Do NOT use Agile! (sometimes)

A good friend of mine received some distressing news recently. Her client was "migrating" to Agile methodologies, and wanted to use Agile to run their project. She had a theoretical understanding of what Agile is, but no practical idea of how to implement it. She asked if we could talk through it, and I agreed.

The discussion was really frustrating. About three minutes into the description of her project (including the people and politics involved), I realized that an Agile approach to their project was fraught with peril. It reminded me of something that you won't hear me say very much: there are times when it is a BAD idea to use Agile, or at least, unnecessary to do so if there's any organizational inertia.

Let's cover a couple of non-negative situations where Agile isn't a necessity to successful project delivery.

Short Projects

Projects that would typically encompass only one or two Agile iterations are probably easily handled via any methodology. As such, don't feel like you have to jump through all the ceremonial and artifact-centric hoops that are required for most Agile approaches. To be clear, you CAN run these projects in an Agile manner, but it's not necessary. Note that software package/solution spikes fall into this category for me (since they take anywhere from a day to a couple of weeks at most).

Simple Projects

A short project isn't necessarily simple, and a long project isn't necessarily complex. I'm defining "simple" projects as projects that are solving problems that have already been solved in well-known ways, or projects whose outcomes aren't very important. R&D projects might fall into this category. For me, secondary ETL projects are commonly in this category: a client needs to add a new data feed to an extant data stream, and the input mechanism is going to be the same as the original one. This is probably pretty simple, and doesn't mandate an Agile approach.

Fixed Triple Constraints Projects

For projects where each side of the triple constraint triangle are truly fixed, Agile approaches aren't necessary. Contracts with governmental agencies might be this way, for example. Projects where the budget is fixed with a hard deadline and a specific scope can succeed with a Waterfall approach. I would still argue that the team *could* improve delivery iteratively via introspection and subsequent changes, but the project could still be successfully delivered without this.

Alright, now let's get into the less happy reasons to avoid Agile. Note that none of the following reasons are indictments -- Agile practitioners should also be pragmatists, and that's where these observations come from.

Teams Lacking An Agile Spirit

Not everyone can embrace change. Not everyone is confident enough to be kindly yet firmly honest with their teammates. Not everyone cares enough to do more than "their share." Not everyone wants to take on the responsibility of self-direction and organization. That's all OK -- Agile really isn't for everyone. If you have team members that are REALLY against Agile practices, it might not be worth trying. Or, you could see if there is another team on which those folks would fit better (which would be my advise). However, sometimes there aren't *any* teams that want to do Agile, because...

Organizations Lacking An Agile Spirit

Some organizations hear about Agile, send people to training, and then try to become Agile by using all of the Agile tools without understanding that Agile is a way of thinking about solving problems and interacting with people. Most of the organizations I've gone into trying to do Agile transformations (moving from traditional to Agile approaches) fall into this unfortunate category. They try to fit their current roles into Agile role titles. They try to create a Gantt chart on an Agile information radiator. They don't understand that Agile is about doing something fundamentally different, and instead fall into the trap of doing something operationally familiar with new tools.

Organizations Where Agile Has No C-Level Support

If you want to make a transformation from traditional to Agile project approaches, you *have to* have high-level executive support. The change is painful for most organizations, and there is typically incredible inertia in every aspect. Having someone high up that can mandate the changes until they are done makes this more possible. The fundamental problem with Agile approaches when no muckety muck is directing the change is that too many people/things in the organization can accidentally or intentionally sabotage the efforts.

Back to the discussion with my friend...

We wound up going through the twelve principles described in the Agile Manifesto. The groups involved with her project could legitimately enact a couple of them, had a chance of adhering to a couple more, but would absolutely fail to adhere to at least half of them. If you an go through that list and be honest about your ability to live them out, you should have a pretty good idea of whether your project is a good candidate for an Agile approach. At the very least, you'll have lots of good talking points about places/things you'll need to change in order to do Agile projects in the future.

In my friend's case, I suspect that the client mainly wanted to "do Agile" with them because they wanted visibility into why it took so long and cost so much to do what I would classify as "simple" projects. I advised my friend to talk to the client and ask if they simply wanted to be on some daily standups to see where the churn happens. Something as simple as that might satisfy the client without having to do a full-blown Agile implementation. I haven't heard back yet, but suspect that this is the track they will follow.

