We had our tech leads retreat on Friday, including the discussion about
"why," and I thought it was excellent, although I'm still trying to
understand some parts of it.
Part of why I'm still working on that is, well, you know that
introversion thing? I had
five and a half hours of meetings on Friday, and the tail end was an
intense four and a half hour retreat, during which I was a major
participant the whole time. And tried to say some difficult and intense
things, both about the "why" conversation that I posted about and about
why the tail end of last year was particularly difficult for me.
All that went very well. I was very happy with the overall meeting.
Sometimes, I half-convince myself that I'm overstating the degree that
introversion or that interpersonal interaction affects me, or that I'm
using it as an excuse to duck out of things that aren't really what I want
to be working on. Then I do something like this, and find myself
completely dead on my feet at the end of the meeting. Not physically
tired, but utterly and completely drained. I went home and did something
completely right-brain and creative and needed that so desperately that I
stayed with it until two in the morning, slept in today until past noon,
and still have, despite a couple of minor attempts, absolutely no
capability to write code or focus on accomplishing anything. I'm fairly
sure I'll still be feeling the after-effects on Monday and Tuesday.
I'm a little annoyed at having both missed a day of releasing something to
the world (I'd managed to post something every day this year until
yesterday) and blowing off exercising yesterday evening for only the
second time this year. But I think part of coming to terms with what
introversion means is being kind to myself about this. That's something
Cain talked a lot about in her book, and it's the advice I'd give to any
other introvert, but it's something I'm not applying as well as I could.
Being an introvert doesn't mean to not do meetings. It means to pick the
ones that are important, do them with all your heart, and then be kind to
yourself afterwards just as if you'd put in extreme effort to do something
quite energetic and difficult. Because you have.
So, I'm trying not to be annoyed at myself. And I think we need to be
better about teaching people about this, because apart from Susan Cain, I
don't remember many people writing about this, or understanding it.
Occasionally there are screeds against meetings, but not a lot of
discussion about when it's worth expending the energy, and about how to be
kind to oneself and recharge after putting one's energy into the social
interactions that are important.
I did want to mention that while retreats seem to have a bad reputation in
tech circles (and I've heard of a lot of retreats that I would hate), the
ones that we do in our group are great. We spent about an hour talking
about the things I posted about on Thursday, then a couple of hours
talking about the larger organizational roadmap and searching out things
that aren't on our upcoming work roadmap that feel like large missing
pieces, and then a couple of hours identifying and enumerating our
technical debt and deciding what major pieces of technical debt we're
going to tackle in the next six months. It's a lot of concrete, specific
discussion of what we're going to spend time on and what we're going to
defend resources for by pushing back against other priorities. If I had
to sum it up in a sentence, I'd say that these retreats are all about
listing vaguely equal things that exceed our total capacity and making the
decisions about which of them we're going to do and which of them we're
not going to do so that we don't have to keep wasting time on revisiting
unresolved decisions.
The actual mission discussion turned into a discussion by each of us of
what we most value in work, stated in terms very similar to what I used in
my post, and that was wonderful. I found out things about my co-workers
that I didn't know, and which will help me a great deal in improving their
enjoyment of their work. I think we came away with a better idea of how
to support each other in creating that engagement and excitement, and I
think that's the best possible outcome. Since, like I said, I think
that's the only real mission statement a group should have.
We did, still, talk about having a mission statement anyway. Apparently
having a shared statement is really important to people who aren't me.
I'm still struggling with this, since it doesn't make sense to me and
doesn't feel useful to me. But maybe it's a sort of validation and
confirmation that we're allowed to focus on what we care about?
But the group mission statement we came away with isn't about any specific
technology and focuses on exactly the things that I care about: elegance,
robustness, durability, and solving whatever problems the university has.
As part of that discussion, we reached a surprising and really satisfying
unanimity of opinion about what values we care deeply about. It's a value
statement as opposed to a distillation of job descriptions, so if a
mission statement is valuable for other people, that's one I'm quite happy
with. Even if I don't understand why people want to have one.
I'm less satisfied with the roadmap and strategic plan for our larger
organization, but I'm starting to realize that's because I'm utterly not
the target audience and it's not going to engage or interest me. It's
more of a marketing statement that's focused externally, and my proper
role in that is to try to help ensure that it reflects the enthusiasms and
engagement of the line staff, not to try to turn it into a document that
will be inspiring for the line staff. Which ties into what I was writing
about previously: in my ideal world, these sorts of focuses flow upwards
from the people who will be doing the work, not downward from a high-level
manager deciding on an inspirational direction.
Jan
Wagner writes about using ethtool to poll the link state on
network devices. While I'm pleased to see another happy ethtool
user, it's a bit heavyweight for reading one bit of information
and it's not ideal for scripting.
Much information about each network device is available under
the /sys/class/net/name directory, including the
carrier and speed attributes. (When the interface
is down, some of these attributes cannot be read.) It's also
possible to listen for link changes (rather than polling
periodically) using the rtnetlink API, but this is probably not
suitable for munin.
My old X61 has 2G in RAM and 3G in Swap. It seems my using-habit for Google Chrome is heavy (more than 20 tabs open most of the time) so my swap is normally being used above the 1.8G-mark. That means, my disk is constantly being written and read, and since this is the original hard-drive scare comes to my mind: will I blow-up my disk if I continue doing this? and the heat this disk-use's generating was absurd.
That's not good, at all, I prefer having cache used than swap; in Venezuela is not that easy to get a good sale on hard-drives (you know, is hard to get dollars here, since is illegal to buy them unless the govt gives you permission).
So the first thing that comes to my mind is 
Usually I'm monitoring stuff with 
yeah, the RC bug count is going down, mostly due to the 
(If you want to ignore the explanations and see how to stop the Linux kernel from flooding the console with low importance messages, go straight to the bottom of the article, is the small bit at end with larger font.)
It took me some time, but finally updated appliances with 
Today I've been mostly replanting spider-plants, aloe-vera plants, and shuffling trees around inside my flat.
Beyond that I've been updating my 
After this