I've Been Assigned A BIG Project And I'm SCARED

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hey folks just leaving CrossFit the usual it's uh Wednesday morning I'm completely beat that was a good workout just backing all of the uh the old crappy street parking here um no this workout was good today I had uh finally something in CrossFit that I can do uh which is a really rare thing in CrossFit but we got to we got to bench press today which is like not a not a CrossFit thing but from powerlifting and bodybuilding can bench pretty well I just uh haven't done it in months so it's funny just like uh my it's kind of what you would expect my strength levels compared to where I was at even a few months ago very very low in comparison so we were just doing and the strength because it's broken into two phases like a strength and skill portion and then like

something that gets your heart rate jacked up which is why I'm always out of breath and dying in these early videos um but the strength portion was just like sets of three so I got up to like 255 lbs but I think for a triple could probably do 290 or something normally so it's dropped quite a bit like my best bench for a single is 320 uh 275 for 7 225 for 15 so 255 for three isn't like terrible but like it's definitely not good considering I've done 275 for 7 like it's quite a quite a drop so anyway it was okay um I'm mostly happy that it didn't feel like I had no idea how to bench anymore like it at least felt natural which is important for me I don't want to feel like I'm learning the movement again it's fine if like

the strength isn't there cuz it'll something that comes back when you train it so it's all good but um yeah just set up breath right now I'm going to be going to the office today so you'll get two more videos um I'll kind of spend this one just talking about like General stuff and then probably get into more software engineering specific things a little later today um but yeah I'm going to be heading up a project for my for my boss man this guy is rightand turn took him like 15 minutes and uh so it's a pretty big initiative uh which will be interesting I think it's going to be a good challenge so it's something that spans like his entire domain if that makes sense so my team that I'm on my manager has the whole area and then within that there are two

like myself as an engineering manager and there's one other engineering manager so we're his two direct reports as uh as EMS so we have like between the two of us we have responsibility over all the areas and he oversees all of it and so this project pardon me is more um specifically it's more of like a I would call it like a project management kind of project so I'm going to be having to coordinate across the entire team um kind of the scary thing about this project is because it's so big and we don't have like a like we'll have to firm up with exit criteria are for it because this is something theoretically like you could work on indefinitely because of the the goals we're trying to achieve so we'll have to firm up some some like concrete numbers and stuff and then actually

work towards those or else you know just to like potentially exaggerate a year two years from now we could still be like are we making improvements yes but like realistically have we gotten to where we want it to be like hopefully the answer was yes way before like two years kind of thing so um it's going to be a good challenge I think like I like being transparent about things I think the things that make me uneasy are uh sort of like def exit criteria because I I firmly believe that this is something that like after some period of time we want to be able to say hey look we've been successful or not and we need to Pivot right but like that's what we want to be able to say is we've been successful and then the other thing I would say is like

like I've been on the team less than a year it's it's coming up on a year pretty soon but there's going to be some areas of responsibility that they're not my my area of expertise so when it comes to like making sure that across the team we have participation on this project there's going to be people that don't report to me um there's going to be areas of like subject matter expertise I don't have and I for my own team I feel very good about how we've like we've already kind of started pre assigning things and and figuring things out but outside of my direct reports like I don't know people's area of expertise I don't know their growth opportunities how are we're going to balance that with the priority work items so just some uncertainty around that but that's not a problem it's just

like that's that's the kind of thing that's going to be top of mine for me as I work through this project so that'll be exciting it's kind of it's started but we're going to I guess like formally kind of kick it off starting next week I think so that'll be good um I think I've talked about this before but I can't remember I know in my um I have yet another YouTube channel where I do uh weekly it's almost like a weekly diary and I've been doing it since I started doing content creation just so that I have some type of literally documentation about my journey as I go and I've talked about this concept like many times and that but uh right now at Microsoft in our organization uh we're doing uh we do them by by yearly and they're called connects and it's

sort of like this opportunity where we can all write our accomplishments and then we have conversations with our manager about like it's like a career it's like a forest career check-in Point kind of thing and I think some people they're like hey these kind of suck as this paperwork um and that's certainly the case if you and your manager feel like it's paperwork there's just no value in it but uh I I really try to make sure that when I work with my employees like that they feel like they're glad they spent time on it so like it's a productive conversation after um so those are those are right now which means on top of all the normal stuff I'm going to have those kind of crammed in on top so this is going to feel kind of hectic I think for a little bit

