Welcome back to The Unemployed Unicorn newsletter. I missed you.
On the way back from "vacation" I managed to push myself through a 4-hour read and finished the book Dare to lead. The next morning (Sunday) 3 hours were spent at the Playback event. The plan is to start joining together with my wife and a close friend but both of them decided not to join me this time. I'm still very new there, no friend-of-a-friend connections. Need to build my reputation from zero. It's scary and also very interesting to monitor myself. It's an amazing place to have a moment with myself to synergize learnings into opinions with a help of others. The event didn't go exactly as I expected (an inside joke for my wife) but generally I enjoyed it and was thankful to the organizers who do it just as a hobby. Mentioning this non-work-related event is important.
Monday morning I woke up at 5:45 from my ideas for the next speech I need to prepare. After agreeing to speak at the RTG event, which is all about providing support to ladies getting better in IT, and drafting 80% of the content, I got surprised that the event is for mentors instead. That changes everything... I felt a bit lost for a few days. So, as I said, I woke up from ideas for the new content. This is a very good example of how knowledge integrates, synergizes, and with a help of events like Playback (it's just one of many options) comes back as a golden boomerang - the inspiration. So, spent an hour writing it all down on my phone and started the "work week" 10 minutes after the alarm.
Unfortunately, the event got postponed ??
Let's get to the key activities and achievements:
- Got my account restored at DevOps Institute by sending another complaint but to the wrong email. The official support email doesn't seem to be responding. Bought an exam voucher.
- Made a proper International Women's Day celebration
- Read 7 academic publications which the professor suggested to me weeks ago
- Provisioned a minikube
- Learned a bit about the Karpman Drama Triangle, the Power of TED, the Change Leader Development Model, Kolb’s Learning Styles, Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory, Kotter’s Dual Operating System, the SCARF Model, Teal Organization, Thomas-Kilmann conflict theory and Wilber's quadrants. It would be fascinating if it wouldn't be sad, that I've been doing some of this by learning from failures how to run my own department when I could have used the latest science to get it all done faster and with better outcomes. There has been collateral damage (metaphorically speaking).
- Got lost in making Anaconda, Python, and its packages to make Jupiter work on my laptop. 10 years later after my engineering days updating PATH manually and looking for the matches in version compatibility is still a thing, omg.
- Created two bots. One from popular manuals, the 2nd purely by myself. You don't need to know more. The dopamine from working code is a truly amazing feeling! Managers from fulfilling spreadsheets don't get such luxury.
- Sorted 15y old videos and sent them to people who were important to me back in the day. Some didn't even know such existed. There is no better feeling than making someone's day better.
- Made small improvements to the LATA website
- Did an intervention to my co-teacher for the RTU DevOps Intro course. Things should get a little better.
- Visited another TechHub event. Absolutely unrelated, but got an idea of how to talk with students about being so inactive in the Slack chat next Monday. That's why going to such events is so important! The brain works in mysterious ways.
- Found a bug on government servers
- The date and speakers for the next DevOps & Agile Talk event are set. The team is starting the work.
- My RTG mentee is doing well. I'm truly happy about her and doing what I can to make it even better!
- Had an intro with one more wanna-be-core-member of the community activities. We're big now!
- Started practice tests for the DevOps Leader certification
That's all folks. Feel free to comment and promote my newsletter if you enjoy reading it. It warms my heart.
Time for a little celebration - my LinkedIn profile has reached 5k followers ?? ?? ??
