Not many thoughts today, so this will be a simple log of events on my mind.
- I started the day attending another org-wide technical deep dive. This one revolved around one of our sister teams responsible for shared language services.
- After the meeting, I went for a short 4-mile run. Ideally, I would’ve wanted to run before my first meeting. But alas, with the sunrise getting later every day, it’s hard to wake up before early meetings (i.e. which happen now that my team’s overarching org is more globally distributed).
- After the run, I attending another meeting, my immediate functional team’s weekly sync-up. Today, my colleagues behind a new chatbot service (for answering frequently-asked questions) walked through their model architecture and findings.
- After that meeting, I had another meeting. This one for my product team’s engineers. The most interesting thing: a proposal for a new feedback entity specifically built for my team’s product. I’ll probably mention the chain of events that led to this proposal another time. But suffice it to say that I was both disappointed that this new proposal was needed (I was hoping that the previous logging and feedback framework would work), and “happy” (because this new framework is simpler and better caters to my team’s requirements).
- After that meeting, I had another meeting. This one for updates on the underlying models powering my product. I can’t reveal “the secret sauce” behind these models. But my team’s goals are public: in this release, we’ll be lowering the amount of data needed for model training, and we’ll be enabling support at least 15 non-English languages.
- With all of these meetings, it’s a small miracle that I get anything done (outside of “attending” meetings).
One thing I did today revolved around a customer metrics request. Because of everything happening, and general short-staffing, I didn’t get to this until quite late, and ran up pretty close to the 5pm deadline.
Another critical thing I got done today revolved around (1) summarizing all of the findings concerning a customer model thus far, and (2) defining my team’s plan of action going forward.
Quite administrative, yes, but one thing I’ve actually started to appreciate a little more is how layers of management can be effective (now that I’ve been definitely trending toward more “management” than “individual contributor”).
That said, because I’m perhaps one of three people who can make the code fixes I’ve outlined, within our timeframe, I’ll be spending a lot of time this week wading through data and knee-deep in stack traces. - After work, it was yoga and movie night. I actually forgot about movie night with Avi, Christie and the crew. Because Suppy thought that yoga with Sam was happening at 6pm, we waited and waited until I realized that he was referring to a private class (that we hadn’t signed up for). Then, because we started late, I joined the movie night late (by like 15 minutes).
- It’s OK, though, because the movie that won was the one I nominated and voted for (Dark City), and it was as gritty and neo-noir as I thought it’d be. Not the BEST movie, but actually not bad at all, especially for a movie from 1998!
I guess that’s all for today lol. A journal entry mostly filled with work stuff. Maybe I’ll have less work stuff on my mind tomorrow.
FIN.