So the next time someone unexpectedly wants to do an Agile project with you, take the time to make sure it's a good candidate. Look for the pitfalls of team and organizational challenges. If the project clears the Agile principles pretty well, go for it. If not, it's worth more discussion before launching into an Agile approach that might've been doomed from the start...

Your Random May Vary: Addendum

My coworker and good friend Tim has provided a bunch of good information in response to my last post. I'm posting it here (mostly) unedited, because it sheds light on the underlying principles.

"sir, you have posted something false to the internet and it is my duty to berate you for it!

combining multiple random numbers is not the same thing as choosing a random number between bigger values.

it flys in the face of one of the most beautiful underlying principles of statistics (possibly the only beautiful thing about statistics):

If you add together many random numbers, you get a NORMAL DISTRIBUTION!
Isn't that interesting... I wonder why the normal distribution pops up so often? Oh that's right because this sort of thing happens all the time. Think about it for a bit; if you flip a coin 6 times, what is the probability of getting all heads? Is it the same as rolling a 6? Nope... you have a might higher probability of getting 3 heads than getting 6 heads. You might not notice it much for six goes, but if you flip a coint 18 times, you are very unlikely to get 18 in a row. It's because the distribution of outcomes is very different, not because one is more or less random than the other.

d&d is built on this principle; creating pseudo normalized random distributions by combining dice rolls.

If you want a better explination of this (and the 3 principles of statistics) I highly recommend reading the short chapter on statistic from "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses" -- Jesse Schell. You can get it from the local library for free and the chapter is really concise and illuminating. The whole book is excellent actually."

Many thanks to Tim for the info!

NaNoWriMo Part 1

And here you thought it would be November 30th before you got another post...

November has, admittedly, been a busy month both personally and professionally. On the work front, we've been trying to secure a deal with a new, rather large, client. The good news is that the client is not only very interested in our product, but more highly motivated than we'd anticipated. We've had several sets of discovery meetings, and I'm happy to say that we're now engaged in a proof-of-concept implementation with them. We are VERY excited about this.

On the personal front, I need to offer full disclosure to you. I had surgery about halfway through October that has kept me pretty inactive for the past six weeks. That, in some ways, is a good thing. The forced inactivity allowed me some extra time to do something that I've wanted to do for years and never got the full motivation to finish...

This year, I entered NaNoWriMo again, for the first time in a long time.

For those of you that aren't familiar with NaNoWriMo and didn't click the link, here's the executive summary.

<snipped from the website>
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing.

On November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 PM on November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought about writing a novel.
<end snip>

I first heard about NaNoWriMo at least seven years ago (and most likely eight or more). That first year, I had a severe false start and only got about 6,000 words in before giving up. The second year I doubled that total, but also fell flat on my face at that point. As a side note, that was the year that my friend Staci Linson entered and produced a book that might still be unfinished at 100,000 words (if memory serves). The next several years were no-go's for me altogether, although I considered it every year. I always managed to find "reasons" not to do it.

But this year was different. I had been getting up early to work out since the spring, and then surgery happened. So when November rolled around, I knew I could carve an hour out of the day just by getting back into the "waking up early" routine. I also had at least a vague sense of what I could write about as well. I created my official NaNoWriMo profile on Hallowe'en; I was all set to go. I set the alarm for 5:30 the next morning, and fell quickly asleep.

I woke up from a dream before my alarm went off on November 1. The dream was an interesting one. I made the decision to use that dream as the basis for my NaNoWriMo story instead of the original vague thoughts I'd had. I realized it was a completely different direction and that I had absolutely no idea of where it would go (much less how it would end), but I trusted that something interesting would evolve. I later found out that NaNoWriMo has a badge for this behavior. I am a Pantser. Simply put, a plotter is someone who plans out the entire novel before writing it. A pantser is someone who, “flies by the seat of their pants,” meaning they don't plan out anything, or plan very little. Some people, call themselves “plantsers,” which means they're in a little of both. (thanks to The Writing Practice for the succinct definitions).

So, I had a brand new story in my head. I opened Scrivener, created a new novel project, and started writing. What happened next was completely unexpected, and I look forward to telling you about it in the next installment.

And yes, I know I'm an incorrigible tease...

Another great outing...

