Me holding a talk about how to survive when you’re thrown into a super messy code base. With a sample size of two (Urb-it + Sortera) I must surely be an expert, right?

The talk was originally about being thrown into legacy code, but having had an intense philosophical discussion this morning about what actually constitutes legacy code, and not wanting to invite a repeat of that discussion during/before/after my talk, I renamed it.

The talk was well received. As a consultant, your assignments will involve messy legacy code more often than not.

There’s no recording this time, but here’s a very brief summary of my five-step approach:

1. Learn the code – read it, draw it, play around with it
2. Clean it up – fix typos, warnings, dead code, etc
3. Set up a safety net – nullability, types, end-to-end tests
4. Bigger refactorings – making sure to finish one before starting another, to not leave the code in a worse state than it was before
5. Don’t forget about the people – talk to your users, celebrate your successes

Still traipsing through Stockholm for job interviews.

Even though I don’t have anything signed yet, today I gave notice to quit my job at tretton37. Three months’ notice period means I will leave by the end of the year.

I have given up entirely on tretton37 – seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company doesn’t survive until the end of the year – so now I’m looking for a new employer. That means phone calls and meetings and interviews – and coding tasks. The first one I did was a small and simple one – I think I banged it out in an hour and a half. The other company I’m in serious discussions with has a bigger task, so basically I’m spending most of today working. I started after a leisurely Saturday breakfast and decided that I will stop when it’s time to cook dinner, and whatever is left undone at that point can stay that way.

It’s a serious time investment, and I might not be willing to do this if I was interviewing with more companies. But I’ve only got three right now that I’m interested in, so I can invest a bit more in each one. And I actually prefer this to the other coding task, which was almost too simple, and for which the feedback I got was roughly “this looks really great!” and that was that. Makes me suspicious. Are they desperate? If my code – admittedly nice but nothing earth-shattering – looked so great to them, what kind of low expectations did they have? They say they’re selective but this coding task wouldn’t winnow out many candidates.

I want to be challenged, and I want colleagues who will challenge me.

I have lost all trust in tretton37 management and given up on the company. Which is sad, but it’s also such a huge relief to step away from the drama and be able to observe it from the sidelines without feeling that it really affects me. Not my problem any more.

So now I’m job-hunting. Having lunch with one consultancy and afternoon fika with another, trying to find one that I feel fits me.

At its best, tretton37 was such a wonderful place to work. Amazing colleagues, great culture. Now there’s nothing left of that. But I can’t help comparing all other companies to what it was like – and they all fall short in some way.

Work is still being very frustrating. Killing all energy and desire to do anything. I nevertheless managed to trick myself into working out, promising myself that I could do the shortest workout I could find, but then ended up doing a 35-minute session anyway. Felt better afterwards.

There is internal drama going on at tretton37, and everybody is worried and/or disappointed and/or confused, which is very distracting and distressing. If anyone managed to spend even half of their attention on actual work, I’m impressed. I was in such a bad mood when I got home that I comfort ate cake. (Cherry cake, from the freezer.)

Ingrid at her summer job.

Does it look like she’s working? No.

Does she feel like she’s working? Barely.

But she is employed and is getting paid and can put it on her resume.

The city of Stockholm offers summer jobs to young people living in the city. The summer is chopped up into three three-week periods, and Ingrid got a job for the last three weeks of her summer break. Her job is to (together with a team) host activities for children at Spånga Torg.

Unfortunately they barely get any children visiting their tent.

I don’t know who did the planning, but they can’t have had much local knowledge. There are no children just randomly hanging around Spånga Torg in the summer. Spånga is an affluent suburb of large-ish detached houses, not an inner-city area. Kids here are either at home with their parents, or more likely out of town.

The team leaders (who are actual adults) work all three periods, and according to them, the group was in other parts of Spånga-Tensta before, where they had a lot more visitors. Yeah, because those areas are densely populated areas of apartment blocks.

The “employees” are making their own fun. Braiding bracelets, painting posters to advertise the tent’s existence, etc. The highlights of Ingrid’s day are when she gets to do face painting on some kids.

We all hope that word will spread, and people will come back from their vacations, and they’ll get more visitors next week.

The Olympic Games are happening in Paris. I’m sort of vaguely interested, but not enough to pay for access, so I’m not watching any of it, apart from short clips of highlights.

Except today! We had an Olympic day at the office, since it was just the four of us on the third floor, and nobody could complain. A teammate who is more into sports has a paid Eurosport account, and we have a big screen on the wall that normally shows graphs and statistics about new customer signups and take-up of the new customer portal and other such inspiring things, that he could Chromecast the stream to.

We saw various branches of gymnastics (always super impressive), table tennis doubles (all Asian teams at the top), swimming, men’s volleyball, and probably more. Not continuously, but whenever I was waiting for a build to complete, or was switching tasks, etc.

The technical setup itself was interesting enough. 360 degree cameras around the table tennis setup, so they could freeze the scene and pan around, Matrix-style. Visualizations of all the spots where ball had hit the table during the game. Miles beyond the blurry slow-motion cameras of yesteryear.

First day back at work. The same for four out of our five-person team, so we congregated at the Sortera office.

I tried to remember how this office work thing works, and mostly managed to pack all the necessities (computer, mouse plus pad, change of clothes, lunch box) except for my knitting. Missed it several times during the day. When I got home, the first thing I did (after unpacking my used lunch box) was to put the bag with my sock knitting in my backpack for tomorrow.

I’ve only used 3 out of my 5 weeks of vacation. But Adrian is away at scout camp all week, and Ingrid will be working, so we won’t be doing anything as a family anyway. I think I’ll use another week to go for a full-week hike some time in September, instead of the long weekends I’ve been doing in the past. And the last week is for Christmas.

I got to spend today with one of Sortera’s trucks, picking up bags of waste for recycling.

Here’s John, the driver, ready to start the day, bright and early at 7 o’clock.

And here’s me, kitted with a hard hat and high-viz vest.

I always thought that they’d attach a hook to the straps of the bag and lift it that way. Ain’t no one got time for that! Turns out they use the scoop to grab and lift the bag. And it can be a delicate job, when the bag is right next to a building facade, or in between trees and lamp posts and other obstacles.

One of the jobs involved lifting the bag over a dense 3.5-metre hedge. A little bit challenging.

The truck has a veeery long arm.

When the container started filling up, John had to climb up into it so he could see where he was placing each bag, so he could use the container to its maximum.

When it was all full, we drove to the sorting facility, where we dumped all the bags. Another guy with a tractor took over and sorted the bags into their respective piles.

We drove off again to a fire-damaged school building to pick up chunks of roof metal. For John this was the best job of the day because he got to put his crane skills to good use, trying to pick everything up in as few lifts as possible.

And then back to the facility again, to dump all the metal in the metal pile.