field trip: Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn

I occasionally tell Anna we're going somewhere, but I won't tell her where, or what we're doing. So a month ago I planned last night, and we went to see Béla Fleck perform alongside his wife, Abigail Washburn. Abigail is a well-known old-time banjo player and bandleader, and seemed like most of the audience was there to see her; they got a bit of a surprise when Béla was unleashed a couple times, because he is almost certainly the greatest living banjo player, and possibly the greatest ever.

Just to give you a sense of the difference, this is Abigail with her band, playing a typical one of her songs:

She's a great songwriter and singer. But Béla plays like this, when he's just jamming and improvising by himself:

And then this is his band:

So that's interesting, to see a very comfortable rapport between two people with unequal gifts on the same instrument (they focused on Abigail's music). And they are completely adorable--actually reminded us a lot of us.

There was jumping up and down with joy. It was satisfying.

parenting by annoyance.

"Hey, monkey. How was your weekend?"
"Good."
"What'd you do?"
"Stuff."
"Did you go for a hike?"
"Yeah."
"Did you play basketball?"
"Um...no..."
"Did you go water-skiing?"
"No. You know I don't play basketball."
"You're not giving me any information, so I'm going to ask you about every possible thing you could have done this weekend until I find out."
"Oh, okay, fine. I did a bunch of stuff without screens. We went for a couple walks, and we played some non-video games. I read a bunch of books. There, are you satisfied now?"
"Yes!"

you can hear the gears turning

It's common for adults to enjoy kids around age 8-11. Their consciousness expands to more and more include the world beyond themselves, and they start thinking in more sophisticated ways. They become more like adults, in other words. We're just biased, because it gets to be less work to relate to them. (This obviously ends with adolescence and picks up again sometime later.)

J is no exception, filtered through his unique brain wiring. The other day he learned what home-schooling actually means--he's heard the word many times, but the reality of it never quite penetrated. Anna is going to be watching a friend's daughter, and I was blessed to witness the discussion.

"So I'm going to have M during the day on Thursday, and I'm volunteering at school, so you might see her."
"During the school day? Doesn't she have to be in school?"
"She's home-schooled. Her mom is her teacher."
There's a pause while he processes this. If he could, he would be raising one eyebrow and giving Anna a hard look.
"But I still have to go to school?"

Yep, kiddo.

This probably won't get easier once he finds out his cousin is being home-schooled too. We've discussed it, and it's the fallback plan for any unresolvable school situation. Anna and I both had traumatic school experiences, and while we work hard not to project our memories too much onto the much safer realities of the modern public school, we're determined that he not have a traumatic school experience, whatever that takes.

His moods are much more fluid these days, and we can often redirect Angry J into Laughing J without much trouble. The other night we got him laughing and after a few minutes he said, "I wish I could stop laughing so I could go back to being angry." Let's call it a success.

One night he was grumbling about not finding a library book, but it was time to call his father. I get to do these all in a cheerful voice.

"I don't know where it was, and my parents won't help me look for it..."
"We will. Now it's time to call Daddy."
He made it about three steps towards the room with the phone when he got distracted and grumbled back to his room again.
"I don't know where that book is, I'm never going to find it--"
"J, go call Daddy, we'll find the book after that."
This time he didn't even make it out of his room.
"And my parents aren't even listening to me..."
"Less grumbling, more calling Daddy!"

That was awesome enough, but then we could hear him ranting on the phone.

"...and then Chris wouldn't let me look for it! He made me come in here and call you!"

Oh, the tyranny!

all the things, all at once.

We're having an extraordinarily busy time here at the Snugglehaus. Anna and I wound up booked for stuff several weekends in a row, enough that we moved our planned trip to Vancouver out to November. We weren't going to Vancouver for any particular reason--I've never been there, and we had 6 hours left to use some frequent flyer miles--but she had the genius idea to go there around our anniversary. This at once gives us a special way to celebrate the end of year 3, and more or less relieves her from having to remember when our anniversary is.

(There is a mosaic plate in our living room with our anniversary date on it.)

I have been fully engaged at work in what we call a "fire drill," which means different things in different contexts, but always involves something important enough to override your previously-most-important work and require your attention until it's resolved. In our case, an unfortunate confluence of organizational failures led to a certain amount of engineering work having to get done within 7 weeks or so, before a certain date.


If you're unfamiliar with the practice of engineering, defining a required set of work and a hard deadline is a terrible idea. It's beyond terrible. It's fundamentally stupid. It produces tired people and crappy code, because there's no time to apply the usual techniques for making sure our code isn't crappy.

It happens anyway, because the world is inconvenient, and the most you can hope for is that the executives truly internalize that this is a corrosive and unsustainable way to operate. They'll do their best to avoid it, and be really apologetic in the future when it happens again, and they'll take your glaring and severe tone of voice seriously.

We're doing stellar work, of course. Tonight I am taking some time to sit back and admire my ability to take a team full of chaos and quickly induce order and organization. The last time I did this I was pleased with the magnitude of the change; this time I am startled by the speed. Once I started facilitating, the fundamental change was almost immediate, within 48 hours. Now it's an actual cohesive team, fluidly communicating, sharing and handing off work, with lots of self-organization. People trust each other, and so there's beautiful, mostly-productive argument. And. And. This happened as we all walked out of our semi-weekly retrospective/planning meeting, which took just under its allotted 2.5 hours.

