November 7, 2021

Back to It

I didn’t write a newsletter last weekend because my family had come on a very short-notice visit. For reasons I really won’t get into, I’m not very close with them. The last time I saw them was earlier in the year. Against my strong wishes, they visited Vancouver at a time when COVID cases were still high. That was the first time I’d seen them in over three years. I’m still incredibly disappointed in their behaviour, and I think I will be for some time. In any case, spending time with my family leaves me feeling pretty emotionally drained. I didn’t feel like writing a newsletter that weekend, and I felt very unproductive last week. Not great.

The past week, I worked on the task of thinking about at least ten reachability ¹ questions that developers could ask themselves during their work and day-to-day tasks. The goal of this exercise is to create a survey that we can send out to actually make sure my reachability framework is:

• Trying to solve real-world problems that developers run into.
• Not just a solution looking for a problem.

Gail and I met on Thursday, and she seemed to like the questions I came up with. I still have that feeling of “Oh my God, I’ve done nothing, Gail’s gonna tear me a new one.” At this point, I should be slightly more confident in the work I do over a week, but old habits die hard. We’re ² gonna apply for an ethics approval (which I am told takes a week, so I’m allocating 2 weeks lol), and start thinking about how we’re going to distribute this survey. Gail also had the idea to run a pilot version of the survey, so I’ll get to work on that.

On Friday, I spent the morning finishing the TCPS 2 (2018) module on “Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans,” so I can start applying for ethics approval with UBC. I went home earlier on Friday because I was still feeling pretty drained from the family visit last weekend, and thought I could use some time by myself. I think being comfortable with my own company is something that I’m very lucky to be decent at, otherwise I would’ve gone insane long ago.

Yesterday I finished the pilot version of the survey, I’m hoping to ask a few members of the lab to play around with it so I have something to show for my meeting on Wednesday.

I’ve also been asked to cat sit once again for an old colleague of mine, so I have that to look forward to in the week ahead.

Stay dry!