The year started much as 2023 ended, and I didn't really relise it at the time but I'm now confident that I was suffering from burnout. The working situation at Novata had become complicated, and my negativity was leeching into my personal life, and worse of all I was letting it happen. In short, I just wasn't in the best place mentally, and I was playing ignorant and putting on a pretense that things were all OK.

I'll keep things surface level, but the Product and Engineering function was stuck in what i'd describe as a state of 'limbo' resulting from a void in leadership. The catalyst started in the fall of 2023, where the CPO was suddenly let go followed a couple of months later by the Head of Engineering. In both cases, there was no successor or real plan in place to fill the void(s) and I suddenly found myself feeling somewhat isolated, alone and lacking in guidance and feedback. The proverbal icing on the cake was my end of year performance review, chaired by the interim COO who was unable to really say anything of much value at all. I should've realised at this point that my role and future was tentative, if not already decided, but my mindset of putting the health and wellbeing of my reports first meant I never really took the time to digest the reality of my own situation and feelings.

Ultimately though that didn't matter, the status qou remained until april when a new CTO joined, and shortly after the need to reduce costs prior to seeking more investment meant my role would be eliminated. This was not a surprise to me, my role as per my duties had been largely redundant for 6 months with processes developed and rolledout, and responsibilites defined and delegated across the team. All that was left was oversight, and line management. The later which was already in the process of being delegated.

There was an opportunity for me to step into technical lead role, which I'll admit at the time was tempting. But considering the changes over the past 6 or so months, it just felt like the perfect time to 'step of the boat' and take a career break.

With the benefit of hindsight, this was one of the best decisions that I've made in my life.

I spent the first month reflecting and trying to really understand what the vision for my life would be, and over several iterations penned the following...

I've lived a full and meaningful life, remained healthy but have extracted all that my body ultimately had to offer. I've found my purpose and have achieved my goals and dreams, and am satisfied that I've made the most of the life that I was gifted and am content and ready for my next adventure.

During my life, I've made an impact on the world and helped to lay some foundation or keystone that others can build upon towards a better, more sustainable future for my children and by proxy all other life on the planet.

I've had a long and happy marriage, with a beautiful wife whose equally fulfilled and radiates confidence. Together, we've explored the world and supported each other to achieve as many of our goals and dreams as feasible. We've raised 2 children, who now stand tall on their own 2 feet and are were well prepared for life in the real word. We've nurtured and supported them to find their purpose and from the back row bask in the enjoyment of observing them living fulfilling lives and progressing towards their dreams.

Through the journey, we've met many great friends who have shared in our adventures and who have been with us through thick and thin. We've shared experiences and explored life together, discovered new hobbies and interests and created many happy memories which we regularly enjoy reflecting upon.

Moving forwards, I've developed the concept of 'My Garden', which is comprised of 5 areas that each represent the important pillars of my life.

• Myself
• Marriage
• Children
• Friends
• Impact

The intent is that I need to be more deliberate about which areas of my garden I tend to, and which I'm happy to let wither and wilt. It's easy to measure, for example I can simply ask my children on a scale of 1 to 10 how present/attentive do they think I've been recently. Priorities will shift over time, and that's OK. But I need to maintain a healthy balance, and be cognizant when I'm not giving areas the attention they might need. I'll perhaps followup with another piece covering each pillar in more detail, but my main takeaway is that up until now I've failed to properly balance my priorities in life, and moving forwards I feel I now have some structure that I can use to keep me on point.

Beyond the above, the other key revalations have been rediscovering what I'm calling 'Intrinisc Joy', and the revelation that I've been leaning far to hard on external factors to enjoy myself and that I need to get better at surfacing those from within, which I'm making good progress on.

Highlights

• Presence: I've been more present for my Wife and Children than I think I ever have been.
• Travel: I've travelled a lot this year with both friends and family and have had some truely amazing experiences, and made a lot of happy memories.
• Intrinisc Joy: The revelation that I've been leaning far to hard on external factors to enjoy myself and that what I've really needed to concentrate on is creating joy from within.
• Content: I've already got all the key ingredients I need in life, and I don't need to seek out more than I already have.
• Focused: I've decluttered my life, and developed the muscle to just let guilt and other feelings go.

