Wed Mar 01 2023

Feb 2023 Month Notes

in: month-notes

Year Goals for 2023

  • continue becoming a better engineer and team-mate
  • practice Italian every day
  • train at the gym at least twice a week every week
  • 8 leisurely cycle rides
  • visit Italy at least twice

How did February go?

In reverse order

Visit Italy at least twice

I'm still figuring out when Italy #2 will be. I'd love to take daughter #1 to Sicily and then catch the train back up through the country. I can work, she can study, and we can both enjoy the food and culture. Maybe a pipe-dream…

8 leisurely cycle rides

0 cycle rides in Feb.

Lots of parenting and responsibilities this month, so very little time for myself. And the bags under my eyes are proof of that 🙈

train at the gym at least twice a week

We were away in Cornwall for half term and so I managed 3 times a week while I was at home. And 2 times a week the 2 weeks that the trip overlapped with. But the dog and I went for a long run while in Cornwall and I accidentally went for a very long walk there. Turns out South West and South East are not the same direction 🤣

Here I am just after turning around, trying to figure out how to get back on track. At this point in time I thought I was all the way on the right-hand edge of that map segment 😅

an OS map showing my position in Cornwall

I don't ache everywhere all the time anymore. And, actually, feel pretty good. Plus time at the gym is uninterrupted pod-cast time. So, I'm happy with that.

Practice Italian every day

✅ only a few minutes at a time, but I did it every day.

Still trying to get my Dad to talk to me in Italian habitually. 🇮🇹

Continue becoming a better engineer and team-mate

I've been concentrating on this more this month. We joke a lot about being a group of lone wolves and in sprint planning I was described as "wolfing with everyone". I guess that's a good thing 😅

My GCSE physics teacher told us to always start solving a problem with a diagram. This month's work was tricky, slow, and frustrating. But when I took the time to draw a diagram or two, and then go for an accidentally long walk, my brain was prepared, and my subconscious figured out how to make the complicated thing much, much less complicated.

a diagram of the problem I was trying to solve

One of my favourite engineering aphorisms is from Kent Beck: "for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change".

This particular piece of work, I had three attempts at that had to be abandoned because of side-effects to the change. By the time I'd simplified it, it was a less than 1-day change. Here's an example of one of the pieces of simplication https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/pull/14348.

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