I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to the great folks in the MIS 374 class at UT Austin.  The students and instructors (Clint and Bruce) are fantastic and gracious.  For those of you that don't know, I do a guest lecture for the class once a semester on Agile Principles, and always enjoy the experience.  This semester's lecture was last Monday, and I wanted to touch on something cool.

This year was a new experience, both for the students and for me.  The MIS 374 class has moved into a new classroom, one of the Active Learning Classrooms at the McCombs School of Business.  Instead of being set up as a lecture classroom, the students sit around mobile tables with white boards and displays on every wall.  It made the presentation quite a bit more interactive, as I could walk around the room while I talked.

It also provided an opportunity to trim down the lecture to the bare-bones, this-will-help-you-on-you-project things while making a class-participation exercise possible.  We wound up doing a prioritization exercise, where the instructor took the role of the product owner and did an initial prioritization of the product backlog.  The students then stood around the backlog and asked the instructor questions about why they had prioritized the cards thusly.  They then pushed back and suggested that a different order would be more sensible, or less risky, or higher value based on how the instructor answered the questions.

Hopefully, the exercise made the lecture more real for the students than it was in lectures past.  In either case, I'm really pleased with the new format and the new classrooms, and look forward to doing it again.  Only next time, there will be even LESS lecture and MORE group exercises!

Switching contexts

WARNING!  There's some technical stuff in this one.  Skim over anything that makes you too cross-eyed.

My first computer was a Commodore 64.  I got it in the 6th grade, and it was a fantastic computer, I didn't do much programming on it (I was only 11 years old at the time), but I did play a ton of games with it.  It became my de facto gaming machine, graduating from the coarse user experience of the Atari 2600 (which I also played the heck out of, and may it rest in peace).

When the power supply for the Commodore 64 eventually burned out, I graduated to the Commodore 128.  Again, I did very little programming on it, and in fact spent most of my time booting into 64 mode in order to play games.  This was a wonderful feature for me, as I didn't have to learn very many new operations.

My mom got an Apple IIc at some point in my junior high or high school career, but I didn't warm to it too much -- too different from the Commodore line, and I was pretty loyal to my current context.  Mom eventually got a Vendex Headstart II, which was the computer I used up until my junior year of college.  It had a word processor, which was the most important thing to me since I needed to type papers.  Nevermind the fact that I couldn't type properly.  :-)

My junior year of college was a turning point for me, as I got an IBM PS/2 25 SX running Windows 3.1.  From that point on, I was a PC/Windows guy.  I spent the next 20 years doing software development in that technology stack, being mostly successful along the way.

Two years ago, I joined a company that doesn't do Windows/PC development, and the default work station was a MacBookPro.  It took me a while, but I managed to get a pretty fair handle on the new paradigm.  I suppose an old dog can learn new tricks when forced to.  I liked the machine so much that when it came time to replace my personal computer, I went with a small MacBookPro instead of a Windows PC.  This marked the first time I ever bought an Apple computer for myself.

Despite this new-found adoration of Apple, I've been trying to keep tabs on the Windows world.  Some really good things are happening in the company.  I installed a release candidate of Windows 10 on my personal MacBookPro (using VirtualBox) and ran it quite successfully.  I was very pleased with the changes they made, dumping most of the annoying Windows 8 features and pulling some of the best things about Windows 7 forward (including the Start button).

Two days ago, I took the plunge; I created a BootCamp partition and installed Windows 10 on my personal MBP.  The installation went flawlessly.  Dual-booting has been a breeze.  I've been really pleased with the experience so far.

There are, of course, some struggles.  Strangely, they aren't in anything to do with the software.  Instead, they have to do with the small context switching that's required when going between the operating systems.

Key bindings are the worst.  For example: in OSX, you press command+tab to toggle through open applications.  On Windows, you should use alt+tab.  They're right next to each other on the keyboard, and I constantly press the wrong combination (aside: Windows 10 handles this quite gracefully; OSX does not).  The command versus alt/ctrl context switch is rough.

A minor context switch has to do with the trackpad.  On OSX, you can tap the surface to click.  On Windows 10, you have to click the trackpad to click.  It's a subtle difference, but my fingers tend to ache a bit if I have to click the trackpad too much.

The good news is that even though I'm struggling a little, it doesn't have anything to do with either OS -- it's a PEBKAC issue.  If you've been considering trying Windows 10, I encourage you to do so (especially if you're on Windows 8).  I won't try to convince anyone from the OSX crowd.  They're pretty loyal to their current context...

