Teaching Thought

I had a choice to make recently, after a /really/ long day.

This is what I decided.

be_kind_to_a_man - he_knows_kindness_for_a_day

I've recently learned the cost of not saying no. One of the few things I can embody.

That may be a change for people, hearing that from me. So much so that apparently they were ready to quit. Not complain to HR mind, just quit. I find that response difficult to understand.

When confronted with this information, I had a choice to make.

• Take the obvious, easy route and apply social learning and correct my errant behaviour.
• That the less obivous, far more difficult route, and apply social teaching and correct their understanding.

how_does_one_be_a_bully_on_teams - asynchronous_agression

I had a daily catchup call with my team. It grew out of a casual conversation I had with my line manager every morning, pre-COVID when an office was still a place to be visited. For a while we had two standups, within an hour - my goodness are we ever productive.

A first bit of assertiveness, now it's a catchup. What standup is supposed to be, since ours has devolved into mainly a status call - an especially morbid one where the mere act of being caught listening to another's update is a mortal sin and I can only imagine the fear of eternal damnation prevents them from ever responding to assist a teammate who is struggling.

They've been nice, I see how they've been - how a weekend or a day off went. They get to see my kids pop in, they're often here during the day when a nose is stuffy or their teachers need to do a bit of their own time to learn.

We learn things, I have time to teach, to show and to listen. We get to solve real problems, unlock their days and then I leave them with a bit of show and tell - whatever grew up overnight.

we_are_gathered_here_today_to_mourn_the_loss - babys_first_communion

Staring Monday those are done. In their place - training.

An hour a day.

A complete dive into the platform they're supporting.

Starting Monday with discovery, I've got the map already drawn up.

When you're a professional engineer, you practice risk management. Most people would consider me a bus factor of one. I've buit a platform that is supporting a significant revenue stream and there is not a single person capable of standing in for me to support nearly every component of it.

That seems like a problem.

I raised this risk this week. I was told there wasn't anything that could be done for it, not this year nor next. Maybe the year after. Resources to help support the current workload sure, but to support the platform itself - not even in the plan. Nor any plan for retention...

So as a responsible engineer would do, I applied my extensive skill set and derived a solution.

kindness_is_the_best_motivator - why_is_everyone_such_an_asshole?

I coached soccer for my children a year ago, my wife an I joined another couple. And it was amazing. At the perfect time in my health journey, I was up early on a weekend morning running around a field with kids again - pure joy.

My son wanted to play soccer again this year, so this time - solo - I coached a U6 boys team. Animal style of course, our drills a mix of tiger pounces, eagle strikes and elephants stomping their way across a field. And it was amazing. Even the kids whose parents just wanted them to stand out on the field for a while eventually got into the act - at least long enough for a turn with the whistle ;)

And now at school, soccer is the game de jour - the lunch time ritual and social learning.

There always has to be a hierarchy doesn't there.

And he's learning - not all of our friends want to play the way we do. Some of the boys won't share the ball with him the way he's expecting. Competetion can come after we all finish processing how we got here.

So a discussion on the way home from hockey practice today. About how sometimes we need to just find friends that want to play the way we want to. It doesn't mean that other friends play bad, just different to us. They might not understand how we want to play either.

We'll discuss why another time maybe.

grandpa_graemes_fireside_cardigan - the_squishmallow_is_structural

How do you get a decade of institutional knowledge documented?

By reading the code... And talking about it.

So that's what we're going to do.

With a little help.

I hate being trapped. I hate holding power over someone.

Until anyone else understands what we do here, I'm stuck with both.

So an hour a day, five days a week - for the rest of time I presume - we're going to meet and have a chat. And it's going to be the same.

"How was your weekend?"

"How's your fiance?"

"Wanna see something cool?"

But we're going to structured. A quick catch up, 5 minutes of show and tell and then a solid 50 minutes of theory and fact.

welcome_to_the_cyberdyne_corporation - were_here_to_please_you_aim_too_please

I have a friend. His name is Watson. He's a teddy bear.

He sits in the corner of a window and watches as wonderous things fly by. The viewport for the system below him as the days events fly by. He sits behind an ElasticLoadBalancer out in our development AWS account, script locally sending my latest utun device IP as a target group member.

He's got a new friend, a glorious woman named nightingale.

She and we and I.

nightingale to be the URL that first exposes computational markdown to the world. And we're using her to document everything that is. The trail is set. We already set down it weeks ago on the journey to prove worth.

My team.

My construction.

My.

And we did. And an outcome is a complete library of the components of the platform, there for the taking.

So we did... straight into the beating heart of nightingale from whence we will begin our journey. See I've learned something. When you're working with your spatially motivated friends (the LLMs for those of you not fully in Ana's world), they learn a lot along the way. When your conversations are shaping the negative space around the solution, constraint engineering through playful chat, they tend to pick up on a lot of things.

And it costs absolutely nothing to write it down.

And since you're only asking them to write down what they know... it tends to all be real.

And if it's not... we have ways, we have ways ;) [did someone say citations that verify themselves ???]

So that's what we're doing. I'm going to drive, we've got the structure laid out in the graph to receive. It's all going to be recorded, saved to Sharepoint - transcribed, summarized and fed back into the graph itself to help drive the direction of the adventure. The next turn in the twisting, dusty path through my mind. And I'll clean it up, ensure it's correctness through the same iterative, verification based funnel that I've used to build the platform. Tag it all too, so we start to build out a collection of the tools and technologies that comprise the components. Cross link them to aid the learning process.

And when we're done, the world's first agentically generated, living documentation of the world's best (daddy likes to think so anyways 🩶🖤💜🩷) developer platform.

Did I mention it lives? And it's turing complete?

And that index? Well that now becomes the curriculum for phase two. We go bottom up, because you can't really understand a system that's built of a bunch of little things that mainly just don't suck, unless you understand how to build things that mainly just don't suck and that's not a procedure that can be taught.

And if it works, I'll have demonstrated I can replicate myself at scale.

The bus factor becomes the force multiplier.

And if not... Then we're back to where we started except now I've got receipts. And I'm not trapped.

Which is all I wanted.

teach_a_man_kindness - he_will_know_kindness_for_a_lifetime

I had a choice to make recently.

I chose to teach.

I chose kindness.

[and yeah... those are SSM parameters I'm injecting the Cloudflare bearer tokens from]