I sometimes wonder if I'm not sufficiently stressed by the pandemic. Or if I'm just in a place of such privilege and lucky happenstance as to be mostly unaffected. Reading Twitter I am supposed to be under enormous stress. I think some of that is that my Twitter is heavy on US sentiments and that makes lots of sense there. I'm not and I have socialized healthcare, have been remote for two years and apparently don't worry about this particular thing very much. It helps that the trendlines are quite good here. So I feel like I'm in a parallel universe. That said. Be kind to yourselves, we all go through things differently.

I am eminently more concerned with the day-to-day of work + life = balance and how a baby weighs into that calculation. It is going fine but also a continuous challenge.

I've had some good conversation with the direct consultation booking. I like being exposed to a new person, new domain, new problemset and helping people check their assumptions and weighing in based on my experience. Quite fruitful.

Oh yeah. I'm trying out vlogging on the blog. Speaking into a camera is weird but speaking in public, on camera and to audiences is something I want practice in. So I figure, just do the thing. If you hate it, let me know, would save me some time. If it is interesting at all, also, let me know.

Publishing since last time:

• Vlog - 2020-09-07
• Is this evil? - This one made the rounds on Hacker News and Changelog, welcome new subscribers.
• Vlog - 2020-09-17
• Vlog - 2020-09-22 - Helping Junior Developers

Putting systems in place

In a call last week for the Lumen project team the idea was brought up that we should have ongoing progress reports for the website. I manage the website. On another end, I recently set up the Beambloggers.com webring as a place for people blogging about Erlang, Elixir, et.al. to gather and cross-promote. I also run a simple web development self-evaluation site.

When setting up beambloggers.com and the web-dev site I set them up on a linode, mostly by hand with some simple scripting to simplify some things. I currently have to deploy beambloggers.com by hand whenever a new PR comes in. Quite inconvenient.

And for the Lumen work I just knew that any kind of weekly or bi-weekly update schedule would be hard to maintain on its own. Chasing down people to ask them what they did last week isn't how I want to spend my time.

All well-working habits I have are formed around systems. Either from necessity or from active intent. The morning is easy enough for me. Alarm goes off, do some basic kitchen maintenance chores, have breakfast, get freshened up. Go outside to the office. The morning routine is kept in check by being time-blocked and also at the very start of the day. It is easy to maintain if I do it every morning. Anything I add to the start of the day is much more reliable than things I try to do in the evening. Because my evenings are jagged and unruly things full of cooking, baby management and failed put-to-sleep attempts. I can impose my will on my morning, my wife and baby are asleep. Morning generally occurs when the alarm goes off.

When I hit the office the calendar takes over. Writing is on the calendar. Recording is on the calendar. Client work is on the calendar. But not all things are created equal and "start work on Lumen weekly update" is not a good calendar item for me. So I put a system in place. There's a script I can run that will look at when the last post was made, run through all relevant repos and relevant authors, pull the git logs as a basis for writing and create a draft post, create a branch, create a PR for editing it and tag the concerned people. They add their summaries, when I see the summaries come in I do an editing pass and add any notes. And then it is ready to go. Or that's the idea. First run worked well.

The idea here is, I get bored and distracted easily. Looking through and figuring out what has been done is not my idea of a good time for something that is a spare time contribution. So I try to automate. Now this script can run weekly and it will create these incremental updates that only require me to check up on it for the actual human piece. And team members are empowered to contribute their own summaries of their own work inside tools they use daily anyway (this case, Github).

So for Beambloggers.com and the web-dev site I'm looking to do continuous delivery and just have it update the site whenever I choose to merge a PR. Still setting that up. But that's the way I want all the things I run to be. Hands off for work that is repetitive and can be automatic. Work that doesn't teach me anything new, that doesn't require creative or mindful input. Now the setup I'm planning to use for the CD will probably be enough for more than one blog post. Because it is a bit of a journey. But just generally, I want it to mostly take care of itself.

So how does the editing work for finishing up a Lumen post end up on the calendar you might say? Well, it is mostly true that the calendar rules my day. But there are other signals. Interrupts from Slack and other messenging apps. I check my email and act on things there. Right now I'm spending a lot of time in Github and that inbox is also continuously a source of signals. So with that, when I see mail notifications or pings on Slack that the relevant team members have summarized their work, I'll go in and do my pass and then publish by merging.

The thing is, if it needs planned time it goes on the calendar. If it requires me to react to it, it should send me a signal in the form of an email or message. If I want to capture it for later planning it goes in my todo-manager.

I like doing multiple things. But that means keeping a tight leash on the amount of hands-on work I end up dumping into things that can be automated. I think if you know you'll do something twice, it requires more steps than what you find comfortable and it would be trivial to shell-script. Do it.

Now I should look into how best to auto-forward all well-formed receipts to my accountant. Because that I do not have on lock.

If you have questions or thoughts, just reply or send an email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading, I appreciate it.

- Lars Wikman