Last full working week of the year is done. On Wednesday it was our Xmas do. A big quiz in the office, then a meal for 70 people and then a few more drinks around the beautiful city centre of Sheffield. Lots of sorry individuals the next day, including myself.
In more productive work news we ran a migration test on a huge change we are working on. The first run of it went smoothly but took 8 hours which is a bit too long. We ran it on a beefed up AWS box and it completed in under 4 hours…eventually. We managed to break it a couple of times while running it. One of our platform engineers managed to delete the database while it was still running. He was very apologetic and rebuilt the database. He also renamed it u-live-db-temp-dont-delete-knobhead-colin-cluster which amused me greatly.
Another big task was road mapping for the new year. An Idealised massive list of all the things we need to do. Divide by resource, sprinkle over some prioritisation sugar and you have an unrealistic set of probably not going to get done stuff. Splendid. Lots to still work on. How to represent non-development work? How to size things at such an early stage? How to focus on outcomes over a big list of projects and features? How to set up squads and teams on projects or products or platform? How many more staff do we need?
Outside of work I seem to have got a bit addicted to word puzzle apps. Crosswords, Type Shift and Wordscapes. Ruined my reading focus as I only finished a Mick Herron short of 60 pages. Need to fix that I think.
Ran up a few (small) hills for the first time in a while. It was painful but very glad I did it. Trying to get into a routine of running to work on a Monday and a Thursday (managed a PB this week). Then a longer hillier run on a Saturday morning in the build up to the Sheffield half marathon in April.
Exercise and diet going pretty well. On the way out of the house my youngest son told me I looked small. I assumed this meant he thought I had lost weight rather than a damning indictment about my leadership and authority.
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