Hey everybody, what is going on? Welcome to the sabbatical blog where I try to make use of my time in a hundred-day experiment to see just how long I can be busy doing nothing.
On one hand, I've not constructed a crossbow. On the other hand, apparently you can't just change gear from software engineer to bowyer in a couple of days and there is a practical limit on just how fast you can retrain. I've mentioned before that the twentieth century turned a lot of blue collars white, and this accelerating trend is ever more significant in the twenty-first.
For more crossbow specific details here is link to the Roger in Technology blog entry where I talk a little about winding crossbow strings. When I improve I'll try and post a tutorial up too.
http://roger-in-technology.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/lost-and-foundry-another-string-to-my.html
So - welcome to the Twenty First. A question you may have heard asked is "what would you do if you could do anything?" or some variation on this - "if you didn't have to work, what would you do?", that sort of thing. On contemplation it's a question that I think is over-asked and while it has it's place I think it's a much bigger question that people give it credit for.
Here is the thought process - our definition of self has been shaped by employment for so long that the question "what do you do?" has penetrated our consciousness so deeply it's become a natural ice breaker. Concurrent to this, specialisation has meant the question can often be answered in a single short phrase which may well be the tragedy of our time.
What would you do if you could do anything? Think on that for a while - what would you do next month if you didn't have to work? What would you do on Monday, this coming Monday, if you cleared the decks and your calendar was a blank slate you could fill with anything? What would you do RIGHT NOW if you had the chance?
Unless it's something that is already part of your routine, then I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that really how you will spend you time is learning and training.
The future of employment is going to continue to be reshaped in the twenty first century. Technology is going to redefine jobs this century in the same way it revolutionised our workforce in the Twentieth and the Nineteenth before it. By my reckoning, it's time to get ahead of the game. Train in a new skill, learn a language, brush up on you hobbies and crafts. And these are things you can do now. Live your life, make something. Succeed, fail, learn and create.
There is nothing better in life than bettering your life, however you may.
Saturday 24 June 2017
Wednesday 21 June 2017
Those magnificent men
Hey everybody! What are you flying? It's been a long old week and it's only Wednesday so I'd like to report in - albeit on a rather somber note - on the trials and tribulations of Roger in Sabbatical.
I had the privilige to sit in and watch Lancaster NX611 trot into position this week, and I've got to say it's a hellva beast.
The Lancaster dates back to the early 1940s - I'm sure you can imagine why. And despite the ample window space, there is a lack of legroom in there. Not the sort of thing you'd want to sit in for a few hours, that's for certain and I'll bet the in-flight meal is pretty poor. Nonetheless, the fate of the world on your shoulders is enough to put even the most reticent crew in the air. And thousands of these took to the air.
This particular Lanc actually spent most of her time serving as maritime search and rescue, but one can't help but notice the swastika on the scorecard. Just standing in awe at her side, it's apparent that every plate, every rivet, every curve of her flank is there for a reason. And those reasons are few. The minimalist, extremely practical design shows all too clearly how quickly our civilisation went from the wright brothers first fateful flight on a beach in North Carolina to the four-engine thunder of the Lancaster bomber.
Those four big old engines - cowled so that ground units can't see the tremendous fire she spits out, make so much thunder that Thor would quake in his boots. Just watching her head off away toward the runway inspires enough fear, and it's difficult to imagine the roar as a whole squadron is launched hull after hull on their fateful flight.
And so, the Lancaster has become the textbook example of test driven development. Each plate, rivet, turret, engine cowling, the tailgunner down to the huge depressing void of the empty payload bay - all of these are birthed of necessity and each have their exact job to complete.
At some point, this was a plane, and specifications changed, so a payload bay was added. The design got bigger, longer, fatter. At some point in twentieth century aviation, a tailgunner became required so they just built one in and recompiled. Resources were scarce and there is little to the Lanc that isn't required to pass it's unit tests.
Does it fly?
Can we put a thousand pounds of bombs on it?
...
Ok, there are a few other tests - as the Lancaster Bomber Haynes Manual demonstrates and a lot of engineering has to go into keeping just one of these in the air. But each of those resolves to a literal bullet point of criteria that it has to achieve and each of those ends up expressed in a simple Yes-or-No decision about it's fit for purpose.
