Inspired by rifling through barrucadu’s interesting blog, I have decided to give writing weeknotes a try.
I have never kept a daily diary before and, if I’m being honest, always found the concept a bit overwhelming. However, going through barrucadu’s weeknotes, I got the sense that they can serve as a good log of the goings-on in my life. I told myself, “At some point in the future, I may rifle through my old weeknotes to recollect what was happening in my life at some point in time.” And that thought really struck a chord with me, so here goes nothing!
Work
Due to my work being in the consulting space, I will not be in a position to share much here on a weekly basis. What I will try to do is capture the technical work that I did and what I learnt out of that without divulging client-specific information.
Having said that, the past week was largely uneventful. This has been the case for the past few weeks. And seeing as we are in the phase of enhancing a product we have already developed, this is not a huge surprise.
Besides that, yesterday we had the penultimate meetup of an internal training program I have been part of for the past 4 months. This program has been built for cultivating the next line of technical principals at Thoughtworks. Of the two sessions we had yesterday, the first was primarily around the challenges faced in scaling large-scale client engagements. We thoroughly enjoyed the second one where one of our current technical principals shared their leadership journey in an intensely personal and thought-provoking session.
Learning
I finally got around to completing one of the homeworks given to us as part of the aforementioned training program. It was this Udemy course on Change Management. Having been part of a handful of projects that I felt didn’t reach their potential due to a lack of adoption, I found the structure presented for managing change by Vicki Hart to be really thought-provoking. I have taken a bunch of notes in my personal space, and I hope to be able to apply the learnings in a future project.
I migrated away from my Mail in a Box setup to Protonmail. I find not having to manage my own mail server strangely invigorating. As part of the process, I also setup my entire website (including this blog) on a NixOS VPS on Linode. I will capture this experience as part of a separate blog sometime soon.
Gaming
For the first time in almost 2-3 years, I finally got around to gaming on my PC. I really cannot say how this happened. I had been binge-watching gaming videos on Youtube over the past couple of weeks, starting with Beaglerush’s Live and Impossible Series to Gameranx’s Gaming Lists, so that’s one possible explanation.
In any case, I installed and played a bit of X-Com: Enemy Within (Long War Rebalance), Invisible Inc, Into the Breach, and Ori and the Blind Forest. I got my butt handed to me in both Invisible Inc and Into the Breach, having to restart my campaigns multiple times in both games; although I greatly enjoyed the experience. But I spent the most amount of time with Ori and the Blind Forest, which I played for my spouse who loved the cuteness of Ori.