As the year closes out, I will close by saying that I simply feel content. And looking forwards to the year ahead, I'm feeling very positive and better equiped to focus on the things that really matter in life.

The tool i've found best for my use cases has been Invoke AI, and in particular some of the features in their recent 5.0 release have really impressed. The killer feature has been the updates to the 'infinate canvas' feature, in particular with the more granular control layers, regional guidence and simplicity by which you can use different models/loras to work on the same image at the same time.

Frankly, once over the initial learning curve (which isn't too steep) you can really create some very remarkable things, and my aim is to create artwork for the walls of my house that is bespoke and personal.

Here are some examples of images where I started with a photo, and have worked to adjust the style. Firstly, an artistic pencil drawing...

And secondly, an Andy Warhol inspired pop-art portrait using the same photo.

Anybody reading this with the requisite hardware and some time on their hands really should give it a try.

From my lens, the major appeal is...

• Having my CV under source control.
• Easily rendering that JSON to different formats, e.g. HTML and PDF.

As i'll be searching for my next gig shortly, now seemed a good a time to action the itch and migrate my CV over. There are plenty of scaffold projects to help get started, hence it was easy enough to create a HTML version of my CV using one of the many themes available. Once up and running, that's when I realised that I just couldn't find a theme that would render my CV specifically how i'd like, so it was going to be a case of 'rolling up my sleeves' and getting hands on adapting one of the many themes to better suit my specific needs, the result of which is a new theme called Americano.

There's several minor styling tweaks, and actually behind the scences I was able to greatly cleanup a lot of the theme code and fix some inconsistancies against the schema. But the main changes I wanted to make were...

• Single column view, with content moved from the side bar and bought into the main document.
• Group positions by company as to more easily highlight promotions, something that I think LinkedIn does quite well and I was keen to replicate.
• Better highlight tools and technologies used at each specific company, something as a hiring manager I find mighty important.
• Other layout adjustments to make it easier to hit the 2 page sweet spot.

Achieving some of the above required some more invasive changes than I'd anticipated, but once I get started on something I really do enjoy getting deep into the inner workings and, when appropriate, making big changes. To meet my goals, I also had to extend the offical schema to support some additional properties, which I've documented in more detail in the README

Overall I'm pleased with the first iteration, andafter updating the toolchain to lean on Playwright to handle/automate the PDF generation I've now got an up-to-date CV that's under source control, that I can now use to apply for any roles that I'm interested in.

There's still some minor improvements that I want to make to the theme over the next couple of weeks, but it's been a fun little project and I feel confident that the CV's the theme renders are well presented and will visually stand out compared to others.

Now, 'eliminated' is an interesting word to use I thought. Normally don't you just say 'redundant' or similar? But whatever, I'm guessing this might be the standard language that they use in the US for this sort of thing.

Anyhow, what I really wanted to write about here was how I was feeling in the moment. In all honesty, I actually feel quite excited and energised about taking some time to myself and thinking really hard about what it is I want to do next.

As the organisation has grown and starts morphing into more of an enterprise business I've been seeing some early signals that things might not be going in the direction that I thought we would, so actually I'm viewing this as a good point to 'step off the ship' and take some time to really think hard about what I want to do next, what mark I want to leave on the world and what direction I need to start moving in to progress towards my next goal.

I'll write a separate post-mortem on my time in the role, but reflecting back on the past 2 years i'll admit it's been a pretty crazy, intense and fun ride. I joined early on when they were just 2 small engineering squads and the product MVP had just launched and as I move on there are now 8 squads split into 4 separate tribes. There's going to be plenty to reflect on, and although there are some alternative roles open within the company that they are keen for me to move into I feel theat this is the perfect time to 'step off the ship' and seek out a new adventure.

Now, I've no experience using Squarespace so I've nothing to say on the quality of their service and/or offering. But, they don't support one of the key features that I need, Dynamic DNS, hence I need to jump ship before all my self hosted services become stop working.

