific outcomes; it's possible, though, that I'm just shying away from some of the issues involved and should behave more forcefully.
I was going to say that this mirrors issues that I'm thinking about in my life more broadly, but it really doesn't: there, I know I want to be doing something different (on a different scale), but possible outcomes are way too vague right now. The similarity is that I think I'm okay with the short-term steps; that's something, but I could use help brainstorming the bigger picture.
Probably a good time to be going on vacation. Though that may end up not giving me enough down time, either: maybe I really need to spend more time alone, just walking and thinking. And writing, always writing.
In the fall, I seemed to be becoming surprisingly close friends with three of my coworkers; interesting and pleasant, but two of those friendships have cooled significantly since then. And this turns out to have its own benefits, making it easier for me to pay attention to more of my coworkers. Which is interesting from a purely observational point of view - they're a distinctive bunch, I learn something from watching them, I enjoy interacting with them. And it's nice to have room for a larger number of lower-key friendships to develop; I've seen some of that happening over the last couple of months, I should spend more time nurturing that.
Not that I didn't enjoy the way things went in the fall: the coworkers in question are all people I still enjoy talking to, and I'm quite glad that one of those friendships has remained strong. But, in retrospect, it was both a bit exhausting and a bit myopic.
Hmm, I just edited out a third use of the word 'interesting' from the first paragraph. Honestly, I really do enjoy people on a pure personal level. (As long as there aren't too many of them around!) But it is doubtless clear to everybody who reads this blog that my brain is incapable of not going analytical at the drop of a hat.
Something I've seen several times recently: person A wants person B to do something or otherwise behave differently, and gets progressively unhappier as person B doesn't do it. Person A then considers whether the appropriate response is to continue bottling up his or her unhappiness, to come out with some sort of passive-aggressive snark, or to make a scene about it. Meanwhile, person B has no idea that person A wants him or her to do that.
In fact, I've done this myself recently; and if any of you reading this haven't, I salute you, because it's a very easy trap to fall into. But still: if there's something you want somebody else to do, try asking for that person to do it before you fall too far into a funk? It won't always work; but sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't work as intended but leads somewhere surprising and (on the balance) good, and when it fails you're almost never any worse off. And it can lead to a remarkable reduction of internal tension.
I'm better at asking in those situations than I used to be; I think I probably have Gerald Weinberg to credit for a fair amount of that? (Perhaps Delany, too.) Though, thinking more when writing this, GTD has also made a big difference, because it asks you to be clear about what you want to have happen, and whether or not you're waiting on somebody else for that to happen.
I like work a lot, but recently I've been more annoyed than usual at the number of silos that we have on the development team. Actually, "silos" might not be the right term, because that implies different groups with different areas of focus: what's really going on is more individual ownership of projects and areas of the code. (So: very skinny silos!) This has been the case everywhere I've worked (not so surprising, among other reasons because engineers don't like to talk to people), but this is the first job I've had where my manager considers that to be a feature rather than a bug. (To be fair, I think his feelings are a little more complex than that, but that's how I interpret his actual behavior.)
I'm not sure what the most productive way is to approach this. But after being bothered last night about recent planning meetings that were organized in an (in my view) excessively exclusionary way, I realized that that actually was a pretty good place to start, since it involved behavior that individual contributors could control. So I sent out an e-mail noting that my behavior was different than other people's behavior in this regard, and asking if the obvious interpretation (that other people liked to exclude people from meetings, and that I should therefore get with the program) was correct. And, fortunately, I got exactly the response I hoped for: a good number of people said that no, they liked being invited to meetings in areas where they didn't work on the code every day.
It'll be interesting to see if people's actual behavior changes as a result of that. And it will also be interesting to see how my manager responds, if at all; he didn't chime in on the e-mail thread. (Which is good management behavior on his part, I think: his responding too early could squelch discussion.)
Something I realized last week: everybody I've dated for longer than a month or two was a faculty brat. (As am I, of course.) That is, admittedly, a small sample size, but it's also a small population to choose from.
I may write about this eventually on the main blog; I'm still thinking it through. Certainly, despite the small sample size, this isn't a coincidence. With (at least?) two causes: clearly that's my type (or at least one of my types), but I'm also sure that the selection process works in the other way, that faculty brats are the most likely to appreciate my considerable peculiarities.
