Derik Badman's Journal

Had another dream where I was being attacked by some large man/monster. Not sure what to think of that. Yesterday wasn't particularly stressful and I wasn't feeling anxiety about anything (consciously at least). Not that work was all wonderful, but it's more about long term issues like planning than anything immediate. We have worked for a long time with short term planning, sometimes deciding what would be done next in our applications right before doing it ("Ok, I finished that feature, what should I do next?"). This worked to a certain extent if everything else remains flexible, though often any larger, more complicated features get pushed off indefinitely. But the more we move into structured releases, scrum methodology, and longer term goals, the more planning those goals and associated features becomes important. That's where we've really fallen apart. My team and I have been working on a large project for the whole year, but we keep having to change code we've already written because the requirements for our project keep getting changed. We are told it should work one way then weeks or months later told something different. Sometimes those changes are simple enough, but other times these changes require major refactoring and days of work to accomplish. It's frustrating because it's out of my control (I don't get to decide the big picture), but I'm the one who ends up getting most of the pressure about the effects (who long things are taking). There was also an early decision about the project that just made everything that followed from it exceedingly more complicated for what I'd argue is not worth the time and effort and potential bugs we will have.

Anyway, enough about work.

Last night, was our regular Tuesday night date night out for dinner, which pretty much always means walking down to Dettera in town and sitting at the bar for dinner and drinks. It's "Restaurant Week" in town, so it got pretty busy (we originally started going out on Tuesdays because of how quiet it is generally speaking), but they had a special prix fixe menu. The tomato mozzarella salad I had was delicious and included pureed kalamata olive that was really interesting. All the powerful flavor of the olive but in a creamy texture.

It's a hot sunny day already today, which makes me not look forward to my walk down to the co-op for dinner ingredients, nor how hot my office will probably be by late afternoon. The two baby doves in the nest on our porch (up in the corner under the rafters) have grown amazingly over the past days. We think one of the parents met an untimely fate, as it's been a couple weeks now since we saw two out there on the porch at once (and previously you'd always see them together). Somehow the one remaining parent (I keep thinking of them as a she, out of prejudice I guess) managed to hatch the eggs and is now caring for the babies. For a while it seemed like she never left the nest, but now that they've grown, I see them out there by themselves more often, and even when she does return she kind of perches next time them rather than right on top.