It really didn't take much research, but based on featureset and reputation I've migrated my domains over to Cloudflare. Process was super easy, almost instaneous and the pricing is solid to.

I had some minor issues with scoped API keys, but I've worked around that for now but otherwise everything's been seamless and service interuption has been minimal, not that my personal sites attract much in the way of traffic anyhow.

My main focus was on improving my health, reducing weight, improving my work life balance and overall just focusing more off my energy on myself and my family. I made some good progress, hitting my weight targets, reducing my alcohol consumption and spending a lot more time with the family, in particular working hard on "creating memories". There is still a lot that I need to build on though, and as such 2024 is going to be more of a continuation of my goals from 2023.

• Maintain an average weight of 80kgs.
• Average a positive state of mind.
• Build more "backbone".
• Read 12 books.
• Reduce time spent "Doomscrolling".
• Complete 4 or more personal coding projects.
• Learn 1 or more new skills.

So there we go, a short summary of my goals.

Before we begin, it's important to to understand who and how the content of your CV will be consumed, and with that understanding ensure that your CV is well structured and clearly communicates to the reader what they need to know about you.

There can be a lot of competition for roles. As an example, when we open a new position we advertise our roles on various public job boards, the result of which can be a lot of direct applications. Thanks to tools like LindedIn's 'Easy Apply', we'd typically get 100 applicants a day if not more depending on the role and requirements.

As such, hiring teams aren't going to be spending more than 20-30 seconds reviewing your CV to decide if you should make the shortlist or not. The goal of that initial screening process is to find the 'signal in the noise' in as short a time as possible, and make sure that that hiring team only move forwards with the, on paper at least, most suitable candidates for the role.

In addition, it's important to understand that those screening the CV might not even be part of the hiring team or same department. Often, we'd have administrators from the HR function pre-screen CV's, and as such we'd brief them on a few keywords to scan for to help them shortlist.

As such, a good CV summarises and surfaces the relevant information in a fashion that makes it easy for the screener to find everything that they're looking for in as short a time as possible.

Once through screening, your CV will likely play little part beyond helping the interviewers prepare and structure a conversation.

Screening

As above, I'd spend no more than 30 seconds completing an intial CV screen During this quick skim, I screen for the very basics...

1. Eligibility: As we're open to remote/hybrid working, we'd get a lot of applications from all over the world. Legally though, we could only hire in certain geograhical locations and weren't able to support/sponsor visas hence it's easy to filter out candidates who just aren't eligible.
2. Length: 2 pages is the sweet spot, anything more than that lacks audience awareness, and I already know that it's unlikely to effectively communicate what I want need to know.
3. Skills: Has the candidate clearly listed the skills, tech and/or tools that they're proficient in and does this marry up with the core requirements for the role. I don't want to spelunk through paragraphs of text to find specifics, so what I want to see is a nice list where I can quickly check off what I'm looking for.
4. Experience: How much industry experience has the candidate got, and is that experience relevant. Here I'm looking at dates and job titles, and wanting a quick indicator that they've roughly the right number of years experience. I'll caveat, that I don't believe 'time' in the industry is what qualifies your skill level, but for initial screening purposes it is indicative enough.
5. ChatGPT: Sadly, I do see a lot of repeat statements, covering letters or supporting text that's obviously come from ChatGPT or a similar tool. Some would argue it's clever use of a tool, but it's a put off for me.

For those that make the shortlist, I'd then do a second and, depending on numbers, sometimes a 3rd pass recovering the above points in more detail, but also looking at...