We have a Lancaster bomber in all of us - a project, a dream, an exact "this and that" which has to be just right. Like the Lancaster Engineers of Longbridge, sometimes things just get in the way but you have to strike those chocks and let your ambitions fly.
Be precise, be professional. Face your runways, and may your four engines roar.
I had the privilige to sit in and watch Lancaster NX611 trot into position this week, and I've got to say it's a hellva beast.
The Lancaster dates back to the early 1940s - I'm sure you can imagine why. And despite the ample window space, there is a lack of legroom in there. Not the sort of thing you'd want to sit in for a few hours, that's for certain and I'll bet the in-flight meal is pretty poor. Nonetheless, the fate of the world on your shoulders is enough to put even the most reticent crew in the air. And thousands of these took to the air.
This particular Lanc actually spent most of her time serving as maritime search and rescue, but one can't help but notice the swastika on the scorecard. Just standing in awe at her side, it's apparent that every plate, every rivet, every curve of her flank is there for a reason. And those reasons are few. The minimalist, extremely practical design shows all too clearly how quickly our civilisation went from the wright brothers first fateful flight on a beach in North Carolina to the four-engine thunder of the Lancaster bomber.
Those four big old engines - cowled so that ground units can't see the tremendous fire she spits out, make so much thunder that Thor would quake in his boots. Just watching her head off away toward the runway inspires enough fear, and it's difficult to imagine the roar as a whole squadron is launched hull after hull on their fateful flight.
And so, the Lancaster has become the textbook example of test driven development. Each plate, rivet, turret, engine cowling, the tailgunner down to the huge depressing void of the empty payload bay - all of these are birthed of necessity and each have their exact job to complete.
At some point, this was a plane, and specifications changed, so a payload bay was added. The design got bigger, longer, fatter. At some point in twentieth century aviation, a tailgunner became required so they just built one in and recompiled. Resources were scarce and there is little to the Lanc that isn't required to pass it's unit tests.
Does it fly?
Can we put a thousand pounds of bombs on it?
...
Ok, there are a few other tests - as the Lancaster Bomber Haynes Manual demonstrates and a lot of engineering has to go into keeping just one of these in the air. But each of those resolves to a literal bullet point of criteria that it has to achieve and each of those ends up expressed in a simple Yes-or-No decision about it's fit for purpose.
We have a Lancaster bomber in all of us - a project, a dream, an exact "this and that" which has to be just right. Like the Lancaster Engineers of Longbridge, sometimes things just get in the way but you have to strike those chocks and let your ambitions fly.
Be precise, be professional. Face your runways, and may your four engines roar.
Monday 19 June 2017
Piss up in a brewery
Hey everybody, welcome to the Sabbatical blog! This is just a quick-fire post about the way we spend time.
As the title suggests, I went to a brewing company with some friends and sampled a selection of their delights. Hats off to that Mr Aled Parry and his drinking associates for the great plan. A good time was had by all and there was pork pie for tea and hangovers for breakfast!
The Leighton Buzzard Brewing Company were our generous hosts and while it may rather sound like we were sitting in the blazing sun in the car-park of an industrial estate, surrounded by clientele you'd expect to find drinking beer in the car-park of an industrial estate, the reality of the experience was that they also had a DJ playing music I'm unlikely to identify.
A hot grill supplied an endless quantity of sausages and burgers and the brewery provided a fine selection of beer. From the former I'd say a pulled-pork burger is a top pick, and from the latter tip my hat to the "Ninja" and the red river one and whatever that golden one was but I'll admit to the connoisseur that details might have become slightly blurred.
Organising a piss up in a brewry is an idiom in English for a task that is so mindbogglingly simple that it requires no planning at all, and day made it into the sabbatical feed not for the fact of the matter, but rather because it's how my mind works all the time. No. Not blurred by alcohol. I mean that I'm a knowledge-based thoughtworker, and the blog is chronicling the differences in different mediums.
In programming, I treat everything I know how to do as impossibly easy, and everything I don't know how to do as impossibly difficult and there is a sheer gradient between the two. When I'm sitting chilling, I'm a dreamer - the sky is the limit. Sure, I've never made a crossbow before and it's probably pretty difficult. But it's only made of stuff, right? stuff that's the wrong shape and I'm going to do stuff to this stuff until it's the right shape ... how hard can it be?
