I got dragged into doing interviews at work. We did the first two on Wednesday, and will do two more next week. It’s not something I particularly enjoy doing, and I suspect the worst bit will be trying to pick which two out of the four get the available positions (because of course it would be insane to reward or recognise people based on their actual value to the company, rather than forcing them to wait for available vacancies or just leave to be better-paid elsewhere). They’re all internal candidates who I know, which makes it easier in some ways but harder in others (and of course it’s critical that we only assess them based on a one-hour interview and a coding test, rather than, say, working with them for several years).
On Thursday we held DevCon19, our internal developer conference which has been going since I organised the first one in 2009. I continued my streak of speaking at all of them, this time with a talk entitled You Keep Using That Word …, about all the terms people bandy about (agile, TDD, CI, refactoring, technical debt, DevOps etc) but often use to describe something unrecognisable from the original definition. I also slipped in a rant against SAFe and a claim that when managers criticise agile development as anarchy then it’s not because they misunderstand agile, but because they misunderstand anarchism.
I got some more descaler, and ran it through the brew boiler of my espresso machine this time. It clearly did something, because the lever moves even more freely now and it’s easier to control the flow with the needle valve. I also (randomly while getting ready to go to work one morning) pulled the burrs out of my grinder for a quick brush down. Halfway through I heard something drop to the floor, and realised it was the tiny bit that sits on top and keys the burr onto the drive shaft. After searching the floor for a while, I eventually found it under the cooker.
I briefly broke the “thinking about Christmas” embargo on Saturday to feed the cakes, and also made a Christmas pudding. I haven’t tried to make one for over 20 years, after a bit of a disaster when I was daft enough to follow a Delia Smith recipe, which came out ridiculously wet and took over 24 hours of steaming, then boiling, then baking, to solidify. This time I used the far more reliable Dairy Book of Home Cookery, which produced a mixture of a much more likely-looking consistency. Obviously the proof will be, as they say, in the eating.
It was Remembrance Sunday, which can only mean one thing – the Stowmarket Scenic 7. I was struggling a bit, and finished over a minute slower than last year, but did at least beat Robin, who was struggling even more.