Feb 21 Retrospective

I pose myself several questions every week (not having to answer all of them):

• how to improve?
• any open questions?
• any small project ideas?
• introspect: what are my feelings?

What are my feelings?

This week was rough. I think my team produced low-quality code and group communication was poor. Reflecting on what went wrong has dredged up the following ideas:

• I should articulate concerns early. Burying concerns to smooth over social problems is a mistake; sometimes you just need to solve the problem. There is an art to doing while still making it clear to teammates you care about them.
• I should be direct. Hinting at the problem often does not help. Be professional; state your mind.
• Messy architecture will kill me as I scale. If I don’t know how all my data is flowing, I will be in a world of pain.

I noticed my thoughts were much more occupied with emotion and interpersonal concerns than they were with code this week. This both feels bad and is inefficient.

Mark mentioned in one of his sessions something like: “having an unresolved thought that comes up repeatedly throughout the week is a repeated tax mental tax“. Being preoccupied with a team instead of a product fell into this category for me this week.

How can I do better? 1) notice repeated painful thoughts 2) be an adult; decide to accept the big pain now of dealing with it instead of the repeated little pain of continuously putting it off

Most of the secret sauce seems to be in deciding to act (funnily enough, this reminds me of the anti-panic loop: notice panic; stop panicking. maybe it is noticing all the way down).

I’ve also noticed a creeping mental exhaustion. The sparkle of the course has definitely wore off. I’m redoubling my efforts to get good sleep/food and trying to fast-track biking to class. Noticing the exhaustion in class is sometimes enough to get back on track.

This is the path. I’m overjoyed to be on the path. It’s hard sometimes, but it is a worthy crusade.

Retrospective on last week’s goals

A bit bleak. Just gotta keep trucking.

Learn loop: FAIL-ish

• Didn’t consider the process as much as I would’ve liked
• Getting better at scoping projects

Rationalist skills: FAIL

• Didn’t do this at all

How do I improve?

I find myself overwhelmed when trying to improve along too many axes. I think a good path is doing something like: 1) more doing, less thinking (the patterns will come) 2) keep carving out time to reflect (already doing this) 3) focus on improving only one thing at a time

See “What are my feelings?” section for the one thing I want to improve this week.