Still getting over having paid $8.25 for a cup of coffee yesterday. Shocker, I will have my Yorkshire status revoked at this rate!

After a mixed start (1 dense loaf, 1 pretty spot-on loaf) I diversified this weekend into making a sourdough pizza base.

Apart from some issues with getting it thin enough in places (it’s much springier than normal dough) and a bit of unintended Calzone fold over transferring it to the oven it tasted pretty good, made better by some of The Duchess’s home made passata sauce.

Penny’s had her Spring Shearing and is bounding around like a 2 year old again

Last week I took her to the beach on a day off. She really enjoyed some hole-digging, though I followed behind filling them back in again. She also brought a lot of the sand back home and shed it onto – and now inside – my bed, so it feels like I’m sleeping between sheets of sandpaper. Nice.

Another year another job hunt. “That’s a surprise!” said nobody that knows me and my drawerful of leaving cards…

After 10 months of faking it as a Team Lead I decided it’s not what makes me happy and took the leap back into the job market, bad as it still is. Management roles, especially in a smaller organization, are a constant struggle to keep on top of the switching and need to make micro-decisions, handle the stress of demands from above while trying to keep your team happy, and — for me in particular — the frustration of having to delegate all the interesting hands-on engineering work because you don’t have the time or energy to focus on something for more than 5 minutes.

I also really really REALLY don’t like DevOps. If that becomes the norm across all organization’s IT departments I’ll be switching careers for the last few years until I can afford to retire.

Thankfully I was able to secure an engineering contract during my notice period that is much more in line with my skills and experience so I wasn’t in the difficult position of having to post those “Open To Work” articles on LinkedIn fishing for opportunities.

I’ve just started the new role, which even though it’s not that hands-on either, will hopefully give me a project to contribute to for the next few months.