Matthew Lang

Curtis McHale offers some advice for those that are just a little bit too quick to write off change.

Thanks to Execupundit for this reminder that it is 70 years since the Dambusters raid. The Spitfire was my favourite as a kid and still is.

... with Nicholas Bate.

Yesterday I talked about annual reviews and how organisations can often get a simple process wrong, but are annual reviews immediately flawed due to their annual occurrence?

A year is a long time. A lot can happen in a year. I left a job, started a new job, got made redundant from the new job and then started freelancing all within a year. I hope you're not as unlucky me to get made redundant, but maybe you move about a lot inside an organisation? What if you're never in the same job for more than a couple of years. Does that make the annual review a redundant process?

In the UK there has been a rise in the last few years of self-employed workers and recently portfolio careers have proved to be popular with workers who want more of a variety in their career. The job for life is gone, so why are organisations still subjecting their workers to annual reviews?

Perhaps a more agile approach is needed with more frequent feedback. A year between reviews is too long, but what about quarterly reviews of your work with your line manager? How about monthly? At what point would your line manager know that you are enjoying your job and making a positive contribution to the company?

As a freelancer I have to continually look at my skill set and improve on areas that are rusty and also consider new programming languages and frameworks every few months. I have a core skill set that I am strong with but I also have to consider other skills if I want to make myself attractive to future clients. I give myself a review every month so that I know what work I have completed, whether I have completed it on time and what is in the pipeline ahead for me. I can afford to do this though as it is just me.

I'm just glad I don't need to sit through anymore annual reviews for the foreseeable future.

It was my oldest son's parents night at his school tonight. We had a fair idea what his teacher was going to say about him and his progress. We weren't disappointed.

The format is simple. You get 10 minutes with the teacher in which time they will go over the your child's progress (that you have already read the week before) and then you get to ask any questions about your child and identify any area where they can try and make improvements. Fortunately our son is doing great so there was just a couple of minor areas for him to improve on.

If you think the format is familiar then you would be right. Parents night is just the kiddie version of the annual review that many permanent workers go through. However, how is it that organisations can get this wrong when the basic format seems so simple?

I've experienced the annual review first hand in a number of companies. Very few of them actually did an annual review on a regular basis and even fewer followed through from the previous annual review.

A neighbour of mine worked in a really well known international bank where annual reviews were not done by your line manager but by someone even higher up. In an organisation such as this where the number of employees runs into thousands, there was a good chance that the person doing your annual review doesn't even know you to look at. In this case our friend did indeed get their annual review done by a director who had only met him twice. Not exactly a good example of an annual review.

Twice a year my son's school give a parents night without fail. They provide a report for your child that you get a week before parents night so that you can raise any questions during parents night. They give feedback on your child's progress and give suggestions on areas where your child can improve. They do it for all the kids in the school. That's hundreds of kids.

It's not hard to do.

Today I did my first Capistrano deployment. Yes, that’s right. My first. Any experienced Ruby developers might be wondering how I haven't used Capristrano in the past. I simply chose not to use it.

When Rails was in its infancy, Capistrano emerged as the default way for Rails developers to automate their deployments, but one thing that put me off was the amount of work that would be involved in getting it up and running. Scripts, SSH, source code management, web servers and databases. It all sounded a bit much.

Then Heroku came along and I smiled. I could deploy my application with a single command. In the past I’ve always opted to use Heroku and during my brief stint in an agile team we used Engine Yard for hosting our applications. Again deployment was as easy as a click of a button.

I’ll admit it. I’m lazy. I hate having to muck about with configuration settings, command line arguments, options and other little details to get things working.

As a developer I’ve come across hundreds of tools, editors, applications, libraries and services that help me do my job. One thing that sticks for my preferred selection of tools that I continue to re-use are the ones that just work and require little work to get working. Platform services like Heroku and Engine Yard fit this criteria perfectly.

Yes I probably should have some knowledge on using Capistrano but the ease of a single click deployment is hard to beat.

At the end of the day I just want to ship code.

In my ideal day I would have one very important thing to do and that's it. Nothing else. I haven't had an ideal day for a while though due to the simple fact that they rarely happen in the real world.

At the moment I am trying to currently balance two projects for one client. They're similar projects with similar scope and similar terminology. Already today I have wasted 30 minutes looking at the wrong code base due to my brain not registering the task switch that happened 30 minutes ago.

I'm toying with the idea of a visual reminder on my desk to remind me what project I should be working on. Or maybe even a bigger zsh prompt is required so that it shows me the current branch in huge writing.

One thing is for certain. I need to make a bigger deal about switching contexts so that I don't lose anymore time like today.

Finally a bag big enough to hold all my son's Lego with the added bonus of it actually allowing you to see all the Lego you have.

I grabbed my first rectangle very shortly after waking. I will likely stare into several throughout my day. For work and for pleasure and as a way to simply pass the time. Heck, my regular gas station has them built into the pumps now. My guess is that when one is distracted by the local weather or the two-for-one beef jerky special they tend to buy more gas.

— Glowing Rectangles by Patrick Rhone

Patrick Rhone is challenging himself to reduce his time spent on these wonderful glowing rectangles.

Maybe you should too?