reception

 i'm sitting here on the balcony after a surprisingly good night's sleep, in spite of mr smear's incessant creaking through the night on his air mattress next to my side of the bed.

i spent a good couple of hours yesterday morning working on my auto-doc: i'm very happy with how it's going. i'm so relieved that the presentation went positively that i'm in "calm down" mode. i'm under immense pressure to include certain improvements, write out a one-pager for my team, and get it out the door. all at the same time.

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i had my quarterly roadmap meeting with my mentor yesterday morning. the roadmap bit went very well, although there was an awkward moment or two when discussing my auto-doc because he suggested that i could have done it without AI generating the documentation. then the real awkwardness began, when he asked how i felt about the company and we got into it over me feeling disconnected and not seeing the bigger picture. it turns out a) linkedin's algorithm just doesn't put all the usual stuff in my feed (granted, i don't use linkedin very often) and b) that while i've been complaining about there not being a company newsletter, i've been receiving a company newsletter in my email - my gmail inboxes were configured by default to only show my primary inbox, and i've been (unconciously) ignoring everything else 🤦‍♂️

once the meeting was over, i flipped through my emails and discovered, to my immense gratitude, that i'd missed an urgent and important email that had a deadline of a couple of days: choosing a gift for rosh hashana. if my mentor and i hadn't gone down that rabbit hole i might've lost my opportunity to pick up a significant shopping voucher, which in our current financial situation makes a very big difference.

a couple of hours after my roadmap meeting, the thing that my mentor had suggested for my auto-doc popped into my head, and i remembered that just that morning i'd read an article on the topic. i reviewed a couple of well-known packages and sent them to him, and was surprised when he immediately called me. not only had he only learned about one of those very packages about half an hour before, but when i explained that it might very well be a good dependency to build in to what i've got i could almost hear the penny drop for him, and he seems to have suddenly understood what all the excitement for what i'm building is about ^_^

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the rest of the work day was finally uncovering the root cause of the golang service crashes and fixing it, and it was REALLY satisfying seeing the memory usage flatline when i finally deployed ^_^

i also managed to make some progress with my primary project, and after months of shenanigans i'm at a point where i've pretty much finished everything end-to-end but now have no idea how i'm going to actually test it :P

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i left the office about twenty minutes before we had to leave home to do the airport run, and called gd to make sure she and mr smear were ready to go. of course, that was when she had just decided that she needed to wash the floors in honor of my sister's arrival 🤦‍♂️

i'd left the office in the middle of getting code reviewed and deployed, so in the literal few minutes i was at home i continued, and on the train i continued, and at the airport while waiting for my sister to clear border control i continued. border control gave me a little more time than expected because they had to hunt down her entry in the population registration - she hasn't been here for thirty years, and she left her ID in london - but she got through it eventually and our reunion was fun, funny and emotional :)

we took the train home, and the girls decided that walking the few blocks from the station was fine, which it totally was. the rest of the afternoon / evening was setting up, catching up, a really nice sushi dinner, a long chat with my mom*, and mr smear enthusiastically trying out his present of a beautiful box set of acrylic pens, then everyone getting ready for and into bed really, really late.

* although a bit intimidating, as she brought up the fact that mr smear's barmitzvah is in two years' time and we're not members of a synagogue and celebrations are a big deal that cost quite a lot of money.

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while getting ready for bed, i saw that the summer camp organizer had registered the refund, which is a big relief.

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i've been up since before 6am when i heard the front door close as my sister headed out to join our cousins for a day trip to metzada, and i can't believe it's thursday already. it's been a big week. so far. i'm very excited about so many things! a bit anxious, too, but mostly excited.