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.

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.

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.

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.

Nonetheless, it was a day of relaxation and recuperation, a curious combination of being chill and anxious that I’m about to relax away four months without getting anything meaningful done.

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.