"This meeting will get shorter, as we find our rhythm and cadence."

This is a true statement.

P is one of my favorite people at work. We argue and debate constantly, which was a little uncertain until a couple weeks ago I made a point of signaling that I understand we disagree continuously and that I really enjoy working with him.

"Lies. I don't believe you."

He was being flippant. It's what we do. And yet. I turned around, grinned, and wagged my finger at him, walking backwards.

"You don't know shit. You don't know that this is my mission in life, and I'm good at it."

I laughed, turned around, and kept walking forward.
He paused for a second.

"Okay. I earned that."

It was just an impulse, to turn his glib moment into something more serious. It's important that they trust me, though. Cynical jokes are funny, but they can also be seeds of doubt, especially in the two new people. The meeting will get shorter, because we will work more smoothly. There is not, in practice, a question about this. They want to perform better, they are more than capable of it, and I am more than capable of guiding them to do that. If we are left to our own devices, it is a certainty.

And now, I think, they have seen some of my certainty.

wife meets binary.

Life with me inevitably means conversations like this.

"How many bytes in a megabyte? A thousand?"
"1024 times 1024."
"Okay, wow, that is so random."
"It's not random. It's two to the tenth."
"Okay, bedtime now."

 She did know what she was in for, at least.

FIX ALL THE THINGS

On Wednesday, I had, hands down the best day ever at this job. That's actually a low bar, but in absolute terms it ranks favorably with all of my best workdays ever.

Wednesday was our planning day for the coming 2-week sprint. We look at the work lined up in our backlog, we decide what we're going to work on, and we break the implementation down into manageable tasks with clear definitions of "done." In order for this to be effective, the design work has to be at least mostly done. Sometimes you need to make time in previous sprints for people to do the design; most often you don't, because design tasks generally don't have a clearly defined end point, and it's the kind of free-thinking work that's good for us to do in between bouts of focused coding.

On Tuesday I sounded an alarm to the two other planning people (our manager and our product manager) that for the two projects we're trying to get done on a tight schedule, there was nothing defined well enough to start working on. I was promptly shouted down, with lots of crankiness on all sides. I went up to the City on Wednesday with some crabby going on.

And then. Then.

We got to the planning meetings, and because the team is fabulous, they discovered quickly that the work wasn't defined. So, without comment, they just jumped in to doing the design work. I didn't have to do much beyond the occasional well-timed nudge. It was glorious. (The next day, they did completely effective sprint planning without me. I should just retire.)

I had a long talk with the product manager about what went wrong with the planning and how we'll proceed from here, and also about our working together and the fact that our conversation the day before hadn't given either of us what we wanted.

At our manager's instigation, I talked to another scrum master about how we run things, and discovered we're doing most of the same things for the same reasons: the beginning of a concerted effort to change how Engineering operates.

I provided a gentle counterpoint to the new guy when he was being overwhelmed by our manager's dial being stuck on Highly Intense.

All of this was awesome because I fixed things. I went to work on a complex system (people working together) and got immediate feedback (people being able to work together better). Relationships repaired and improved, plans made, seeds planted, realizations begun.

Not bored now.

once again I wield my iron fist of command.

I've had a tumultuous time at work, this past eight months. A variety of interlocking issues make it feel like a less-than-great fit, and that was sort of a constant stressor until recently, when I decided to just accept the situation and relax. It's not such a bad thing to not be working at 100% capacity.

As usual when I settle down and accept reality before trying to change it, within a few days it made sense for me to take over as the team's "scrum master," to take on most of the organizing work. This took a load off a teammate who had been doing it for 18 months, under quite trying circumstances (and without any guidance). This coincided happily with a sudden "Hey, can you guys write a whole ton of software for us to demo for thousands of people in 6 weeks?" fire drill from the Powers That Be: a sudden need for particularly team leadership, and a particularly good team leader.

Telling people you're a very good team lead is a little like telling people you're a very good kisser. It may be true in your case, but enough people believe it about themselves, and are wrong, that no one's really going to believe you until you do it. It happens that I am both a good team lead and a good kisser, though Anna made me take the latter off my resumé.

24 hours later, the team's manager noted that our tasks were better organized, and the four of us on the team were communicating more often and more fluidly in the chat room we use. In a way, I didn't do very much: so much of leadership is just being an information traffic cop, making sure that person A waits to talk until person B is actually listening, asking "Hey, can you jump in on this other thing with Person C?".

This is very difficult if the team is looking to someone else for their cues, whether it's a "team lead" as such or just a scrum master. (We don't really have team leads, which is one of our many organizational problems.) We might have all been happier if I'd taken over this job a couple months ago.

The managers are being very kind and making sure I'm not overloaded, but the truth is that this is the first thing I've done at this job that I'm particularly good at. After my previous team of 9 people, with a dozen conflicting priorities and several constituencies, a team of 3-4 with simple priorities is easy.