Weeknotes S02 E14: Sparking joy

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Web of Weeknotes

6 min readApr 30, 2023

Marie Kondo smiling at the camera while carrying boxes. Caption reads: Does it spark joy? — Accredition: IMDb/Netflix

I’ve been thinking about things that bring pleasure this week, partly after watching American Beauty and seeing it so starkly portrayed, but partly through some of the work I’ve been doing. The question of what sparks joy may seem very Marie Kondo but I think being clear about what gives you pleasure and how organising things better can help that is really valid (beyond just throwing stuff away).

To that organisational aspect, I’ve been working this week on information to help with the key backlock grooming tasks by creating Confluence pages with embeded Jira data. These pull together custom searches that show all the data I need, order the issues in a way that makes sense for that activity, and mean I don’t feel so hassled in wading through Jira to find it. Joy, maybe on a small scale, but one I’ll also get every working day in using them.

This week also saw the last leg of a project with our designer in creating some truly beautiful work. We’ve both worked closely together, kicking around ideas — mine from a practical/development and customer need front, and him from a UX and design perspective. We both got a great deal of joy from the interaction, the output and the reaction of the customer.

A former colleague, who’d been through a bereavement and had to pick his life back up again, was always clear about this. Whatever the current priorities or stresses, he would spend some time every day doing something that made him happy. At the time it felt like an indulgence but now I can see the sense in it. So John, if you’re still out there, I finally caught up with your way of thinking. Thank you.

Dealing with blowbacks

I had a set of interactions this week that were meant to be helpful but (in hindsight) I blundered into, being too quick to try and solve the problem rather than focus on how to deliver the message in a way that would lead to a better outcome overall.

In the past I think I would have let this completely cloud my week, and lead to a bout of self recrimination and guilt. Instead, I decided to realise where the core of the issue was, propose actions to stop it happening again and just accept that there was no changing what had happened.

That might sound like perfectly rational behaviour, but this sort of thing has evaded me for years. I do think writing Daily Notes has helped me reflect on issues more quickly to move through them. Feels odd looking back at what I wrote that day (some anger in there!) and not feel the emotion I did at the time.

Supplier and council relationships

The rest of the product team abandoned me this week for the start of the regional LocalGovCamp events, so it felt a bit like Easter week all over again. The workshop session we’d all planned last week was put into play and it sounded like a great success — I can’t wait to see the results

I did a bit of exploring around the supplier/council relationship myself this week while that was happening thanks to a great conversation with Alex Shiell. I’d got in touch with him about his TechUK Industry Briefing (which I couldn’t get into), and he was kind enough to give me my own private briefing, with extra chat thrown in.

Alex’s pitch was a simple one: here’s what you can do to make working with us as a council easier; get the basics right, break down barriers and be a good partner. There were some things within these that would be a challenge for us, but others felt like easy wins. For example we were delighted to get our Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation recently, but I now know that to smooth the way with council IT security teams we could look at making documentation about how we achieve it more readily available.

There were some interesting challenges around product too. Is it better to continually develop, improve and enable customisation of our products to meet every customers needs, or do we maintain a core set of products that work in a certain way so there is greater clarity and refinement?

What did I learn about Agile this week?

That planning for the worst sometimes means that it doesn’t happen.

We’ve been working on The Project On The Side that has involved significant testing, and had assumed that we’d need to throw all the resources available to mop up bugs emerging from it. Turns out there have been very few so we’ve had to adapt to pulling in bugs from the next sprint to keep things moving along.

I was really delighted to see what a good Spike ticket can look like, and the discussion it can generate. We had two bugs emerge that would normally have us throwing things at them to get solved, but our wise Senior Dev said we needed to understand the wider issue and see how we treated this for other aspects of the platform. A brilliant bit of investigative work led to that wider understanding, and also a discussion on our strategy to tackle it. My favourite part was when we realised although there were some aspects that we wouldn’t want to change as they weren’t relevant, the additional work required to avoid those changes was more effort than just including them.

I pushed out another roadmap update this week. We’re still in that place where it’s not always easy to align what we’ve done with what we planned to do as we’re not yet pushing planned work from Prodpad into sprints fully formed. I guess that’s just where we are at the moment in needing to be more responsive than proactive. I’m still loving the debate it generates and how it makes us reassess what we still want to achieve rather than just the focus on the day to day

Quick thoughts

I finished my second full week of daily notes using Obsidian and am really seeing the benefits of how I process each day and capturing data I can reuse to help organise myself better. That includes the terrible truth around my diet and exercise!
Really enjoyed working with the marketing team on a blog post to go out soon. I liked how they help structure the into to put things in context, and how I was able to help them understand accessible hyperlinks
My replacement laptop (Macbook Pro!) arrived this week and while I’m loving using an OS I’m more comfortable in, switching across meant my notifications were reset so I missed two meetings on Monday
Attended a Liferay Circles of Success online event at 8pm(!) on Wednesday. Leaving aside the awful title (“Then and Now: Goodbye Asset Publishers, Hello Collections!”) it fired me up to learn more about the newer aspects of our platform, so I may have to sign up for more

Reading this week

Spot of the week

All is safe within the Cat Fort. Be calm. Be still