And besides, wouldn't it be cool.
I don't know if I ever made a transition from a dreamer to a wall-climber, certainly some of these mind games coming from knowing how difficult a task is. Am I more willing to fail because I don't know what I'm doing? That is a rather convenient excuse for failure. Is it because I've got nothing to lose - or nothing to prove?
"Having a stab" at something is a workplace skill that we should all retain. Not everything has to be as easy as a piss up in a brewery or so impossible we should abort mission. There is a healthy middle ground of play that isn't a bad place to be.
As the title suggests, I went to a brewing company with some friends and sampled a selection of their delights. Hats off to that Mr Aled Parry and his drinking associates for the great plan. A good time was had by all and there was pork pie for tea and hangovers for breakfast!
The Leighton Buzzard Brewing Company were our generous hosts and while it may rather sound like we were sitting in the blazing sun in the car-park of an industrial estate, surrounded by clientele you'd expect to find drinking beer in the car-park of an industrial estate, the reality of the experience was that they also had a DJ playing music I'm unlikely to identify.
A hot grill supplied an endless quantity of sausages and burgers and the brewery provided a fine selection of beer. From the former I'd say a pulled-pork burger is a top pick, and from the latter tip my hat to the "Ninja" and the red river one and whatever that golden one was but I'll admit to the connoisseur that details might have become slightly blurred.
Organising a piss up in a brewry is an idiom in English for a task that is so mindbogglingly simple that it requires no planning at all, and day made it into the sabbatical feed not for the fact of the matter, but rather because it's how my mind works all the time. No. Not blurred by alcohol. I mean that I'm a knowledge-based thoughtworker, and the blog is chronicling the differences in different mediums.
In programming, I treat everything I know how to do as impossibly easy, and everything I don't know how to do as impossibly difficult and there is a sheer gradient between the two. When I'm sitting chilling, I'm a dreamer - the sky is the limit. Sure, I've never made a crossbow before and it's probably pretty difficult. But it's only made of stuff, right? stuff that's the wrong shape and I'm going to do stuff to this stuff until it's the right shape ... how hard can it be?
And besides, wouldn't it be cool.
I don't know if I ever made a transition from a dreamer to a wall-climber, certainly some of these mind games coming from knowing how difficult a task is. Am I more willing to fail because I don't know what I'm doing? That is a rather convenient excuse for failure. Is it because I've got nothing to lose - or nothing to prove?
"Having a stab" at something is a workplace skill that we should all retain. Not everything has to be as easy as a piss up in a brewery or so impossible we should abort mission. There is a healthy middle ground of play that isn't a bad place to be.
Thursday work.
Hi everybody what is going on? Welcome to the sabbatical blog where I turn a hundred days of holiday into a plethora of painful projects.
To summarise my position - Good progress is being made on the forgehouse, and before long I'll be working steel and bronze. Until then, I thought I'd make a crossbow. I've never really stopped to ask why, I find such questions can get in the way of blinding buffaloing on.
There are three material choices for making a crossbow, when you are me. The first is a wooden prod, which is going to involve a lot of careful work and a whole load of luck to get right first time. This involves literally carving a wooden bow and sticking it onto a crossbow shaped body. Option two is to make a prod from spring steel. This is a much more uniform material than wood, so you can fabricate it with some precision and it'll behave as expected. Option Three is to use a synthetic composite material - a plastic that I can shape easily.
Well, if I had a forgehouse I'd use steel, but there are many crossbow making skills that are prod-material agnostic. Making the furniture, string, firing mechanism and ammunition. So it makes sense to construct a temporary plastic prod and then use that to get practice building all the other parts. Besides, I can make a second spring steel crossbow afterward so I have two to compare.
Remember when I said a "plethora of painful projects"?
My three successive attempts at making a plastic prod have been a learning experience that I'm not sure if I was expecting. This past week has contained a lot of learning how to learn, so here is a smithing 101 lesson free of charge. Need a tool? Make a tool. With a long enough lever and proper application of force you can move mountains, by which I mean selecting the right too for the job can make even the most mountainous task achievable.
