OKAY (Part 2)

(I don't often reply to other posts, but this one deserves a reply.)

I spent a good chunk of my day working on computers, of course, because that's what I've picked as my career. (It's odd to have a career, but that's another post.) So I spun up Docker container after Docker container, built in Jenkins, tweaking LDAP and SSL settings until everything was right, then adding favicons and splash images that would make me and others around me happy. Laughing -- laughing well and happily, not meanly -- is important. And as a reward I got to share those laughs with coworkers, and I got to move tickets to the "Resolved" pile, and both were satisfying.

So work is done, but now it has to be documented -- another thing I like, since it means writing (which I like) and writing down what I've done so I don't have to explain it (which I like), and even if it takes longer than I think it will (which it does) the time goes faster when you slip in some jokes that make your coworkers smile. Laughing is important.

Next up is lunch, which gives me a chance to talk to my onboarding brother from another mother and ask what he's up to, and what keeps his team from doing things another way -- which turns out to be a lot I didn't know, which is exactly what I had hoped would come out of this: me learning something I didn't know. Later in the afternoon I'll ask another coworker questions that are challenging-sounding, and explain that I don't doubt his assertion, I just want to know what it is he's thinking about that I'm missing. I still struggle with how to phrase these questions.

And then there was a problem with Nagios and PagerDuty -- which turned out to be a problem with our understanding of how they interact. I've got a shaky understanding, and my attempt to explain it to someone else does not sound convincing -- which is fair, and in any case is less important to them than the fact that they have to do extra work to figure out WTF is going on. It calls for a better understanding of how we use the two, so I make a note for our Friday documentation spike, which I'm proud to say I started.

All this has left me no time to talk to my coworker in San Francisco, who spent yesterday busy in meetings and spent today working on stuff I should have helped out with. We commiserate about it. Supper is leftover pizza eaten cold (it is the ONLY way to have leftover pizza) at my desk.

At 6:30 is OpenLateYVR, the Northern Edition of the meetups in San Francisco. People show up, I talk to them; I introduce our speaker, then call for other speakers after it's done; I talk some more. I am not extroverted, but I have learned, late in life, that one of the gifts my father has given me is the ability to LARP it when needed, and I meet many people during the night: the guy who worked in the docks until he busted his elbow, and is now figuring out web development; someone else who works at a competitor and may be up for a career change; the one who is reorganizing his life, one bit at a time, and is feeling his way around Vancouver's tech scene. It is a strange thing to be so outgoing, so confident (maybe not deservedly so, but confident nonetheless), when most days I want to just hide in my hole and type at computers, not people.

I get home at 10:45, after a crowded SkyTrain and bus ride home. And I come across my wife's blog post about her day. I've known for a hella long time that I'm incredibly lucky, but it is a particularly wonderful example of this to read her describing her day; there are pictures of the kids (our beautiful, beautiful children), there are the details I would have asked for, there are thought-provoking bits that I'm doing such a poor job of trying to echo here.