It's been a month, part 5: work!

Work has been... pretty great actually.  I really don't have anything I can legitimately complain about, which is quite a statement coming from me.  I can typically see the worst in every situation (especially when I'm in a mood), but in this instance I have to admit that everything is going as well as can be expected.  Our team is coming together really well and producing a ton of great code in remarkably little time.  The team is, simply put, awesome.

Before I get ahead of myself... let's rewind a bit to cover recent events.

Trip to California

June included a work trip to California.  I've mentioned this in a couple of other posts, but wanted to take a moment to elaborate on why the work part of this trip was also great.

First of all, what was I doing?  One of the projects I've been working on at Outpace is an in-room device for when a person stays at a Starwood hotel.  When you check in at a participating property, the hotel system sends the check-in message back to Starwood's data center, which then publishes the event to our system.  Our system then looks at all of the available data on you, the property, the reservation itself, etc., and determines which promotions are best suited to you.  Meanwhile, the tablet in your room asks our system what content it ought to be showing.  After we have received the check-in event and determined the best content for you, we tell the tablet to change its display.  By the time you get to your room, you see content on the device that has be picked specifically for you (or for people very much like you).  Pretty neat idea, huh?

We were provisioning devices, doing staff training, changing master content, and providing general production rollout support for the week I was there.  I got to hang out with Albert and Daniel quite a bit.  Beyond working, we walked/ran to the beach, ate good food, drank good wine, had existential discussions, and played fun games.  That is a great way to spend a work week!

Attrition

Not everyone has been able to adapt to the reshaped Outpace System, however.  This is to be expected -- after large layoff, people test the waters to see if there are other (typically more stable) opportunities to be had.  Since June, we've had several people decide to take other jobs.  I've been genuinely saddened to see each of them go.  At the same time, I'm genuinely excited when folks find things that they really enjoy doing.  So I always feel strangely when someone leaves on their own.

To my knowledge, three people have left so far.  I know that there are two more in the process of transitioning their workloads to other people so that they can leave.  By the end of August, five people will have left the company voluntarily since Not April Fool's Day.  That is about 1/6 of our remaining force, making us a company of roughly 25 people.  We're still a really strong team, and a good size for a normal start-up.  However, if there's anything that is a bit of a drag about the company right now, it's that people are leaving from time to time.

Working with Tanya

On a happier note, I've been able to pair with Tanya quite a bit over the past month.  This is always a treat for me, because there is no one in the world that is better at teaching me stuff about problem solving.  She's always patient, which is a great thing because I'm really grumpy while I'm trying to learn something.

As an aside, I've been told that I have unrealistic expectations of myself.  People don't normally have master over subject matter that they haven't practiced/studied constantly for at least a fair amount of time.  I fully expect that I'll understand and be productive with something foreign after an afternoon of watching someone else do it.  OK, that's a slight exaggeration -- it might be a morning and and afternoon.  In any case, I get frustrated with I'm not good at something.  Tanya handles that better than anyone else I've ever met.  It's actually quite unfair to her, since my knowledge that she can deal with it makes me behave more badly than I would with other folks.

The other thing about Tanya is that she is REALLY FREAKIN' PRODUCTIVE.  I've known this for a long time, but since we hadn't worked together much at Outpace until the past month, I'd lost sight of the fact.  She constantly gets stuff done, with high quality and an eye towards extensibility.

Long story short: I'm glad she works at my company and that I get to work with her directly sometimes.  She's THE BEST!

Working with the boys

And finally, I've been working with the boys.  Every summer we try to do at least one thing that helps us learn something.  This summer, we decided to try our hand at learning Python using codecademy.com.

Even though both boys professed to actually desiring to do the coding stuff, neither one seems very eager when I bring it up.  I get the feeling that they do this in order to please me instead of out of a genuine desire to learn something.  I guess I can understand that.  I still remember summers between school years as being times where all I really wanted to do was play video games, watch movies, and go swimming.

For now, I've decided not to push them too hard on the coding stuff.  My hope is that they'll be exposed to enough variety of activities (via the trips we take and the stuff we do) that they'll find something that they enjoy doing that might eventually translate into a way to make a living.  Unless someone starts paying a lot more money for watching other people play games on twitchtv or youtube, they might have a hard time... :-D

This wraps up the "it's been a month" series.  I hope you enjoyed reading it -- I enjoyed writing it!  Next month is my birthday month, so I would expect that I'll be back to the usual shenanigans soon.  Until then... enjoy!