1. Impact: What specifically have they been working on in their most recent roles, and what were the outcomes/impact of that work. How and what candidates choose to write here can really say a lot about the environments that they've worked in and how they measure/quantify success.
2. Why: Opening statements say a lot about a candidate, and what I want to read is a statement that comunicates what's driving you to do what you do, and where ultimately you're trying to get to. I see 100's of generic and bland statements that overall say so little, but a solid opening statement that really say's something about person behind the paper are always a strong positive indicator for me.
3. Tenure: How long did they work at specific companies. The world has changed, and people do move jobs more than in the past. I find the 2-3 year mark the average these days, but lots of short tenues of a year or less I find a negative signal, contract roles being the exception.
4. LinkedIn: If there is a link or profile name, I will go and quickly look at it and quickly compare the information there with what's written on the CV. More often than not, there are contradictions with what's being said that can uncover embelishment or 'bending of the truth'.
5. Portfolio: Candidates often include links to work GitHub account of perhaps a blog or dedicated portfolio. If I see these, I'll always go and take a look. What I want to see are solid, showcase quality examples of the candidates work, but sadly often these links lead to long abandoned blogs or barren GitHubs. It signals poor judgement to include links to items or materials that don't add weight to your application.
6. Presentation: Your CV is an advert of you, it needs to stand out and deliver all the important information to the user. Despite best efforts, people do 'judge books by their covers', and there can be a lot of competition for roles so apperance goes a long way in making you stand out amongst the crowd.
7. Spelling and Grammar: As above. these 2 pages are your sales pitch. I expect attention to detail, and as such can't stand spelling or grammar errors on CVs. Note, that I cut some slack for non-native speakers, although typically I find non-natives write better english than natives.

Lastly, sometimes you get a decent number of suitable candidates but bandwidth in the team means you need to shortlist further. In those instances, I'll look for other signals that I find indicative of top performers.

1. Promotions: Any evidence of promotion at specific companies, where I find signs of rapid promotion generally a positive indicator.
2. Education: What was there educational journey like, and where were they educated. Graduates from top insitutuions are good signals that a candidate has 'grit and grind'.

Guidelines

As such here is my (not exhaustive) of , guidelines are...

• 2 pages max, it's a 'sales pitch' not a life story.
• Structure as...
  • Heading
  • Vision/Mission Statement
  • Core Skills
  • Professional Experience
  • Education
  • Meta
• Make sure your opening statement conveys why you do what you do. Keep it short, but keep it punchy. Consider 'Experienced software engineer with 10 years industry experience in web development with a passion for writing high quality, maintainable code' vs 'Passionate technologist and product engineer driven by the desire to make the world better by working on products that solve real problems for end users' and make your own judgment on which says more about the author.
• List your Core Skills as keywords, and only list the skills that you're really adept in and are immediately transferable. Don't be afraid to remove items that you no longer practice or have lost proficency in.
• List skills, tech stack and tools as keywords per role, the goal is to make it really clear what you used where and when. You can also list past skills here where perhaps your proficiency isn't quite what it was.
• Focus on detailling your most recent roles, and get lower resolution the further you go back in time. Specifics from a decade ago are seldom relevant, so shed the details the further back in time you go.
• For each company you worked at, include a single sentence about that the company actually does, e.g. Online SAAS platform for ESG data collection. A well worded sentence can add essential context to the specifics of what you did there.
• Detailing your accomplishments per role is important, but keep the list short and pay attention to your wording. Well structured sentences can add colour about specifics such as approach, culture and environment without needing to be explicit.
• Keep your Education section light, exhaustively listing modules and scores isn't particularly useful information and just takes space. Simply list the course title, institution, dates and your grades.
• Only include a link to your LinkedIn profile if the info on your profile is up-to-date, and aligns with the information in your CV. If you don't want to put the energy into maintaining data in both locations, then simply don't include a link to LinkedIn on your CV.
• Only include a link to your GitHub if there is actually substantial projects/content there that's worth while sharing with a prospective company. And make use of the Pinning feature to highlight your best work.
• Proof Read: Get your family, friends, collegues, etc, to proof read and cleanup spelling and grammar mistakes. At 2 pages, the word count is low and there is no excuses for letting mistakes slip through.
• Presentation is important, and will help you stand out from others. Engineers often put as much effort into their CVs as they do their documentation, but the reality is that its a competitive landscape and standing out from the crowd is important.

I might amend this list in the future, but for now it covers the important parts.

Hence I wanted to pen the below statment which I think encapsulates those learnings in a concise fashion

Burnout is giving up, and it's caused by high expectations coupled with low control, where control is one's ability to affect the outcome.