And: class runs deep.
I've worn my Sorority Life hoodie for the last couple of days, for three reasons:
It's been interesting: the third point is present, but already diminishing. So that's definitely good: I'm not drawn to femininity, but I'd like to be more in control of (or at least aware of!) my reactions there. And it's also reminded me of the fact that zippers are on the left side of women's clothing.
This experiment would, of course, be more powerful if the hoodie in question weren't mostly grey with a relatively small SL logo. Baby steps...
A former coworker (who reported to me for part of the time we worked together) asked me for a LinkedIn recommendation the other day. Which is something that I've never given before; and even though I think he's a good guy and would happily serve as a reference for him in general, I somehow didn't want to give a LinkedIn recommendation.
I'm not sure why. It had nothing to do with him: like I said, he's comfortably above the threshold for me to serve as a reference. And while I am a bit worried about this serving as a precedent that would make me harder for me to turn down other former coworkers who are beneath that threshold, I don't think that's the issue: I'm generally comfortable saying no to people. So I think it must either be something about public recommendations in general or LinkedIn in specific that I'm uncomfortable with.
I don't think I have any conscious philosophical dislike for public recommendations, but my guess is that I do have an general distaste for it. And, as social networks go, I certainly don't like LinkedIn as much as LinkedIn would like me to: I put my resume up there, I accept contact requests from coworkers and friends, and occasionally I'll even go through the recommended list and click on names myself, but I don't spend actual time there and I certainly don't want to turn it into any sort of hub.
I dunno. I wish I knew what was going on there, but not enough to actually spend more time thinking about it.
It had been clear for the last half year or so that it was time to buy a new TV for a while, but I'd been putting it off. Which is a little strange: I'm in general not actively adverse to electronics shopping?
I finally got around to doing a bit of research online and talking to friends, and noticed that I was enjoying the process. As I spent more time poking around Amazon, I realized: I actually wasn't averse to shopping for a new TV (and receiver) at all, my brain had just assumed that part of that shopping would involve going to a physical electronics store, and I apparently really didn't want to do that! So I thought about that for a bit, decided that I wasn't being irresponsible by not looking at TVs in person, and a day later everything was happily ordered from Amazon. (Incidentally, it turns out that, even with Amazon Prime, TV delivery still takes a week, so don't expect to get it quickly if you follow the same route.)
At first I assumed this reflected my dislike of shopping in stores. But the truth is that I actually like shopping in some kinds of stores just fine: I really like bookstores, I enjoy doing the grocery shopping every week. And I would expect electronics to be something I'd be okay with shopping for, too. I think that what's going on is that my mental model of a store where I would buy a TV is Best Buy; and I don't like the sales staff there, don't trust them to give me advice that has more to do with my needs than their financial incentives, and don't trust them to have configured their display models in ways that reflect how they'll actually look in my environment. So, when my subconscious puts all of that together, it can think of lots of other things it would rather be doing; and I'm certainly not going to say my subconscious is wrong in that judgment.
After reading my last fragment, a friend of mine e-mailed me saying how he noticed the extent of his negative reaction to use of "male" and "female" as nouns. (They're fine as adjectives.) Which I agree with, though it looks like my reaction isn't as strong as his, so I was surprised to hear that I'd made that mistake; looking at the fragment, though, there's an inappropriate use of "female" in the second sentence. Oops.
If I'd caught that myself, I would have just edited it out, even after publication. But now that he's pointed it out, doing that would feel like I'm hiding my mistakes. So, instead, I'm taking the opposite tack: after all, what is this blog about if not publicly embarrassing myself?
(And, of course, it's nice to have an extent to anonymously talk about another friend of mine. Or at least I find the idea strangely amusing: how long will it be before somebody who doesn't know me at all can trace out all of my friendships and their interconnections here?)
Reading Whipping Girl (which is excellent) got me thinking more about what made me uncomfortable about that coffee the last week. One of the specific topics that was discussed was another male participant's recent interactions with an apparently quite conventionally attractive female, and the fact that he didn't end up with the outcome that we're supposed to think is desirable (and that he probably did think was desirable!), namely having sex with her. (There was also some amount of friendly teasing of that participant for various other reasons, and some of that teasing was gender-linked.)
