26 February 2023

MONDAY: Inset Day which these days means assembling my 9 year old son and bunch of his mates and playing football in the rec. There's a purpose built 5-a-side pitch freely available with a gritty, hard surface, perfect for slicing your hands up when you fall.

TUESDAY: I did a bit of prep for a technical interview. I needed to draw a simple architectural diagram of application / system I was familiar with to use as a visual aid for a discussion. My last job was not in a delivery team, it was a mixture of strategic, leadership and managerial responsibilities from an engineering perspective. So digging into detail about any one of the 75 systems (at last count) is a bit of a memory game, plus scouring the Github repos, which gladly are open.

I ran about 4k

WEDNESDAY: Aforementioned technical interview went okay. From an interview perspective, I'm finding it's challenging to give examples of technical detail of projects because most of my work in the past 4 years was about building teams, strategy, growing engineering capability... I wasn't in the detail as much as I would have liked. My strategy with these types of interviews is to try my best and say when I don't know the detail.

In the afternoon I walked over to the library to find and read a random book. I read The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami. Turns out the tastier brains are the ones with more knowledge. Ask the old man.

THURSDAY: Gym session plus spent some time preparing for behavioural questions. I scanned the company's Glassdoor interview section for an idea of questions asked and wrote up some answers.

FRIDAY: I had the final interview. A good number of the questions I found on Glassdoor came up. I do wish they gave you interview questions ahead of time so you can give your best answers. I find this mirrors the a lot of works these days anyway, plus I need time to recall and take the mess in my brain and turn out a coherent structure. When I have been a hiring manager, I have experimented with this, giving out the questions 10 to 15 minutes before the interview on piece of paper so the candidate has time to make notes, know how much time to dedicate to each question, etc... Having a question written down in front of you also allows you to re-read it as many times as you need to whilst answering to make sure you have given a full answer. This relies upon having a standard set of questions, which is current best practice. It obviously doesn't apply to more open-ended technical discussions.

Booked a hotel in Inverness as part of travel plans to Skye later this year for the wedding of the century. I'm one of the ten bridesmen and I have a speech to prepare.

Saturday: K and I ran Parkrun. It was K's first time. I managed my fastest time 32:01. Very pleased with my time given I started training for a 5k at the start of January. I thank Podrunner.

Dropped the boy off at rugby whilst we had a full-english to replenish our energy.

Sunday: K needed to use up a spa voucher she'd received for Christmas. So I joined her. Only right given my run the day before. Afterwards we walked across Hyde Park lit by the low sun.

What I'm listening to

🎧 Cracker Island by Gorillaz

🎧 Breaking the balls of history by Quasi

What has resonated with me

• https://devsnap.me/css-animation-examples - It's amazing what CSS is capable these days. I'm old enough to remember back to the days where most of my time was spent dealing with browser quirks and using bugs as features. CSS looks like a joy to use these days.
• https://subset.so/ a really interesting take on the spreadsheet. You use resizable blocks instead of worksheets and there's an infinite canvas.
• https://www.twitch.tv/atheneaiheroes - 24/7 AI generated livestream of celebrities answering questions posted by people in the chat.