I was definately in the camp of people that defined the word as meaning 'working to much', and hence assumed the cause was typically too much on one's plate. But reflecting now on past situations it's actually bringing a new perspective as to how I understood and attempted to support.

With this new understanding, I've modelled a basic framework below.

From this, it identifies that when faced with burnout there are 2 potential remedies, either you can work to increase control or you work to lower expectations, although ultimately you want to focus on restablishing control to keep restore the sense of challenge and empowerement.

It's simple, sure. And by no means it it a a silver bullet. But this is going to be an interesting tool for me moving forwards.

I've updated it to the latest major version of Ghost, 5 at the time of writing, although sadly that has bought with it a migration from SQLite to MySQL. Since Oracle took over MySQL, i've leant more towards Postgres or MariaDB for my database needs, but Ghost seems to firmly required MySQL 8 and getting it to integrate properly with others would require more tinkering than I can be bothered with at the moment.

Instead, after updating and migrating I put some energy into customising the theme. I'd been using a theme called weblog which I'd tweaked slightly, but this time I decided to make some deeper, more invasive alterations the result of which you see before you. I've still got some fine tuning to do, but overall the layout and styling is more to my personal tastes whilst maintaining speed and simplicity.

I'm going to be putting some energy into some more personal projects, and am committed to reports here more about my progress and learnings.

Watch this space I guess...

One thing that's resonated with me recently is a terminology change we've recently made, which I find helps makes those conversations a lot more constructive than they used to be.

Value now vs more value later

It's simple, but focusing on that 'value' keyword has changed the dynamic of those conversations to be much more beneficial for all sides. Getting engineers to think about the value proposition that addressing some particular debt will have in the long term has been somewhat eye opening in helping them assert if a particular piece of debt is really worth addressing or not.

And likewise, for stakeholders having conversations focused on how this is going to allow for more value in the future helps them to understand the tradeoffs better, making it easier for them to prioritise engineering items against the roadmap items they tend to better understand.

Having started causually looking for a new job it dawned on me that it would be a good idea to update my CV and Linkedin profile with some links to my GitHub. Afterall, when reviewing CV’s for candidates applying for roles if any share any links to publicly accessible source code then I’ll always take a look. Reviewing the code of others is a great way to learn more about how they approach problems and if they practice methodologies like TDD or similar. Before I started circulating my CV around though, I thought it would be wise to spend some time pruning my code and pinning my more complete and interesting projects to my homepage.

In thinking about my interesting projects, I was reminded about some code I wrote quite a few years ago that was a more practical demonstration of using video frames as a source when drawing to a Canvas element. I first came across this feature when HTML5 was still a draft specification but Chrome already had support. The most interesting part of the feature was the ability to slice up video frames and apply 3d transforms. I came across a demo page that played a video and when the user clicked the video it would explode into around 50 seperate pieces, and then slowly pull itself back together. It stuck in my mind, and then about a year later I was called into a meeting at work to discuss how on earth the company that I worked for at the time was going to code support for a complicated customer feature it had committed to.

The customer required a now and next preview bar that actually had live previews of up to 5 channels, and the user could use the up and down arrows to flip the bar to view the previous/next 5 channels. The devices we developed at the time at best could only decode and display 2 video streams, so the second stream would be a ‘mosaic’ video generated server side containing 16 video thumbnails, hence individual thumbnails of video would need to be sliced from the screen and then displayed on the screen in the right location and then have various transforms applied. Once the requirement was presented, various engineers in the room scratched their heads. We’d no support for any form of 3D redendering in the software stack, nor any current APIs to access decoded video frames. But, I recalled the exploding video demo that I’d seen, and with browser ports that already had support for the video element and canvas if we could just get the browser access to the decoded frames then we might just be able to pull this off. I made my pitch, showed the exploding example to the crowd and then asked for a few hours to knock up a proof of concept on a desktop browser just to prove my point, and by the next day our course was set.

And that’s what led me here, I recall that I still had the code for that proof of concept lying around and wondered if it still worked. I recall despite it’s overall simplicity, it looked fairly decent and would make a nice addition to my portfollio if I code deploy it to a publish it in a public location, aka GitHub pages or similar. I found the code in an older backup, and on trying to fire it up it still sort of runs. It seems some behaviour changes in the browser now mean that user interaction is required to start video playing, and the entire thing was hardcoded for a screen resolution of 720p.