I am male. I do not, however, consider being male as an area of expertise. And so: I'm not particularly good at acting conventionally masculine (though I'm worse at acting conventionally feminine, and years ago discarded the two skirts that used to be in my closet). And I'm also not particularly good at expressing traditional masculine sexuality, so while I'm noticeably more attracted to women than to men, I'm not particularly attracted to women who are strongly marked as feminine. (In general, the latter is an active turn off for me; it is not a coincidence that Liesl hasn't shaved her legs in years and doesn't spend much time shopping for clothes, or for that matter that she gave me one of the aforementioned skirts.) And so, in retrospect, being in a context where somebody else was being teased for failings along those lines was probably at least as much a source of my discomfort as other aspects of the coffee were. (There certainly were other sources of discomfort: my introversion, and less-gender-linked ways in which the interactions marked me as unusual.)
Don't get me wrong: the other people involved are all people I like, and in fact (as I hope is obvious to them, but it always bears repeating) like quite a bit. And whom I had a pleasant dinner with tonight; I'm writing this post in part to try to understand why I actively enjoyed tonight's dinner instead of actively disliking it. And I take an active role in friendly teasing somewhat often myself; also, there's nothing at all wrong with most of the interactions in question. (Being reminded of the existence of differences is something that I in general view as morally neutral, even if I don't always enjoy it.) It's just a reminder of how this world encourages us to actively reinforce gender norms.
Continuing on the theme of "common social situations that my brain doesn't deal with in anything approaching a normal fashion": I was talking with some friends about birthdays this afternoon. Here is a list of things that I enjoy on my birthday:
The third of those is by far the most important. And here is a list of things that I don't enjoy on my birthday:
There are a few things going on here. One is that I, in general, actively dislike parties. Two is that, in general, my life is a quite happy one (despite the at times morose tone of this particular blog!); and, while there are always ways to improve that, restricting improvements to birthdays seems bizarre. So: if I enjoy spending time with you in some context and we do that regularly, great! Whereas if I don't enjoy spending time with you in some context, then why would I want to do so on my birthday of all times? (And the context there is key: there are lots of people that I enjoy spending time with in small groups but whose presence isn't enough to quell my strong desire to flee from large groups.)
And if I would enjoy spending time with you in some context but we don't do that regularly, then I'm happy to have a birthday be an excuse for fixing that! But the downside there is that if the birthday really is a noticeable outlier, then that will be as likely to make me feel mildly depressed as anything else: it would leave me wondering what's going on the rest of the time. (Don't get me wrong, that last situation is quite rare.)
Side notes: yes, I am aware that birthday celebrations aren't all about the person whose birthday it is, and I don't incorporate that enough into my analysis. And one of the many reasons why I am very lucky to be married to Liesl is that she is happily accepting of my several extreme quirks when it comes to holidays.
An interaction I had earlier this week: I was going out for coffee with a slightly larger group of friends than normal. (All people I enjoy interacting with in other circumstances, e.g. I quite enjoy playing board games with all of them, or talking with any of them one on one or even in slightly larger groups than that.) This time, the conversation ended up going in a direction that left me feeling alienated in the same way the company holiday party did: yes, there are reasons why we are friends, but still, we have pretty different approaches to our lives. (Some of them more than others; incidentally, earlier, I mentioned being at different stages of our lives, but while true, I don't currently think that's very relevant.) And, rather than deciding that this was an interesting difference (or coming up with a way to steer conversation in directions I would have enjoyed more), my brain simply decided that it would rather be elsewhere. Which was hard to do gracefully in that specific situation.
No big deal, certainly: an hour of unexpected boredom is, in general, enough to cause me to shrug my shoulders. What to do about that information in the future is less clear, though: I suspect that this particular mix of people in this particular context doesn't work well for me, but I will be a bit lonely if I stay away from related interactions. (Slightly different mixes of people in the same context, the same mix of people in different contexts.) But if I'm in the same situation again, it's not obvious to me how to redirect it to an interaction I would enjoy instead of one that leaves me feeling alienated: I can't very well say "I'd really not rather do this with all of you" or "I like spending time with all of you but only if we're playing games instead of just talking" without acting like an asshole.
I can try to gracefully withdraw from such situations a little earlier, but sidestepping isn't my favorite reaction to such situations; hoping that it won't happen again is also not a great solution. I'll probably do a mix of those approaches anyways, but hopefully tempered with enough observation to find a better path forward? And there are times when it would be convenient if my brain were better at enjoying common social interactions...
