Weeknotes 002

Feb 16 2020

I chaired the tech fortnightly. It is an open agenda; anyone can put a topic in and speak. I always forget how much work it is to co-ordinate the events. Finding people to talk and suggesting topics takes more time than I expect.

I presented three things I have enjoyed while learning some Python. It sparked some good discussion in a community which does day to day work in Ruby. I am glad that my presentation served as a conversation starter. I want the tech fortnightly to become more two sided discussions rather than one sided presentations. I was a little dismissive of JavaScript in the middle of my talk, which I regret. It is insensitive to those who work primarily in JavaScript.

I started working on a prototype to explore data from a satisfaction survey. This involved putting together a database schema from a spreadsheet of data of denormalised and anonymised data. I inadvertently created quite a large chunk of what is a generic survey data design in the process.

I also attended a strategy workshop with other lead developers, head of tech and senior product managers. Thinking strategically is a skill in which I am not practiced. I still fall back to thinking of solutions and immediate implementation detail.

I spent some time tidying up my vale linting setup. Writing to vale’s exacting standard is hard!