Hence, my project for the next week is to modernise this old code and get the old demo to a place where it works as intended and post it publicly for demo, alongside open-sourcing the code on GitHub for anybody that might find it interesting.

Work is happening here.

Another successful orbit of the sun means it’s time to set some new goals. I was a little over ambitious with my goals last year, and as such I failed more than I completed, so this year the aim is to tone it down a little but sprinkly in some new goals that aren’t entirely lockdown focused and will involve leaving the house.

So, without further ado…

• Cycle 2500 miles by the end of the year.
• Read 4 books by the end of the year.
• Get my weight down to 80kg by the end of the year.
• Complete 1 or more Game Jams by the end of the year.
• Complete 1 or more programming projects by the end of the year.
• Complete 6 mountain biking rides by the end of the year.

I feel other than perhaps the book focused goal everything there should be relatively achivable if I don’t spend my down time procastinating, but the proof will be in the pudding.

The end of the year draws ever nearer, and I figured it would be worth at least penning a quick update about progress so far…

1. Cycle 2000 Miles. (1/1)
2. Read 4 Books. (0/4)
3. Join and submit an entry in 2 Game Jams. (1/2)
4. Complete 6 video game related coding projects. (1/6)

As you can see, it’s not looking that great overall leading into the closing part of the year. I passed the 2000 mile mark on the mark towards the end of September which I’m pretty happy about, although my pace of progress really tailed off from August onwards and I should’ve really hit that earlier than I did. A goal is still a goal though, and I’m happy with myself for getting there.

On the book front, I’ve tried and failed a few times so far to get this started. I started ‘Running on Empty’, but only hit about the 50% mark before becomming destracted. I’ve also tried ‘Reality is Broken’ a couple of times but haven’t got past the first 2 chapters. I need to focus on this more, and the fall leading into winter might work better for me with the evenings spent in front of the fire.

I finished up Ludum Dare 48 back in the spring, but haven’t managed to yet pen and put together a retrospective post about that. As I write this Ludum Dare 49 is currently in play, but I didn’t sign up this time. I sniffed around the JS13K jam but ultimately didn’t get my ass into gear there either. Time is running out for this, but out of all the outstanding goals this is one that I am really keen to tick off.

For the coding projects, well I burned a lot of time on the Raycasting engine project that I used in Ludum Dare 48. Since the event I’ve taken the engine a lot further than I expected with support for animated textures, directional specific textures and played around with trying to fine tune the rendering for performance. Ultimately though, its the only project I’ve been working on. So again a long way to go.

Overall, I figure my focus has just been elsewhere somewhat. I’ve spent a lot of time with the Family and work absorbs a decent amount of my bandwidth. I just need to get better at focusing on my goals alongside the above and making sure my free time is spent progressing them rather than spent elsewhere. I’m going to try and post on at least a bi-weekly basis, that I hope will help keep my aims at the forefront of my mind.

I’d already sort of decided before the Jam started that I’d like to do something using Raycasting. I’d done a little bit of studing about the technique before hand, and looked at some tutorials but only ever put together something basic. In hindsight this wasn’t the best idea, I seriously underestimated how complex the Maths for Raycasting is and just getting to the point of having a basic engine, with basic textures and basic sprites with some animations took me the majority of the 72 hours.

There were also some performance challenges that in the end I managed to find solutions for, but again it sucked up a lot of time reworking code and distracting me from actually working on the gameplay.

In the end, the final product is functional but it is sub par when it comes to gameplay.

I have got plenty more ideas though, so I’ll be continuing to work on the game and see if I can get some of the missing features implemented over the next month or so.

I’ll also followup writing some more detailed posts about some of the specific challenges and how I worked around them as others might find that useful.

You can find the code over on my GitHub, and you can try the final product for yourself here.

For this year, I will…

• Cycle 2000 Miles.
• Read 4 Books.
• Join and submit an entry in 2 Game Jams.
• Complete 6 video game related coding projects.