This is all fine in the games industry. There are a lot of games problems I know the solution to. Heck, there are a lot of solutions I know the problem to as well. Being able to spot a problem, then diagnose it, and then find and apply a solution is a methodical process and you forget just how many of those steps you power through when you have an implicit understanding of the problem domain.
But now I'm taking my first shakey steps as a backyard bowyer and I've reached a new level of incompetence that I've not known for twenty years. For a more detailed breakdown, I'll post up the ashes of disaster and roses of success to the Lost and Foundry blog and save this space for the causes and effects of the process.
To summarise my position - Good progress is being made on the forgehouse, and before long I'll be working steel and bronze. Until then, I thought I'd make a crossbow. I've never really stopped to ask why, I find such questions can get in the way of blinding buffaloing on.
There are three material choices for making a crossbow, when you are me. The first is a wooden prod, which is going to involve a lot of careful work and a whole load of luck to get right first time. This involves literally carving a wooden bow and sticking it onto a crossbow shaped body. Option two is to make a prod from spring steel. This is a much more uniform material than wood, so you can fabricate it with some precision and it'll behave as expected. Option Three is to use a synthetic composite material - a plastic that I can shape easily.
Well, if I had a forgehouse I'd use steel, but there are many crossbow making skills that are prod-material agnostic. Making the furniture, string, firing mechanism and ammunition. So it makes sense to construct a temporary plastic prod and then use that to get practice building all the other parts. Besides, I can make a second spring steel crossbow afterward so I have two to compare.
Remember when I said a "plethora of painful projects"?
My three successive attempts at making a plastic prod have been a learning experience that I'm not sure if I was expecting. This past week has contained a lot of learning how to learn, so here is a smithing 101 lesson free of charge. Need a tool? Make a tool. With a long enough lever and proper application of force you can move mountains, by which I mean selecting the right too for the job can make even the most mountainous task achievable.
This is all fine in the games industry. There are a lot of games problems I know the solution to. Heck, there are a lot of solutions I know the problem to as well. Being able to spot a problem, then diagnose it, and then find and apply a solution is a methodical process and you forget just how many of those steps you power through when you have an implicit understanding of the problem domain.
But now I'm taking my first shakey steps as a backyard bowyer and I've reached a new level of incompetence that I've not known for twenty years. For a more detailed breakdown, I'll post up the ashes of disaster and roses of success to the Lost and Foundry blog and save this space for the causes and effects of the process.
Wednesday 14 June 2017
Tuesday 2.0
Hey everybody and welcome to the Roger in Sabbatical blog where I struggle with the realisation that all projects I do get resolved as if it's a software problem. When your best tool is a hammer, everything becomes a nail.
Today's lesson comes in the shape of iterative, incremental design. During Tuesday 1.0, the square form of the forgehouse was marked up out back and it just looks a little out of place in the context of the rest of the garden. Today is Tuesday 2.0 and represents the last cost effective time I can move the walls before it becomes a pain in the ass.
This must be what a producer feels like, and bleh, it's terrible. So for extra credit today, I've learned a little about exactly where the buck stops.
Seeing the thing in position is the integration test - does this part work with all of the other parts? I have unbelievable confidence that it'll work perfectly in isolation. The forgehouse is well designed, it's the right size, materials, and composition. All unit tests passing. But how it slots into the rest of the garden is the problem I had to solve in Tuesday 2.0
The two options are reasonably simple - I can "stick with the plan" and run with the 3x5 size or trim it down to about 2.5x4.5. This is only a smidgen off the size, and a 25% reduction in footprint but brings it clear of the surroundings a bit and is just going to look better.
Next on the agenda is learning how to make a bowstring. There are a few different types and techniques, so I twisted and tied string until my hands cramped, and eventually blisters threatened to end the day.
This is an interesting self-limiting factor that I'll have to consider over the next hundred days - I'll have to round-robin the skills I learn so that I don't overextend myself. It's going to take more production work. I can see this turning into a gant chart.
Having to make an irreversible construction decision and finalise the size of the forgehouse was more of a mental struggle than I was prepared for. I guess it goes to show that sometimes you've got to go big or go home, and I'm already home.
