Adrian is home from school because of a runny nose, but essentially not the least bit sick. So when the sun is shining bright, we can go for a walk in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

This spring’s very first crocuses.

Sörmlandsleden stage 17, back and forth, 6 + 6 km.

Today’s walk was mostly just to get out of the house. With nothing going on in life, I’ve gotten used to nothing going on and lost the habit of doing things, of planning and making things happen. Planning something feels like so much effort. So it’s a good thing that my slow-burn Sörmlandsleden project makes it so easy to get out. Just take the next stage on the list.

12 km is far from a full day of walking, but with the driving there and back and a leisurely lunch + book break in the middle, the whole outing took over 8 hours anyway. Sörmlandsleden stretches many miles away from Stockholm and the point that I have reached is currently about one and a half hour’s drive from home. And it’s only going to get further and further away. Stages 18, 19 and 21 are all just over 10 km, so they’re also doable back and forth in a single day, albeit a long one. Stage 20 I’ve walked already.

It was a very quiet walk. There was no wind and none of the rustling or whispering sounds of wind. No birdsong. No sun, with its brightness and shadows. I met a single other person on the trail. He was running and doing the same as me, back and forth, so he ran past me twice.

The ground was not as muddy as I had feared. In many places, what looked like soggy ground turned out to be still frozen. There were patches of grainy old snow here and there. The small lakes were all fully iced over, but the larger ones had open water.

I heard a black grouse sing. I didn’t know what it was; I don’t think I’ve ever heard one before. I walked closer, hoping to get a look, but it took flight. I got enough of a glimpse to see that it was like a large dark hen, which means it was some kind of grouse. Google and Fågelsång.se helped me figure out which one.

This is the inside of a hollow dead oak.

Mello is Melodifestivalen, a Swedish song competition where the winner gets to represent Sweden in the Eurovision song contest. Ingrid used to be a fan but has outgrown it, while Adrian still cares.

I wouldn’t say I hate it, and in these pandemic times I can’t even say I have better thing to do with my Saturday evenings, but I don’t much enjoy it either. But Adrian really wants company – watching TV on his own is just no fun – so I sit there and knit and follow the competition just enough so I can converse with him.

Today was the finals, which Adrian celebrated a Mello-pink donut. (The previous, less important shows only merited pink Mello smoothies and sometimes just fruit snacks.)

Adrian’s favourite breakfast is a cherry tomato omelette. I make one for him and me almost every weekend. Eric is not that fond of eggs for breakfast, and Ingrid we rarely even see before 11 on weekends, so it’s just Adrian and me.

I’ve never quite gotten the hang of proper French omelettes, which you are supposed to keep stirring all the time. When I do that, I end up with scrambled eggs… which we also love, but not when we want an omelette. The fact that our omelettes are made of at least 5 eggs probably doesn’t help. My omelettes are more like the Spanish and Italian ones: thick fluffy ones, filled with stuff, slowly cooked under a lid. But with tomatoes instead of potatoes.

Cherry tomatoes are on the “must always have at home” list only because of these omelettes.

The weather is abominable. Winds are howling around the house, sleet is being whipped around and drips down the windows. The air vents in the bathrooms clatter in the wind. The dead Christmas tree that we put outside on the deck after Christmas (because we’re lazy, and we were going to chop it into pieces in the spring when the weather is nicer, and also because it actually looked somewhat decorative at a distance) has blown down twice, and then we gave up righting it and let it lie. I’m glad I don’t need to go outside.

I made no forward progress on the cardigan today because all the time I spent on knitting today went towards fixing an earlier mistake. The lacy pattern has cables, and three pattern repeats ago I twisted half the cables the wrong way. Not a big deal, and it probably wouldn’t even be visible – but if I don’t fix this, I’ll be confused each time I come to the cables, because I won’t be sure which ones are the correct ones.

Fortunately the pattern is made up of rectangular blocks that don’t interfere with each other. I could unravel a vertical column, four stitches wide, fix it, and repeat the process for the other wrongly-twisted cables.

Eric already jokes that half the work of knitting cardigans is about ripping up and starting over. Indeed. Perhaps I should try to do with cardigans as I do with socks: decide on a base pattern and only make minor modifications in it. I would certainly be more productive that way.

My reason knows that it is not sensible to expect a few warm days in early March to mean that spring is here. But I still hoped, when I saw the first flowers. And now we’re back in snow and wind and cold.

For International Women’s Day, tretton37 interviewed me and some of my women colleagues about being a developer. Here’s a video of me talking about why I love my job.

Part of my job is doing recruitment interviews. I do them quite regularly – recently at least once a week. 1337 is growing and we want to hire more developers, and someone needs to interview them from a technical point of view. These days I do roughly one per week, and often get requests for more. It’s getting to the point where I have to say no because I can’t take that much time from my “real” work. But I enjoy them, so I do try to take the time.

We’re a large enough firm to have specialists for the early phases – finding and winnowing out suitable candidates, and having a first interview with them. I’ve never enjoyed that part of the recruitment process so I’m glad that’s already done by the time I get involved.

The second step is a technical interview, and that’s where I come in. The third and final step is a manager interview.

In a tech interview, we spend one to two hours inventorying and mapping the candidate’s skills in a wide range of topics. We don’t usually dig into any one area in great depth, but we probe enough to get a good picture of where the candidate’s skills lie, and find out where there are gaps in their knowledge.

These days we have a comprehensive template document listing all the areas to cover, each one with a set of keywords to help jog our memories. This is a relatively new “tool”. We’ve invested many laborious person-hours in internal workshops to prepare this interview guide, and then to get used to working with it, and now it’s really paying off. I’ve been doing interviews for many years and they’ve never been as focused and well-organized as what I’m doing now.

We always do the tech interviews in pairs, which I really like. Not only is it good to always have a second opinion, but it also makes the interview run better. If I can’t think of a good follow-up question, my colleague is sure to have one.

It’s easy, relatively speaking, to interview a developer who is supposed to be roughly at my own level of experience. I know what I would expect from another senior colleague. Does this person know enough to be able to deliver production-ready code? Do they have enough experience to make architecture decisions? Are they able to consider the bigger picture, the business needs, the trade-offs?

It is much harder to interview a junior developer. Experience and knowledge can be judged more or less objectively. But judging potential is so much harder. How can I know what this person will be able to do in a few years? How much of their lack of knowledge today is due to lack of exposure, and how much is due to lack of initiative?

I’m quite glad that the final decision is not mine.

Despite all the digital tools we have, I always take notes with pen and paper. Nothing beats pen and paper when it comes to quick scribbles and unstructured comments.