The platform team launched Monday. Six engineers, a signed charter, and a lead — me, wearing the Staff title like a jacket that doesn’t quite fit yet. Week one taught the job’s first real lesson faster than expected: I wrote zero code and it was the most productive week I’ve had in a year. The work was three conversations that PREVENTED two teams from building incompatible auth systems, one document that turned a hallway argument into a decision, and a roadmap review where my whole contribution was asking “who maintains this in year two?” until the room went quiet. Staff engineering, early field notes: the unit of work is no longer the commit; it’s the DECISION, and decisions ship through people, which means the compiler now has feelings and vacation days. My IDE is a calendar. Grieving accordingly; adapting faster than the grief predicted.
The world’s January, for the record: CES delivered its annual vaporware parade (this year: flying taxis, again, and a rolling robot ball from Samsung that will never ship); Iran tensions had everyone refreshing feeds badly for a week; and the Australian bushfire season is apocalyptic enough that the smoke is visible from orbit — the #165 PG&E file (infrastructure vs. climate) is apparently a global franchise now.
One line I’m logging purely on instinct, the way this archive logged a Transformer paper once (#121): health authorities are investigating a cluster of “mystery pneumonia” cases in Wuhan, China.A few dozen cases, one market, no confirmed human-to-human transmission per current reporting. Probably nothing. The archive logs it anyway; that’s what the archive is FOR.
TIL: the “decision log” — I’ve started one for the team, same discipline as this blog: date, context, decision, expected outcome, revisit-by. Institutional memory is a bus-factor problem (#061) and I’m apparently the bus now.