It's been a month, part 1: traveling!

Apparently, I've had other things to do besides write blog entries... What have I been up to for the past month?  Quite a bit, actually.  I'll do you a favor and break the info up into a short series of five posts: Traveling, Games, Books, Fitness, and Work.  There will probably be some overlap with several of them.  Let's start with traveling!

I've made a couple of trips in the past month: one to the St. Regis Monarch Beach resort in California, and another to Austin.  Monarch Beach was a work trip where we rolled out the MVP Stay pilot program at the resort (think Android tablets in resort rooms providing awareness advertising to the guests staying there).  It also provided me the opportunity to meet up with Pat and her SO and friend in Santa Monica.  We are terrible at taking pictures, especially at night, but here's a (blurry) shot that I like:

And yes, that's a minion in Tanya's arms.  Ken (the guy on the right) actually won it for me, but I gifted it to Tanya.  He (the minion, not Ken) now sits in my office in any case.

The Austin trip was a college buddy "camping" trip.  Why we persist in calling it "camping," I'm not sure.  Even though the trip originally entailed tents, sleeping bags, fire pits, etc, it hasn't been "camping" in almost 10 years.  For me, it is now a lot of time in a swimming pool drinking beer, an annual round of golf, an annual poker tournament, an abandonment of anything resembling fitness and diet, and a great time of fellowship with guys that I only get to see once every year or two.  No pictures allowed at this event, though.  The new experience this year was purchasing and playing Civilization V.  More on that in the gaming post...

We've got one more pre-planned trip coming up.  We're going to Colorado for a semi-active vacation with the boys.  I'm not sure either boy is ready even for the "semi" part of the activities, but Tanya and I are determined to get them outside a bit while they're still somewhat young and impressionable.  We'll be riding the Durango-Silverton steam train, going rafting, taking an all-day hike, and learning stuff at Mesa Verde.  It will be the first time the boys have seen mountains in real life.  I hope they're as impressed as I was the first time I saw them.

In other traveling news, I'm teaching Garrett to drive.  He's already 16, but hasn't shown any real interesting in learning to drive.  I recently asked him why that was, and he said "well, there's nowhere I really want or need to go."  I distinctly remember wanting and needing to get my license as soon as I turned 16.  I wanted to drive myself to school, the store, Brian's house, or other places as needed.  I wanted to be able to cruise 57th (not that I ever did, but being able to was a big deal).  I suppose it was more disconnected time... the Internet in general and cell phones weren't a thing and entertainment was harder to come by.  Ah, to be a kid in today's society!  How many video games would I be playing right now?

Speaking of video games... stay tuned for the Gaming installment!

Github anemia, or How my activity is hidden from view

For just under two years now, I have worked for a company that exclusively uses Github for source control management.  I'd had a Github account prior to that, so I used that account for contributions.  I didn't really think very much about it until recently, when I started standing up more of my own repositories in Github using that account.  It occurred to me that my public account and "private" account tell very different stories about me as a developer.

Here's a snapshot of my public activity over the past year:

If you believe what this graph says, I haven't been very busy as a developer this past year.  I've been busier over the past couple of months, but all things considered, still not very busy.  Only two commits a day?  Most of the activity happening during the week of April 15th?!

Juxtapose that with a snapshot of my overall activity (including contributions to private repositories) over the past year:

This graph seems to tell a better story.  I've been relatively busy over the past year, averaging about three commits to repositories per day.  As a side note, I was especially busy this past January, around the time of our Guest Stay project launch.  I know it's hard to imagine, but not all software launches go exactly as planned.  ;)

Granted, I'm not nearly as busy as lots of other developers.  As it turns out, my hobbies for the past year have not included many software development activities.  For regular readers of this blog, that won't be a surprise.  For all you new folks, most of my free time is spent with my family, gaming, reading, and working towards physical and mental fitness in general.

My working hypothesis is that I'm a better all-around person, and as a result a better worker, when I'm growing along different vectors.  Focusing all of my time and effort toward improving my software development prowess would yield growth in that direction, but not as much overall fulfillment.

