Accidentally in Code

Tag: shipping

  • The Joy of Scope Creep

    The Joy of Scope Creep

    I’m disciplined about scope. Ship the smallest thing that moves you forward. The feature you don’t build is the feature you don’t maintain. When I was running a team, holding the why was the job. Keeping us focused on the things that actually mattered, and away from the things that didn’t.

    In Navigating the AI Shift there’s a module where we talk about finding the joy of scope creep, once your core thing is shipped and you can lean into curiosity.

    I think this is both the joy and the danger of AI. Everything seems possible, so everything is happening, and you lose sight of the point of it all.

    But back to the joy. I wanted to fix our marketing messaging. It had been sitting on my list for… a while, which is a long time for something I’d decided was important.

    I hate marketing messaging. But finally, I’d collected all our blog posts, the things we say about running DRI, not the things we write when we’re trying to sell something, and used them to build a point of view that actually sounded like us. It was better. But I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

    So I stuck it into Claude design, and entered a few days of absolute madness.

    this is what passes for a daily standup in our world

    24 hours later, I was rolling out the redesign. New design system, home page, landing page template, all three courses. The messaging that had been stuck was live. A 404 page, just because I could. A “how to expense this” page that Jean rolled out while I was asleep.

    24 hours after that, the comparative ugliness of the logged-in views was untenable. So now we have an all new experience, right on schedule for Module 3 of our accelerated cohort.

    Objectively, a whole site redesign to unblock one piece of copy is ridiculous.

    Practically, it worked.

    This isn’t the first time I’ve done this, but it’s the biggest and most visible. I was feeling a bit low and needed a win, and this was my background task that I poked along between a day of too many calls.

    The admin portal is just me and Jean. Does it matter? Looking at our previous UX, you would have to conclude: no. But also: don’t we also deserve to have a good experience in what is functionally our workplace? And now the “show cohort progress” item that I wanted but didn’t know how to express, is in.

    Jean has the generous read, which is that the creep is productive. Every side quest teaches you where the tools are strong and where they fall apart. The dashboard rebuild went fine. The macOS app I once tried to build for Social Brain, my analytics thing that kept growing until I tried to make it native, did not (yet). I keep learning, I’m getting better at it all.

    I’m having a great time.

    I had a pause when I realised that Claude design produces very similar sites. I shook it off. Most sites already look the same and it’s clearly better. A designer is not in the budget. Let’s just get it done.

    In the course we tell people: find the win, and find the joy. When AI is what everyone else is using and it’s making your work life worse, it sucks. You have to find the thing that makes your work life better. When it’s the stick you have to use otherwise you’ll be laid off, and you might be laid off anyway, there’s no joy there – only fear.

    When you shipped the thing you wanted? There’s joy in that.

    Lately my wins are getting bigger. I did this in a week when I was feeling low, and I fucking loved it. I learned a ton. The site looks good.

    And when the first sale came through on the new look, I thought, oh. Maybe this is why.

    We’re really enjoying seeing what people create in our first cohort of Navigating the AI Shift. The next cohort starts June 8, and if you could use help finding the joy of it all, we’d love you to join us.

  • Shipping

    Shipping

    a great girl
    Credit: flickr / cambiodefractal

    To mark my 4 week anniversary in Kitchener, I didn’t have a party (as suggested by AY), I instead had a week long crisis. I think AY had the better idea…

    It was a number of things. Moving. Change. The stress and difficulty of dealing with the appalling Goodlife (there’s some deep irony in that name). The clocks changed and I started waking up when it’s still dark, and having nowhere to go. Freaking out over my thesis. Two years in grad school, remarkably unworried about it (I’m told) and panic finally set in. I spent far too much time contemplating the webpage of a guy in graduate admissions at Carleton who suggested a couple of times – joking I’m sure – that I transfer. I was very close to emailing him and asking how joking was he.

    I’m not panicking about writing my thesis. I’m panicking about what I do with it when I’ve written it. I have no idea – and frankly, I’m terrified of finding out.

    The biggest thing, though, was some jackass being patronizing and disparaging of something I was concerned about. I’m told – by other engineers, who understand why I’m worried – that my concern is valid. It’s now being addressed through other means. However. This one person, ignoring my question, finally calling to “answer” it – only to try and make me feel stupid for asking it… threw me off completely. He didn’t make me feel stupid for asking it. He did make me furious, and start questioning some big decisions I’ve made lately. It resulted in me not exploring another option – not because I’m so happy of where I am and what I’m doing, but because I feel like it’s too late and if I’ve made a horrible mistake… I don’t need any more information about that to make me feel bad.

    So I spent a lot of time in tears. And I kept getting up, feeling like I wasn’t ready to face the day yet, and napping on the couch until it was light. In the midst of this, my trainer annihilated my thighs to the point where I could barely walk for two days, so no gym.

    Just me, completely overwhelmed by everything, wracked with indecision.

    no one can hear you!
    Credit: flickr / g-mikee

    I’m reading Making Ideas Happen at the moment. And something in there struck me. Shipping. And I realized, that typically I ship things every day – blog posts, draft work, emails… and I’d stopped. Nothing had left me.

    I booked into the spa for a mudwrap. But first, I read this huge paper (a warm up to being productive) and sent the email I’d been agonizing over. Then afterwards, I made myself ship some academic work in the form of a blogpost.

    I still feel overwhelmed. I still napped again this morning. But then I finished a blogpost I’d been struggling to write. Now this one is flowing more. I have a plan for what I will work on later – and I’ll aim to ship a draft of a document I need to write.

    And – I said no to my escape route, because I don’t want to run away. And the situation with the jackass will work itself out – someone else is taking it seriously, and now some circumstances have changed making it a different problem of known size.

    Finally, I’m overwhelmed by grad school and the dreaded thesis. But, I think if I just keep shipping stuff towards that goal, day in, day out, it’ll be OK.