Week Notes 005

The Week

Tired - and now sick - two weeks in a row. Might need to changes things up. I'm just not getting enough sleep, and the whole family got sick. Nothing serious, but sick kids don't sleep well, so I haven't been sleeping well.

For work, something I'm noticing is so many things getting stuck at like 85 or 90% of the way done. We have some dependencies outside our control, but that's only for some of what we have going on. And we've made huge progress not only towards a milestone but in general as a team. Velocity as a term is often derided, but I think it can be valuable for a team to help gauge its own health and productivity. If a team uses it internally as a litmus test, and examines why a given sprint is higher or lower than a previous one, the team benefits and catches growing problems earlier on. And higher velocity is definitely something we're seeing this sprint, which I'm taking as a huge win. But, we are still seeing things sit at almost done for longer than I'd like. Maybe it just goes back to that idea that the last 10% of the work is the hardest? Something to talk about in our next retro, perhaps.

The tech lead role has also been a lot this week. Got kind of low at the beginning of the week, feeling like I'm doing everything wrong. Feels like I'm saying too much when I should hang back and keeping quiet when I should step in. I don't know, maybe the tiredness is throwing me off my game.

I just can't help comparing myself to some of the amazing tech leads I've had in the past. People who have been so expert in this field and deft at handling either the team, the client, or both. And I know I haven't been on the job as long as them, and they certainly had more leadership experience than me I do now. But it just feels like I'm not ready for that.

I know the counter-argument to that is they had to start somewhere, and that I can get better with practice. Just feels like I'm making all the mistakes right now, and the impostor syndrome is hitting hard this week.

And maybe this just means I haven't found my role - the particular aspect of the tech lead gig - that both suits me and that this team needs. Maybe I'm trying to fill too many roles. Maybe that's why I'm getting things wrong and not really feeling like I'm on top of everything as my past tech leads always appeared to be. I'm not ready to throw in the towel, but this week has certainly been a lot.

The Links

• The Mindset That Kills Product Thinking

  In keeping with my tech lead focus, here's an article about leadership and the product mindset.

• Useful CSS Tricks

  Quick, fun guide to a few CSS tricks. Learned a thing or two, myself.

• Images Effects with CSS

  Not the only article/tutorial I've seen on this, but I like messing around with this kind of thing.

• Web Components, Pseudo-Classes, and Pseudo-Elements

  I don't know as much about web components as I'd like, so I must admit, I didn't have a whole lot of context on why this was perceived as difficult. But the article is great.

• Optimizing Full-screen Images

  Thorough guide on getting big images to users well.

• The selectmenu Element

  A new and better select element WIP from the Open UI group.

Send-off

And that's it, folks. Thanks for reading, and I'll be back next week. Have a great weekend!