Today's lesson comes in the shape of iterative, incremental design. During Tuesday 1.0, the square form of the forgehouse was marked up out back and it just looks a little out of place in the context of the rest of the garden. Today is Tuesday 2.0 and represents the last cost effective time I can move the walls before it becomes a pain in the ass.
This must be what a producer feels like, and bleh, it's terrible. So for extra credit today, I've learned a little about exactly where the buck stops.
Seeing the thing in position is the integration test - does this part work with all of the other parts? I have unbelievable confidence that it'll work perfectly in isolation. The forgehouse is well designed, it's the right size, materials, and composition. All unit tests passing. But how it slots into the rest of the garden is the problem I had to solve in Tuesday 2.0
The two options are reasonably simple - I can "stick with the plan" and run with the 3x5 size or trim it down to about 2.5x4.5. This is only a smidgen off the size, and a 25% reduction in footprint but brings it clear of the surroundings a bit and is just going to look better.
Next on the agenda is learning how to make a bowstring. There are a few different types and techniques, so I twisted and tied string until my hands cramped, and eventually blisters threatened to end the day.
This is an interesting self-limiting factor that I'll have to consider over the next hundred days - I'll have to round-robin the skills I learn so that I don't overextend myself. It's going to take more production work. I can see this turning into a gant chart.
Having to make an irreversible construction decision and finalise the size of the forgehouse was more of a mental struggle than I was prepared for. I guess it goes to show that sometimes you've got to go big or go home, and I'm already home.
Tuesday 13 June 2017
Fail fast
Hey everybody what is going on? Welecome to the Roger in Sabbatical blog, where I talk about not working, not doing projects, but also work, projects, and a good deal about kayaking.
Today was make-a-crossbow day. I know that might sound like a normal Tuesday to most of you but to me it's an unusual project, and as such packed full of unusual skills that I have yet to fail at. In preparation I roughed out the furniture in advance using some spade bits, a half-inch wood chisel and a whole lot of swear words so today was really the mechanical bit and assembly.
Or so I thought.
Right off the bat let's provide some context. I live in the beautiful city of Cambridge. And in Cambridge can you buy polyester string? You know, cheap string. cheap, plasticy, synthetic string. You know the kind. It's usually barbie pink or bright blue but if you are really lucky there will be a sandy coloured variant that looks like its from GetDate().currentDecade.
"But this is Cambridge" We've got organic natural cotton string. Hand fed free range balls of puffy white expensive string. Who sells cheap synthetic string? bloody nobody.
So after hiking all morning through town until I found some, and then a quick march to buy some paracord that I'll need. Plus breakfast pancakes and coffee, and that takes it to technically after noon, so as you can tell the disaster that follows isn't going to suffer from having too much time.
And Cambridge is nice, and the unsightly kayak wounds on my thumbs are scabbing over nicely and will scar up just so, and I'll be out on the river again in no time.
But anyway. I was most of the way through forming the prod of my crossbow, right before learning how to twist a Flemish style bowstring, and figured I could shape the thing a little more with a cold-cut chisel. This isn't a wise decision, as the material stress caused a fracture just beyond the recurve that will "fuck it right up" when put under stress. So a couple of hours wasted forming the thing that I've now wrecked through a bad choice of tools.
However, all is not lost, as I proceeded to stretch the thing in my hands to see how much flex and restitution it had and discovered a flaw in my curve that ultimately is a weakness that would have prevented it from ever being functional.
What I suffered from here is a lack of early testing. I'd not QA'd each step of fabrication and was relying on user-acceptance-testing (UAT) to tell me that the system as a whole doesn't work after then darn thing was built.
Fail-Fast is the (software) engineering principal that you should expose and uncover defects as soon as possible in the development cycle to prevent additional work being wasted. Essentially prevent you throwing good money after bad and allowing you to take one step back before your two steps forward.
To put a civil engineering slant on the proceedings, which is a frequent source of metaphor in software, I'm building in the garden and my visualisation wasn't as good as digging a foundation and looking it it in place. Stopping while it's just a square hole and redesigning now is a lot cheaper than building it and moving walls. The civil engineering metaphor only works with software so far, as one is an architecture task and the other is a construction one.