I may not have been thrilled about the company Christmas party last week, but yesterday was a good example of why my job is awesome. First, on a social level: one of my coworkers has been in a board game mood this week, so we played a game over lunch for the third time this week. (A five-player game of Settlers of Catan this time.) And my Scharffen-Berger order showed up earlier in the week, so we had a chocolate tasting party yesterday (two single-source chocolates plus their standard mocha and nibby), with rather interesting conversation.
Which is all well and good, but of course I'm actually getting paid to work, not to play and eat. And the programming yesterday was fascinating: I started chipping away at something that had been bothering me for a little while (in a way that will directly help an upcoming feature), and I got a really useful code review at the end of the day from one of my coworkers that had me rather regretting this morning that I wasn't going into work today to follow up on her suggestions. And we'd had a very productive planning meeting on Wednesday (which generated some useful ideas going in a quite different direction from what I'd expected entering the meeting) that I wrote up notes from yesterday, I'm also looking forward to helping implement that in the beginning of the new year.
Good times.
We had the company holiday party this Friday. Which was at a local winery, followed by dinner, followed by a pub. And which started off depressingly: I had a lovely conversation during the first five minutes of the bus ride, but I spent the remainder of the ride listening and realizing that those who surrounded me had a very different approach to (some aspects of) life from me, were at a quite different stage of their lives, or both.
The winery started off bad, too: over-oaked wine, and while I'm no wine expert, I can say with confidence that the cheese and chocolate that they served it with were bad. So: if they don't take food seriously (or aren't aware that they're serving bad food), why should I take their wine seriously? But then things got better: I played a game of go against three of my coworkers who were collaborating on move choices, and then played Medici with one of them; we played a couple more games of Medici on the bus to the restaurant, it's a good game that works well on the iPad.
The food at the restaurant was nice: not exceptional, but certainly better than at the winery. And I enjoyed the conversation, including a discussion with a Korean colleague of mine about K-Pop groups and Korean dramas. I, along with about a third of my colleagues, skipped out on the pub and took an earlier bus back: while the early employees all enjoy alcohol-focused occasions, more recent employees feel less uniformly so. I mostly read on the ride back; there was one conversation going on nearby that sounded like I would have enjoyed it, but I was just far enough away that my inertia overcame my desire to participate.
All in all, pleasant enough: it started off making me feel more alienated from my coworkers, which presumably wasn't the desired effect, but had the reverse effect by the end. And probably I should change the balance of how much time I spend with which coworkers...
Like a lot of people, I'm not thrilled with version 4.0 of the iPhone Twitter client; but what bugs me the most is a small thing, namely it's way of handling Instapaper. For one thing, you have to click on the article before saving it; that isn't particularly inefficient (you don't have to wait for the article to actually load), but it feels conceptually wrong to me, since I'm explicitly deciding not to read the article right then. But what's wrong on a more pragmatic level is that it no longer saves the text of the referring tweet in Instapaper, making it almost impossible for me to credit the referrer if I decide to link to that saved article on my linkblog.
I gave Tweetbot a try; it saved the text of the referring tweet but not its author, which is almost as useless for citation purposes. And Tweetbot has a whole other host of issues around state and strange ways of tapping (double-tapping, tap-and-hold). So I think I'm going back to the official client; but I miss Tweetie. It's certainly surprising how much of a difference these apparently small design decisions make to me.
Right now I'm trying to learn the 6-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering. Which is a quite thorny piece, and makes me realize that I really don't understand the process of how music gets into my fingers. I'm not memorizing it, and it seems like there are too many notes / fingering decisions for me to be able to parse it, even with annotations, but somehow I'm learning the piece anyways.
How much of that is muscle memory? I'm sure that auditory memory is quite important, but I don't understand the mechanism: does auditory memory help with muscle memory, does it improve my ability to parse, it that reduce my need to parse, does it help in other ways?
Amazing piece. As is the 3-Part Ricercar: there, my brain has gone through a phase transition after I've gotten it into my fingers where I can pick out the voices much much better than I'd been able to before, hugely improving my options when interpreting the piece. If I can get to that state with the 6-Part Ricercar, it will feel wonderful.