Weekly 3 - Yet Another Pivot

It is Monday the 20th of January 2025. This is the third petals weekly of 2025 and of season three. So this week I'm going to get a bit more focused on Petals. I'm going to change the format slightly and try to give it a bit more structure and takeaways for you to all to learn from. So let's see how this goes. So first things first, as in all good Petals conversations, we're going to start off with the Petal scores. That's what it's all about. So let's do it. It is productivity 3, it is enjoyment 2, teamwork 4, learning 3 and serenity 2. Average of 2.8 for me. Let me explain why. So, delivery wise, it's been a bit of a mixed bag this week. I've tried to get my focus on with petals. I've had a few of the distractions which I'll talk about later, and a few plates that I've been spinning at the moment. So I'm really keen to kind of bring it in. But this is why my score is quite low. I'm not particularly happy with how productive I've been this week, especially compared to last week, but I did start to see the light at the end of the tunnel and get a bit more focused towards the end of this week. Because of that, I've been quite disappointed in myself. My enjoyment has dropped. I'm not particularly happy about what's been going on. And again, with Serenity being quite low with two as well, I'll explain why shortly. That all being said, there's been a lot of ideas going around. I've really relied on the Petals team behind the scenes to bounce some ideas off each other, to focus on some of my key areas for this quarter and to try to get things moving. Again. It's been great because last Friday I had some two great conversations with the team members. One around some public speaking gigs and I'll get some structure around that. I've also been doing some coding this week, which has been a while. Not going to lie, but it's been great getting back into that, making sure that I'm doing it properly. We've also been playing around with some of the tooling, just kind of refine that a little bit. Instant feedback, which I'm happy about. So again, teamwork's been pretty strong, hence the four. I've also felt like I've learned quite a few things this week, not just with the app. Like I've been doing a bit of diving into DevOps looking at Heroku pipelines and organizations. I'm looking at GitHub and a few other toolings, but I've also been learning some interesting stuff which I talk about again in the learning section of this episode slightly later on. Serenity took a bit of a hit though this week we had some family dramas that didn't help to get my head into that space, make sure that everyone was in a good place. Thankfully everyone's good now and I won't go into the detail because it's quite sensitive, but I do want to put that out there in this space. To say it is okay to have personal challenges. It's okay to share it if you want to and if you feel safe to, I'm going to happy to say that I'm going to tell you the details why, but I just want to demonstrate it's fine to talk about your personal challenges. Why? Why? Serenity might be taking a dip, but hopefully try and do something about it. So that's the kind of summary for my petal scores this week. Lots to learn from and I need to refocus next week. I need to think about some of those high challenges. I've got a conference talk I need to submit. I'm nearly there. I just want to give it a bit more refinement today. Okay, next section is around Petals, actual projects and delivery. As I said, lots been going on behind the scenes so it's not been the most productive time, but thankfully we have good teamwork going on so I can rely on my team members to get things moving on, get some support where I need it, and we are getting there. What I have been doing is stripping out some of the CSS frameworks that we had in place for version 2. It's proven quite difficult to work with at the moment, so we're trying to strip it back and find a new library that'll make it a lot easier. Daisy ui, which is like a tailwind library, was the original plan and as we got into it we realized it is limiting us in a sense. So we're going to take that out, start afresh, but with a fresh canvas, zero CSS on the app and then we've got clean slate to start with and I can pass that over to a team member to pick that up and apply some designs. That is in Canva at the moment. I also had a look at a tool called Axolo which is kind of trying to integrate GitHub with Slack and improve the workflow process for any merge requests. It creates channels for each merge request you can tag people and that sort of stuff. I found I was just going down a bit of a rabbit hole. It looked quite cool. I had a play and it got the feedback going. Do we need this? I don't know. What do you think? So, you know, instantly found the feedback from the teammates and said, nah, let's get rid of it. But it's nice to have a play with that sort of stuff. I always like to try new tools when they're surfaced and see if it's relevant to what we're doing. If it can make our process any simpler or more efficient. This one just seems like excess for the scale we're working at. I think if you're in a large organization with loads of work going at the