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This Christmas, give yourself the gift of knowing that your work isn’t boring
‘Sorry, this is the boring bit.’
When I hear those words, my heart sinks almost as much as it used to when I heard someone declare that they were not technical. In the field of enterprise technology, they normally mean that the speaker is about to attempt an explanation of technical detail to an audience which includes non-technical people.
Perhaps they are going to explain to a product manager why the system built for a hundred users can’t scale to a million without extra infrastructure. Or why it’s not a good idea to put a system which holds customer’s personal details into production without security testing. Or why, while it might be tempting to make the chat interface available to every user, someone has to pay for all those tokens.
Embrace the gift of boredom this Christmas
It’s Boxing Day today, which means that, if you live in the United Kingdom, you are entering the limbo period between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. (Other countries may have the same experience, but I have only ever celebrated Christmas in the UK, with our holiday timing and traditions.) The presents have been opened, and the Christmas dinner has been eaten. Batteries have been found for the toys that needed them, but they’re starting to run down. The board games have been played, and you are wondering when your relatives are going home. It’s dark outside and it’s possibly raining. Most of the shops are shut. In theory, tomorrow is a working day, but lots of people are still on holiday.
You might feel a bit aimless during this period. Possibly even a little . . . bored?
At this point, you may be tempted to reach for one of the distraction devices that most of us have to hand (you may even be reading this article on one of them). Perhaps what’s needed to brighten up these midwinter days is to scroll through a social media feed, to reply to all of the messages in the chat group, to scan the news, or have a quick go on a mobile game.
Or perhaps not.
All I want for Christmas is speed and reliability
What were your Christmas lists like as a child? Were they modest requests for improving books and educational toys? Or were they, like most Christmas lists, an extravaganza of wishes, containing toys and sweets and games . . . and possibly a dragon and a unicorn?
It sometimes feels like our requirements for software development are like a Christmas list written by a very small child that wants everything at once. We’d like the ERP package to have world class embedded processes, but we’d also like it to customise it to meet our every need. We’d like the cloud platform to give us capacity on demand and pay as we go, but we’d also like it to be on-premise because we’re worried about security. We’d like an AI system that predicts our customer’s needs, but we’d like to do it without using our data.
And being a project manager or a product owner can feel like a harried parent who can’t possibly afford everything on the list, and is worried that Christmas morning is going to be a disappointment. If I give them all the customisations they want, then we can never take the upgrade. I can give them security on cloud, but they’ve got to understand the shared responsibility model. I can build them an AI model, but not unless someone’s prepared to share the data.
What’s hiding in your technology sock drawer?
If you celebrate Christmas, I hope that you got some good presents. But you may also have got some presents that seem fun for a few weeks, or a few days, or a few hours and that you then put away, never to take out again.
In the fascinating podcast series Gamecraft (https://www.gamecraftpod.com/), Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins explore the history of the video game industry. I learnt a lot from this series about the economics and history of video games, as well as the way that the behaviour of developers and players has shaped and been shaped by games. I recommend listening to the whole series, but there’s one concept that particularly stuck with me: the idea of ‘sock drawer ware’.
This is consumer technology that appears to be a good idea, and that looks like it will gain a committed, sustained audience, but ends up in the sock drawer after a few weeks. (This term crops up in the episode about virtual reality - sorry VR people, but this seems like a good way to describe the repeated waves of enthusiasm and indifference that have greeted developments in VR. Perhaps this time round it will be different.)
Now you’re thinking with . . .
Christmas is a time for play, so let’s talk about a game. If you haven’t played the video game Portal, then I suggest that you stop reading this article and go and play it.
Welcome back. Did you play Portal 2 as well? If not, go and play that one as well: it’s even better.
If you didn’t take my advice, then you’ve missed out on a great experience. (Maybe you should go and try it - we’ll wait.) I believe that the Portal games are examples of just how good video gaming can be: intriguing, playful, thoughtful and challenging, with a sparse but engaging story.
In the games, you are a subject in a lab, and you have one tool to pass a series of strange and dangerous tests: a portal gun. When fired, this gun creates a hole on a surface, and when fired again, it creates a hole on another surface. If you jump through one hole, you come out of the other - it’s a portal! The games are an exercise in creativity on top of this simple premise, by both the developers and the players.
Celebrating our celebrations
If you celebrate Christmas, when did you put up your decorations this year?
In our house, we don’t normally put our decorations up for very long: about a week or so each side of Christmas. But this is not a normal year: we put our decorations up a week early, and I think that many other people did the same. This year (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere) it felt like we needed those extra lights in the darkest time of the year. Even though the timing might have been a break with tradition, it felt important that we could still keep some traditions in some form, despite the challenges we face together.
The value of decoration was brought home to me even more this year by the extra effort made by the shops in the town where I live. For the past few years, many of these shops have had their windows painted by a handful of local companies, but this year even more seemed to join in. The picture at the top of this article shows just some of these paintings.
Maintaining work/life balance in an unusual holiday season
For many people, the next day or so will be their last working day of 2020 before taking a break over Christmas and the end of the year.
Like so much in 2020, though, that break will not be like other years. Where I live, in the UK, there are still restrictions on travel, hospitality and social interaction, and while some of these rules will be relaxed briefly over Christmas, we will still need to exercise caution.
How should we spend our holiday time, then, when we can’t do much of what we would normally do?