My annual retro

Lots going on, to be honest, but this is my retro. It was my birthday recently, and i like spending a little time at the end of the year to figure out what's been happening and what I want to do next. So, in no particular order.

I am super-burned out on work. Experiencing autistic burnout symptoms, especially the ones that lead to social withdrawal. Friends pinged me on my birthday to wish me a happy one, and I didn't respond at all. Not because I don't like them, but because I'm just overwhelmed. The thought of talking to humans drained me. There's a light at the end of that tunnel, more on this later, but if I owe you an email or a text message: I'm sorry.

My pottery over the past year has improved. I've been altering pots more an more, and learning a lot about working with slabs. I'm still lousy at throwing specifically what I want, and throwing elegantly, but I've gotten a lot better at getting something interesting out the other side of the work. I'm working on throwing about twenty mugs (of the spiky variety shown top-center above) so I can give them to my team. We're having an all team in-person week at the end of November, and I'd love to be able to give everyone a mug when we're all there.

There's been a couple of house problems this year; nothing awful, but just stuff to do. The big blackwood acacias in front of the house had to come out. One of them had a fungal infection, and both were leaning enough that when they actually started to go, they'd go catastrophically. There was a huge overhead of bureaucracy- the city considers all large trees that overhang a sidewalk to be "significant", and need to approve their removal. The city came out, looked at the fungus and said "yep". We're planning on replacing the trees with a Mayten and a Fern Pine. Still a WIP. We also had a minor flood upstairs, which ran downstairs through the ceiling of the kitchen, which damaged the plaster/drywall. That's been fixed up, and the good news is, no mold. They also fixed the other damaged walls in the upper treefort room, from the roof leak we inherited with the house. Also, no mold.

We, of course, went to Scotland for a while, lots of photos and stories in my past posts. Not much to say there, other than: I could write every day when I was in Scotland. Back home, it's so hard to write, because of work stress. I'm making big changes there, and see: I'm writing again (self referencing evidence).

Okay, so the big change is: in January I'm going to work at YouTube. This is a really big change for me- I have been on the same team since I started working at Google (more or less). I've learned a ton about engineering, full-stack work, how stuff happens in Google Workspace (what we call "dasher"), and I'm totally an expert here. I also love my team, they're all great humans. Looking down the orgchart is great, looking up (and out at the non-engineering leadership) the orgchart is ... the reason I'm leaving. I'm looking forward to learning C++ again, to being on a slightly more deliberate set of projects, and to working on a thing people actually use. More on that in some future posts. For now, I'm just glad to be back online.