hiiiiii.

The work changes I've been alluding to are now official: I'm taking over the video transcoding team that I've been working closely with for the past many months. It's 4 people, highly visible to customers, the former tech lead is leaving the company entirely, I don't know anything about video transcoding, and I've never run a team before. No pressure.

The first few weeks have been...not a sustainable way of working. Two days last week I had four and a half hours straight of meetings, which is way, way over my limit, especially when a big chunk involves video encoding questions way out of my expertise. Monday was more meetings, but today I did carve out a few hours to write some code, and I plan to be pretty firm about getting that, because otherwise the job won't be any fun.

Everyone at work is very kind and congratulatory, but they don't know--and don't absorb very quickly--the enormity of the task I've taken on. I'm not sure I understand it, and I've spent months cataloging and organizing and developing a direction to go in. It's a big mess: I was all excited to get some re-architecture work done, but when we scheduled this 2-week "sprint", the amount of time for re-architecture work was about 1/2 of one person's time (which can easily be eaten up by customer or production issues). But, we have talented people and we work well together, and we've got the organization behind us, so...we'll get things to a better place. Slowly, so far.