but I do have a vacation at the end of the month for a week so we're going to be going to Hawaii or at the yeah at the end of the month for a week sorry my brain is completely foggy um so we're going to be going to Maui for a week which will be cool we went to Hawaii last year did I forget my shaker cup no I think I forgot my shaker and I'm thirsty and my mouth is dry this is going to be so difficult to keep talking but we're going to Maui now we were supposed to go last year but there were forest fires and stuff so um we were we felt weird because we didn't we didn't know if people because like obviously tourism is uh an income kind of thing we didn't know if people would be happy that

we would go visit them or if they would would be upset like hey we just suffered from a big forest fire and you're still like I don't know like being a tourist here like go away I I don't know we didn't know what to think so we ended up going to Kawaii instead Kawaii was very beautiful um but we're going to go to Maui this time and and check it out so definitely looking forward to that um I feel like every time I go on vacation it's always like peak of not Fitness um like I've dieted for bodybuilding shows and stuff multiple times and uh and I've never like traveled somewhere and felt like I can like go onto a beach and look good every time I'm like Peak obesity and uh and then I'm like man like I'm uh going somewhere hot and sunny

and I'm like I'm not comfortable taking my shirt off cuz I'm like significantly fatter than normal which kind of sucks but um anyway it doesn't matter my wife loves me she knows I'm she knows I love my food but she knows I work hard and I know how to diet and stuff if I need to so I'm not super concerned um what else is going on oh I got hiccups man I'm I'm a mess this morning I have like a throbbing headache right now my mouth is dry uh I'm definitely having a nap when I get home I told myself when I woke up this morning no nap I need a nap like without a doubt I can't my my brain is like even talking about naps making me on but I can feel my brain like throbbing so um I'm probably dehydrated and uh

kind of underslept here so it's like it's like a struggle to struggle to be talking like I I feel like if I wasn't driving a car I could curl up and like just fall asleep so just my whole body is uncomfortable I feel like a little nauseous too because uh because my heart rate from Crossfit so I like that's not helping anything anyway uh let's talk brand ghost a little bit we um we had our our sort of call it like a launch yesterday we were going out to a newsletter with like 50,000 subscribers um turns out like that newsletter has a pretty pretty low uh clickthrough rate and open rate so for context I think uh make my own personal newsletter which is just over 7,000 subscribers so it's like an order of magnitude less um has the same open rate as this newsletter

with 50,000 so I think I think we were assuming a lot more traffic and it just never came which is okay I think this is the kind of thing and this is like a I don't know like a reflection or a mental note I've briefly talked about this before too but we're always afraid of like okay well if we open the floodgates what happens if we're not ready and then like you kind of like get paralyzed you're trying to like over prepare for it and then finally you open the floodgates and then like one person trickles in and you're like oh like all of all of that work and anticipation for for that and this was kind of the same thing like it was underwhelming not that I'm I'm not complaining but I think the good lesson here is like there's there's not going to

be any such thing as telling too many people we can't we can't accidentally tell too many people the same way that someone can't accidentally go to a gym and and by accident become too big and strong overnight um you know it's like people saying like oh I don't want to lift heavy weights cuz I don't want to I don't want to look like that and it's like dude it doesn't we wish it happened accidentally and it doesn't you're not going to have to worry about that like if only you were so lucky um but I think it's the same kind of thing right we oh 50,000 people on a newsletter making sure everything's perfect we want it to be perfect but like we're we're trying to optimize for things that like aren't even there yet and then uh and then this happens so no I

don't think anyone's like I'm not blaming anyone cuz I'm certainly like I'm like this too I panic about it but I want to keep this as like a mental note like just another piece of evidence that it's like if someone came to us today and said we could tell a million people I I would not say oh I don't know if we're ready I don't know what happens if a million people click a million people click were're solving different problems like that's okay like it's like maybe we find it immediately we have scale issues but like we don't have that we don't have a million people we don't have you know the the people from the newsletter which is 50,000 people like we only had a small fraction even click so yeah just a good reminder just like I need to exit right now it's

a good reminder for me almost missed it yeah so yesterday was spent uh like outside of work a bunch of bug fixes um which is pretty annoying uh I think the the embarrassing one for us and no one no one caught it fortunately um but I want to talk about it cuz it's like it's frustrating and embarrassing again no one's fault um we had like two misses back to back and I'll explain it so we have this feature for canva integration that we built and that way if you want to import if you have content in canva like you've been making designs and stuff and you want to make posts out of them it's cool because you can continue to use canva as your editor and then we have an integration where you can just pull in the pictures and we can use them so