same time with a larger team, potentially better and really useful for managers to kind of have full visibility. But at the same time we don't need it. We've got GitHub, we've got the pull requests, we've got enough comms going on. Let's leave it. Something else I've been looking at this week. Again, similar to like what I'm doing here. I've rethought the content that I'm going to present on these Petals weeklies. As you've already seen, I've done my petal scores and explained as to why the scores are important. I'm talking about some of the project stuff that we've got going on with the app, with the content and all the other stuff going on. And what we'll also do is share something I've learned this week. So hopefully you get something really interesting to take away at the end of all this. And because of this, I'm also rethinking the calendar work in progress, but I'm wondering if it's better to have like every two weeks we do some delivery updates and then the in between weeks we mix it up with some conversations either within the team, with outsiders. And I'm thinking that might be a nice, more natural approach to the Petals content, Petals weeklies. But again, I appreciate any feedback on whether this is going to work. I've got a couple of people lined up to join the conversations. Watch this space. Not immediately, but they are coming. And something else I just want to kind of highlight that I've done this week. We've been playing around with Buffer. Buffer.com is a fantastic service which is used for distributing content on all the social networks. I've got friends and contacts that work there, so I'm always thinking about how I can use it. But I've basically set up a new plan where We've got our three main channels on LinkedIn threads and Blue Sky. They're my three main focus areas at the moment. They automatically pull in content or I can add my own content sporadically and it just goes into a scheduled buffer that eventually gets pushed out at the right times. So I've set that up now. It's quite nicely streamlined. I've got a tick tick sort of recipe with if this and that that automatically pushes to that as well. So watch this space. It makes it a lot simpler for me to put content out and hopefully get out as well as distributed models that are currently happening the final section of Petals Weekly that I want to play with is what I've learned this week. Today I learned or what I learned this week. We'll work on the language of that, but it's playing on the L of Petals and I want to share some sort of article I've read recently, maybe a book that I've been reading or a podcast I've been listening to. So I'll share what I've learned this week in this section. This week, one of my call outs is a book called Four Ways of Thinking by David Sumpter. I listened to an audiobook version of this on Blinkist. It was quite interesting to listen to though, because what it explores are the different types of thinking that we use in mathematics, but how that translates to all other There are four distinct modes of thinking that he calls out statistical, interactive, chaotic, and complex. I won't be able to explain this and give it full justice, so I'd recommend reading up on this properly. But what I found really interesting about this topic itself was how as individuals we have different modes of thinking and when it's most relevant, but also how you might realize the different modes of thinking within a team level. You know, you might have some real expert analytical thinkers based on personality types. You might have some really good chaotic thinkers when it comes to chaos mode and the sort of interactive and complex modes when it's more empathy related. So it's something to consider as part of a Petals conversation, or maybe as part of a retrospective or maybe there's a workshop to think about how your team works together. I've also been thinking recently about some ways of working workshops and I was actually speaking to my wife about some leadership skills and tricks and techniques that we could potentially explore. So watch this space when it comes to sort of workshop mode, leadership mode, ways of thinking, and all the sort of models and frameworks that are available across the industry, not specifically in tech, actually across the board. But you know what's relevant to what we're trying to do with Petals. Okay, so that is this week's weekly. Hopefully it's useful and a little bit more structured and not just me rambling about all the projects. If you are interested in all my projects, continue on the side jobling YouTube channel where I'll be continuing to just put occasional content out. But this is on a brand New Petals YouTube channel. Now do your classic thing like and subscribe. Push notifications, all that stuff so you get the warnings and notifications when things come out. Give us some feedback, give us some comments in down below and let me know what else you want to explore. Or if you want to join me for a conversation on how you've been using Petals or you want to know more about how to do petals, please get in touch and I'll be back get back to you to sort something out. That's enough for this week. I'll be back next Monday. Cheers.