I’m rebranding this monthly post to “Achievement Unlocked” to match what other people have, and cos it sounds more fun!

Just before writing this, I was:

Having a post-lunch lazy arvo nap 😴

This past month, I achieved:

  • 🎤 Doing an engineering-wide tech talk at work (my biggest so far) on the sprawling billing landscape in the Campaign Monitor product after fifteen years of growth (hint: it’s quite difficult for our own developers to reconcile the many business rules)
  • 🧘‍ Started doing yoga for the very first time - it’s offered at work on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I finally showed up to a session. It’s really a good feeling when you show up for yourself and make the time to do something new and challenging, and I’m looking forward to getting better at it
  • 🚲 Got back into cycling, including commuting to work by bicycle two days this month
  • 🛠 Contributed back to the internal design system in the form of a bugfix to a React component we had modified for the project we’re working on now
  • 🍄 Cooked some new meals, including a delicious “exotic” mushroom stir fry that I recommend trying, even though it involved buying $15 worth of mushrooms
  • 🔍 Took a very brief look at Elixir, a subset of Erlang which has intrigued me for some time with its resilience handling
  • Started one new book:
  • ✅ Kept to my “positive change” from last month and only went grocery shopping to a prepared shopping list
  • Saw Regina Spektor live!

This past month, I learned:

A little bit more about how much I loathe change; a pretty big organisational change got announced in the past month that I was unprepared for and which affected me directly. Whilst it was mostly a positive change, it reminded me that I’m very resistive to change and don’t cope well when it happens.

I tend to get super insecure, try and work out whether I was the cause for the change, iterate through all the potential ways in which that could’ve been the case, and speculate about the worst case scenario (which usually involves me losing my ability to work effectively and care about what I do). For the rest of the day I was basically useless and unable to work, so I just bummed around and went for a really long walk.

I think that once the change had sunk in and I’d clarified what exactly it meant for me on a day-to-day basis (moving away from my focus on billing and towards more UX-heavy product features).

There’s a few key takeaways in relation to change that I got out of it:

  • It’s ok to have some time to let the change sink in, and to breathe through it all
  • It’s important to clarify why the change happened, and how it’ll likely impact me
  • It’s valuable to see the change through before judging it completely - I’m now doing some really interesting work that I am enjoying the technical implementation of
  • It’s worthwhile making clear to others that you are struggling a little bit with it, and that most of them are able to help you work through it

This past month, I got bored of:

Nothing really - I’m actually pretty sure I never put anything interesting for this question, I might delete it tbh.

But that’s OK, because I enjoyed:

Listening to some new tunes - I’m really into The Internet at the moment.

Today, something that made me happy was:

I went on a coffee date with a really interesting person.

Today, something I could’ve done better was:

Listened more and interrupted less 😛

Tomorrow I’m going to:

Go frisbee’ing with a good pal I haven’t caught up with in awhile!

In August, I’m looking forward to:

  • Going out for my friend Suji’s birthday
  • A 50th birthday party!!
  • The return of my friend Olivia - she’s been in Europe since mid-June and I’m keen for her to be back :)
  • Learning more about Elixir
  • Seeing Flight Facilities live again - I saw them first at the very first FOMO festival up in Brisbane, but I hadn’t really listened to them much at the time. I love this band now and I’m hyped.
  • PyCon 2018, which I’m super excited about
  • DDD Sydney, a .NET focussed developer community conference
  • The launch of a new project we’re working on at work

In August, I’m going to make the positive change of:

Bike riding to/from home one day a week. It’s time to get back in the habit of regular fitness!

One thing on my to-do list is:

Reread this Rands article on the benefit of anti-flow states during the weekend.

One happy photo from the past month is:

This pretty awesome sunset shot I got of the container yards out in Sydenham next to a bunch of highrise apartment blocks being built in Alexandria.

After this post, I’m going to:

Go shopping for dinner - a delicious tagine!