With the foundations its not too early to step back and redesign. The poor crossbow prod has to be deleted and remade, but it was a cheap enough process that throwing one away in the guise of education is fair enough. Tune in tomorrow to see if the forgehouse survives the redesign process.
Today was make-a-crossbow day. I know that might sound like a normal Tuesday to most of you but to me it's an unusual project, and as such packed full of unusual skills that I have yet to fail at. In preparation I roughed out the furniture in advance using some spade bits, a half-inch wood chisel and a whole lot of swear words so today was really the mechanical bit and assembly.
Or so I thought.
Right off the bat let's provide some context. I live in the beautiful city of Cambridge. And in Cambridge can you buy polyester string? You know, cheap string. cheap, plasticy, synthetic string. You know the kind. It's usually barbie pink or bright blue but if you are really lucky there will be a sandy coloured variant that looks like its from GetDate().currentDecade.
"But this is Cambridge" We've got organic natural cotton string. Hand fed free range balls of puffy white expensive string. Who sells cheap synthetic string? bloody nobody.
So after hiking all morning through town until I found some, and then a quick march to buy some paracord that I'll need. Plus breakfast pancakes and coffee, and that takes it to technically after noon, so as you can tell the disaster that follows isn't going to suffer from having too much time.
And Cambridge is nice, and the unsightly kayak wounds on my thumbs are scabbing over nicely and will scar up just so, and I'll be out on the river again in no time.
But anyway. I was most of the way through forming the prod of my crossbow, right before learning how to twist a Flemish style bowstring, and figured I could shape the thing a little more with a cold-cut chisel. This isn't a wise decision, as the material stress caused a fracture just beyond the recurve that will "fuck it right up" when put under stress. So a couple of hours wasted forming the thing that I've now wrecked through a bad choice of tools.
However, all is not lost, as I proceeded to stretch the thing in my hands to see how much flex and restitution it had and discovered a flaw in my curve that ultimately is a weakness that would have prevented it from ever being functional.
What I suffered from here is a lack of early testing. I'd not QA'd each step of fabrication and was relying on user-acceptance-testing (UAT) to tell me that the system as a whole doesn't work after then darn thing was built.
Fail-Fast is the (software) engineering principal that you should expose and uncover defects as soon as possible in the development cycle to prevent additional work being wasted. Essentially prevent you throwing good money after bad and allowing you to take one step back before your two steps forward.
To put a civil engineering slant on the proceedings, which is a frequent source of metaphor in software, I'm building in the garden and my visualisation wasn't as good as digging a foundation and looking it it in place. Stopping while it's just a square hole and redesigning now is a lot cheaper than building it and moving walls. The civil engineering metaphor only works with software so far, as one is an architecture task and the other is a construction one.
With the foundations its not too early to step back and redesign. The poor crossbow prod has to be deleted and remade, but it was a cheap enough process that throwing one away in the guise of education is fair enough. Tune in tomorrow to see if the forgehouse survives the redesign process.
Monday 12 June 2017
Kayak of doom.
Hi everybody, what is going on? I'm Roger Sabbatical and welcome to my irregular blog about building things, chilling out so damn hard, and trying to survive the work free zone of my own mind.
Week one ended well, with enough ground clearance so that the construction can begin so its time to talk kayak. In July, I'll be taking a trip down the Yukon River, along with two other guys so took the chance to get out on the river of my hometown. Find my water legs, find my limit and exercise the right sort of muscles.
All kayak'd up and ready to go, Emma, my guide, glides off upriver. Powerful, quiet, strokes making easy headway. And duckling that I was, splashed up behind her in a mass of effort just trying to keep pace. She is confident and calm on the water. I am ying to her yang, so I like to think that together we maintained balance in the universe. I'm going to say that I'm propelling more weight by a good few stone, which I offer as an explanation of the exhaustion that followed.
Unable to maintain a steady pace, I did what I could to catch up and then dropped back as I recovered. Basically, I was doing kayak interval training. That's the positive spin on it.
Our ninety minute trip took about only sixty to seventy minutes, as I managed to blister up good and proper so headed back. Ultimately, the pain of skinning my thumbs - and fear of subsequent infection from the dreaded cam water - was as much a motivation as the promise of bacon and coffee to get us turned around and back downriver.