This is not just my hypothesis, by the way.  A CEO at one of my prior jobs, after he discovered I'd been working 16-hour days for about 6 months and wound up in the hospital, told me that life wasn't meant to be lived that way.  He recommended the 8/8/8 approach: 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, and 8 hours "play," where "play" was everything else that helped me grow as a person.  Another VP at another company once told me that nothing we were working on was life-or-death (which isn't true of everyone, but is definitely true of the type of software I typically work on), so I shouldn't be killing myself in order to do my job.

My sincere hope is that I've finally learned about that balance, about how it contributes to the well-being of not only me but all the people around me, coworkers included.

There are certainly a lot of software developers that do software development purely for fun, that would (and do!) do it regardless of resource constraints, and that use it as a way to let of steam.  I sincerely wish more power to those people, because they make my professional life easier, and I greatly appreciate being a part of the teams those folks are on.  I just hope they won't judge my Github anemia too harshly in return.  :)

All day, every day!

I'm finally back to life and reality.  The past couple of weeks have been interesting to say the least.  To begin with, at the end of April we took a trip to Utah.  Specifically, we took the REI Adventures trip to Arches and Canyonlands national parks.  Hopefully before too long we'll finish processing all of the pictures and publish some of them for your edification.  In the meantime, take my word for it that it was a fantastic trip, full of remarkable sights.  I also learned a few things.

First of all, you should start getting fit early in life and keep that habit forever.  Ten out of twelve of the other people on this trip were older than us, most of them having already retired.  All of them were in better hiking shape than we were, and we thought we'd prepared at least an adequate amount.  These folks hike regularly for the fitness and fun of it.  The life lesson here is that fitness is far more important than most people realize.  Don't continue to give it lip service.  Make it as important as everything else you do regularly.

Secondly, the people you vacation with are just as important as the destination itself.  The folks we met were interesting, funny, and kind to a person.  Our guides, Chris and Ashley, worked 16 hours a day to make the trip as enjoyable for us as possible, and they succeeded.  Well done, everyone!

Two other interesting things about the trip: one of the guys there was a Joseph Campbell fan, so I got to talk about that with someone.  I also nabbed a really neat Chinese poetry book while in Utah, and have been going through that bit by bit.  (Aside: Tanya doesn't understand why it's considered poetry, since in Russian there are REALLY strict rules about what can be considered poetic --big surprise! ;) )  Both of those reminded me that I need to spend a little more time extending my spirit (as well as my mind and body).  Make the most with what you have, then stretch a little farther!

After returning to the real world, I took on the role of "lead/point person" for our development group at work.  You might recall that a month ago we had an event that I was struggling to deal with.  I still struggle with it, but I'm moving forward at this point.  Hopefully my taking this position will keep the really talented technical people solving the hard problems while allowing me to facilitate, coordinate, communicate, and any other "-ate"s that are necessary to help make us successful.  I'll still do technical stuff too, but probably not as much as the other devs.

Another good thing that we discovered last week is that we're closing deals at work that will keep cash flowing.  While these deals aren't moving our product offering forward much, they are keeping the doors open and the lights on (so to speak).  It sounds like we'll be viable until at least the end of the summer, and very likely the end of the year, if nothing else changes.  This might sound scary to a lot of people, but it's actually really good news from a start-up perspective.  It gives us runway to sell our products and help define our niche.

I feel better about where I am in this world than I have in a month, and I'm very glad to feel this way.  The moral of the story here: remember to live life!  All day, every day!

Still here...

This post marks the end of several things.

First of all, it marks the end of the gap in posting frequency.  I was really trying to hit at least one post a week, but the weekend of Easter ended that streak.

Secondly, it marks the end of the best times at Outpace.  You see, for the past year and a half I've been working with the most talented team I've ever seen assembled in one place.  The Thursday before Easter weekend, 60% of the development staff got fired as a result of sudden and unexpected revenue issues.  I dodged that axe, as did Tanya.  Even so, I struggle to describe the sense of loss I'm still feeling even now.

It's strange to realize how much I care for my (now former) coworkers considering we are a 100% remote development shop.  I feel their absence very keenly.  It's been really difficult to forge ahead knowing that they won't be here to help shoulder the load.

Don't misunderstand me -- both Tanya and I feel extremely fortunate to still be employed, and working with some truly superb people.  I just didn't expect to be affected as severely as I have been.

I'm not sure why, but this poem came to mind this week.  Take it for what you will... I happen rather to like it.  :-)

“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people -

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.”


― Rainer Maria Rilke