Office day today. One of my colleagues spotted a Sortera truck doing a pickup right across the street. We had a good view from six floors up!

The trucks have been abstract concepts until now. But now we could look up the pickup order in the ordering system that my team works on, and then in the driver’s app, and the customer’s live tracking page, and correlate the physical activity we could see happening to the data. Here are the large bags of cardboard, and the small bags of metal, and here’s the driver marking them, etc. Here is the extra pickup time because there was no room to line up all the bags in advance. Trivial, in a way, but still a bit of a highlight of today.

First there was a lot of commuting all of April because I started on a new project and we wanted a solid handover from the old team. Which we didn’t get. Then there were two weeks in the beginning May when things felt settled and I could work from home two or three days a week. And then our PM was let go. Which was absolutely the right decision and to the team’s long-term benefit! But it happened with no handover and barely any warning, so now we’re floundering again and having yet more meetings to figure out how we’ll work together and who does what. Which means lots of days in the office. I’m always tired in the evenings, and I haven’t worked out since I don’t even remember when.

All of sudden my laptop is not recognizing the monitor through the USB hub. I was going to work from home today, but working on just a tiny laptop screen would be bad for both my mood and my productivity, so that’s not going to happen. More commuting. Luckily I have another USB hub that I keep at the office and can bring home tonight – with a bit of luck, that will solve things.

Nysse is out all night doing whatever cats do at night. Comes home in the morning, eats, sleeps like a log. Making the most out of summer.

I’m also tired. Work is mildly chaotic – we’ve lost our project manager, so a lot of her duties have fallen onto me. And we’ve got a lot of front end work but not a lot of front end developers. Only one, actually. But the work needs to get done, so I’m also wearing a front end developer’s hat. Which is no heavier than my normal tasks, per se, but I have to google everything and test my work after every small handful of changes, and I never get into an actual flow where it feels easy. I make it work, but by the end of the day my brain is exhausted.

tretton37 moved to new premises, because we outgrew the old ones. Especially the meeting rooms, of which there was a constant shortage. The new place seems to have plenty more.

We’re in the Waterfront building, almost on top of the train station. Which makes for boring views of station roofs and train yards, but for an incredibly efficient commute.

I can’t go so far to say that I’m excited about the move – I haven’t been spending much time in the tretton37 office recently – but it does look nice.

The Sortera logo at the far end of a corridor, and a glass meeting room wall.

First day on a new assignment, at Sortera. From environmentally friendly urban deliveries to environmentally friendly industrial and constructional recycling. I’m excited to learn all about it.

(Photo by a colleague.)

Attended a workshop about facilitating workshops, with activities about activities. Quite meta.

One of the activities was to practise visual collaboration, so we wrote and drew our ideal working days.

In our small group, we all agreed that a good foundation for an ideal day is predictability. Knowing roughly what to expect from the day, in general.

All four of us then wanted to work mostly on our own most of the day. I had expected more people to want to pair program or do collaborative work, thinking it was just my preference to be left alone to get work done.

We did all want some social interaction, though. Opinions diverged on how.

For me an ideal day would involve helping others somehow – either delivering something that users find useful, or helping someone in my team with something. I was alone on this one.

The others in the team instead preferred to socialize after work, with some alcohol, which I have no interest in at all. In fact after-work events are more of a chore for me than actual work.

Did my talk about multi-tenancy again, for the fifth time or something. Lots of people signed up and almost all turned up to listen. So many of them came by to thank me afterwards that it was almost embarrassing, but I’m working on accepting praise with grace. But I really need to find a new topic soon.

Masses and masses of snow overnight, to the point where the front staircase in the garden was barely distinguishable. Which of course led to chaos in public transport everywhere.

Today is my last office day with Urb-it, because my contract there ends this week, so I braved the weather and the traffic and went to the office anyway. A train arrived right on schedule, just as I got to the station in the morning. But that was just dumb luck: there was a 45-minute gap in the list of trains just a short while later.

In the afternoon I wasn’t as lucky with the timing. The monitors kept promising trains in 13 minutes, and in 20 minutes, and so on, but they kept vanishing before they got to Odenplan station. One arrived after 45 minutes of waiting, though, so I got home in the end.

Not the most efficient day, but definitely worth the chance of saying farewell to people I’ve worked so closely with for two years.