On the plus side, I know know where my kayak-limit is. On the bad side, my kayak limit isn't very high, my stamina is bad and my technique could be improved... I've skinned my thumbs so aren't likely to get much more on-river practice in over the next couple of weeks. Yay me.
So I leave you with the life lesson from the experience, if a jobs worth doing, it's worth doing until it hurts and then having bacon and coffee.
Week one ended well, with enough ground clearance so that the construction can begin so its time to talk kayak. In July, I'll be taking a trip down the Yukon River, along with two other guys so took the chance to get out on the river of my hometown. Find my water legs, find my limit and exercise the right sort of muscles.
All kayak'd up and ready to go, Emma, my guide, glides off upriver. Powerful, quiet, strokes making easy headway. And duckling that I was, splashed up behind her in a mass of effort just trying to keep pace. She is confident and calm on the water. I am ying to her yang, so I like to think that together we maintained balance in the universe. I'm going to say that I'm propelling more weight by a good few stone, which I offer as an explanation of the exhaustion that followed.
Unable to maintain a steady pace, I did what I could to catch up and then dropped back as I recovered. Basically, I was doing kayak interval training. That's the positive spin on it.
Our ninety minute trip took about only sixty to seventy minutes, as I managed to blister up good and proper so headed back. Ultimately, the pain of skinning my thumbs - and fear of subsequent infection from the dreaded cam water - was as much a motivation as the promise of bacon and coffee to get us turned around and back downriver.
On the plus side, I know know where my kayak-limit is. On the bad side, my kayak limit isn't very high, my stamina is bad and my technique could be improved... I've skinned my thumbs so aren't likely to get much more on-river practice in over the next couple of weeks. Yay me.
So I leave you with the life lesson from the experience, if a jobs worth doing, it's worth doing until it hurts and then having bacon and coffee.
Time Travel helps.
Wednesday 7th June
Yesterdays reflections put my mind to the future. The reason I’m gardening isn’t to have a garden, it’s to clear space to construct a forgehouse. With a walled and roofed workshop in place and a firepit at my disposal, my projects won’t be limited by weather anymore.
Being able to control some factors and not others is typical of engineering tasks, and has been a reality through human history. Whether you are working stone, bronze, steel, or C++, you always find a balance between what you can control and what you can’t.
Future Roger is going to thank me, however, Past Roger is the guy who watched it become overgrown and didn’t cut it back sooner. I hate that guy, he’s a jerk.
A little bit of time travel does you the world of good, you can borrow resources from the future by incurring a debt now and repaying later. And you can lend to the future by establishing resources and improving your workflow.
Think of your future self as a coworker and treat them with respect and generousity. This is what I’m doing now. Preperation for the future, although it does feel a bit like tidying up for the past.
In this instance, I'm trying to balance overkill with shortcomings. A decision made now will be difficult and expensive to change later, so overall I've opted for a very high minimum bar so that the workshop is never "not enough" for any project I can line up. A little bit of overkill, a little wiggle room to go bigger, but overall should be more than I need.
Wednesday 7 June 2017
When the rain comes, prepare to get wet.
Tuesday the sixth of June, two thousand and seventeen.
The Rain Came.
And I mean this both in the very physical, weather based sense, along with the philosophical damp that accompanies it.
Gardening was the plan for the day. Well, actually, I’m no gardener. But hacking back weeds and bushes to make way for things to come still counts. Out of all of the thought, planning, and preparation that I’ve done, I may be about to be scuppered by the great British weather.
Staring out of the window at the clouds - this is an exercise I recommend for all and I’m going to turn this into an object lesson.
“When the rain comes, prepare to get wet” ?
Hows that for a thought? I could of course, refuse to take no for an answer. In every challenge we meet there is the option to press on, uncompromising, undeviating. Keep your eyes on the prize. This is a work ethic that will see you through a lot of problems - if you do keep on buggering on you can maintain a lot of momentum.
I’ve had this both ways in the past, in humility have maintained reliability and yet at other times only pride and resentment have driven my steps. In pressing on, there are debts you can incur to your future self and a moment of introspection is recommended before you work in the rain.