I think it's pretty awesome um now we went to go use it last last night when we were on a call cuz I think uh one of the guys was showing it to like a potential customer during the day come on man it's green light my God it's too early I wasn't the guy in front of me it was two cars in front of me just asleep at the light um but anyway one of us went to go show to a potential customer how we have canva integration and it wasn't working of course cuz it never does when you want to go use it and um so we were talking about it on our call and we tried it and we were like hey wait like it also doesn't work for us we thought it might be like a a one-off thing and we realized

like the uh if you're not familiar with how ooth and stuff works like we you need to have a they'll call it like an application in canva just like we have an application for Facebook and for Instagram and for Threads um it's something they have on their end that you can authenticate with so canva has the same thing and we realized that when our server is launching it's not loading up the um the credentials for it so it would it would never work so we were like oh my God this is so embarrassing this is so dumb okay and it's a super quick fix like it's already wired up to do it it just wasn't doing it because we didn't provide the settings so okay provide the settings and we're like awesome wait for it to deploy go try it and we get a different

error so settings worked great and then we were like well why isn't it working and then we looked at our canva application and it was still on the canva portal still in draft mode so we're like oh my God we didn't publish the app and then we realized like cuz we've done this a whole bunch it's not just as simple as going from draft to live mode you need to go record a video and request permissions and have canva log in and approve everything and try it and they have brand and styling guidelines so we just realized that like all of the work we've done like none of it matters because there's probably going to be like weeks of waiting for canaba to approve um which is so disappointing um we have the same problem with Facebook and Instagram and threads um it's and Tik

Tok and YouTube it's so frustrating and it's it feels kind kind of ridiculous because we're like professional software developers that have been you know working in industry for like well over a decade and and for us it feels like it's very problematic to be able to get stuff approved we're not even coming up with cases to like try and like abuse the apis and stuff and even for us it's extremely frustrating and tedious I talked about this before there was a period where we didn't make any code changes for one month to our Facebook integration and we kept sending our app for approval and they kept failing it for completely different reasons like they were I'm not trying to be rude but they were too incompetent to like to follow the instructions and I say this like again not trying to be rude but say

this with confidence because we gave them written instructions and a video and then we used our Telemetry to play back what they were doing and they were not following the instructions they were just doing random things so we said like you're you go to this you log in It's Already Done go click here and they were going in deleting things like that's not anywhere in our script of things to do so then they would fail it and it got to the point where like we were a few weeks in like on our fourth week and we emailed our contact that we ended up getting somehow because they had failed it so many times before we emailed our contact and we said the testers are literally not following instructions we've been watching the videos back and the next time they just approved it and we made

no code changes for one month so they delayed one month of progress for us sorry my mouth is so dry and I have hiccups they have played one month of progress for us just because they have some process and they they couldn't do their jobs adequately which again very frustrating um and it's entirely outside of our control so hopefully can us better but we still like we are done coding YouTube and integrating it and we're waiting for them to increase our quota and they denied us um because I think we don't have like the YouTube branding and then Tik tok's the same like we are done Tik Tok integration but it's not live because we need we need them to approve it uh Meta Meta fortunately we got the first round of approvals but we need uh commenting so we're blocked on that but the

point is the the process is very very uh troubling like it's not not okay I'm almost home but man I got to curl up and and die I don't like I don't know what I need to do when I get home like do I chug water do I just like take an Advil and go right to sleep I don't know it doesn't feel good though yeah being a I'm not super nauseous but I have a headache and I'm nauseous enough like being nauseous and and like not intoxicated if you're intoxicated and you're nauseous you're kind of like I know I did this to myself I don't encourage you to do that it's not a good time but at least you understand why you're like yeah probably shouldn't have done that that's how I got out here um but being like completely sober and and you

know good state of mind and then feeling nauseous is another level of like discomfort cuz again if you're intoxicated you're kind of like whatever like it sucks but whatever like you don't really care about a whole lot at that point um but right now it's like it's pretty rough so I will take the kitties out of their room veto and Vinnie I'll bring them into the the master bedroom and nap for a little bit with them they're funny cats we uh we've been finding that Vinnie knows how to tip over the big container of cat food and we've been catching him like we'll go into the the room where they stay and like he has it tipped over and his like he's just like climbed inside of it eating unlimited amounts of food and it's funny because you have if you haven't seen the cat

in my videos he's uh he's like pretty well we got two cats at the same time they're Brothers and Vinnie is significantly fatter because he does stuff like this so anyway I'm going to go nap with the cats um stay tuned cuz I got two more of these coming today and uh I'll pick some good software topics I hope I'll go through that together so thanks for checking it out I'll see you later