Maybe the lesson here is
“In days of sun prepare for rain” ?
I could have spent an extra hour or two yesterday banking up the time and getting ahead so that I could flex around bumps in the road. There are times with any project you should do this, and times when it will only make work for yourself.
For example, putting extra effort in so that you become exhausted can cause a disaster. We all remember the fable of the tortoise and the hare. However, setting yourself a strong foundation by getting ahead early buys you flexibility to spend later.
But then, perhaps there is a more potent lesson on risk-management.
“If you need sun, bet on rain”
This is more straightforward that it sounds. When I say bet on rain, I don’t mean a colloquial expectation that things won’t go your way. I mean stack your chips so that you actively benefit from it. In my case, I had to sort fuel, choose between some grades of steel for different projects, estimate the quantities to order, delivery dates.. stuff that benefits from me being indoors for projects I’ll post about soon. I didn’t just make use of the rain, I benefited from it.
If the analogy is not apparent these lessons apply to software development, or any project work, as evenly as they do gardening. There are times when you should maintain momentum, there are times when you should push ahead and times to consolidate. But perhaps most of all, sometimes software needs to bet on rain. Parameterise from above, rely on return values and dispatch so that when it rains you can benefit from the inherent flexibility you have engineered.
Check-box-Chores
So it turns out that Monday is the first day of my Sabbatical, and that’s really apparent from my energy levels right off the bat. Consuming delicious bacon in toasted hot-cross-buns and drinking fresh coffee gave me the energy to mow the lawn and cut back some bushes.
And here is where it was odd. It was a really natural thing to do, not a check-box-chore that it might feel like on a regular day. There is something magical about having birds flock down to the exposed insects that makes you feel like a Disney princess, and this gives the mind time to wander and ponder, and on this day it strays to where this expression of vigour comes from.
Obviously I’ve been carrying it around, because I’m still the person I was yesterday. This is my vigour for a task that needs doing. It's to physical to be lazy and it's too dangerous to be an autonomous task - you have to be there in the moment, every moment.
OK - I do a lot of my gardening with an axe, which accentuates that, but this is a different experience to the dragging-of-feet gardening with which I am familiar.
I can remember not mowing the lawn two weeks ago, and not wanting to either. But today I wanted to, and I’ve got a feeling it’s because I didn’t have to. The low pressure environment, and specifically balance of internal pressure vs external pressure seems to be good for me - and thinking back to the times I’ve been most productive over the ten years leading up to this sabbatical the peaks of effort and accomplishment do coincide with the times I’ve been self-motivated, internalising my goals and actions.
On this optimistic start I leave you with the thought that each check-box-chore is a stepping stone, Find your motivation for within, hold it in a larger context, and it becomes part of a great journey.
A Master Ninjas journey.
A master ninja is built of layers, forged in fire, well tempered, and sharp. After ten years working at Ninja Theory in Cambridge, it's time to humbly accept my Master Ninja title and embark on a personal journey of contemplation and challenge.
What follows over the next hundred or so posts, is a mixture of time earned, time spent, and the thoughts that accompany my over this journey.
So start as you mean to go on... Hungover on a Saturday...
Saturday 3rd June
Hungover after leaving drinks, I treated this as a regular Saturday and tried to reconcile that a day you enjoy wasting is not a day wasted. I can't remember which philosopher, commentator or author coined that, but it's packed with meaning. However one must wonder if the same applies to a day YOU are wasted.
On the other hand, I Cooked a five-hour slow roast topside of beef and watched the SpaceX CRS-11 mission launch Dragon-2 to the International space station in an historic 100th Launch from KSC 39A, previously host to both Saturn-V and Shuttle launches. An inspiring way to start any journey...
Sunday 4th June
Feeling a lot better and brighter after a day of recovery, and agreed to help take down the marquis. Tooled up with fire in my blood, it’s time for action. It’s time to demonstrate my training.
I’m assuming they will have torches and pitchforks there so didn’t bring my own.
Discovered that we were taking down the marquees, which is a different process altogether. The life of a Master Ninja is nothing if not full of surprises. Hiding my disappointment, we helped out until five or six in the evening after which I had a generous helping of roast beef.
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