Ruhee Dewji

Retro #8

I’ve been gravitating toward having a single longer-form thought at the beginning of these retro posts, and then throwing some grab-bag items in afterward. There’s nothing wrong with this format, but after re-reading last week’s post, I feel like it could have just been its own post. I didn’t need to jam that into a retro! It made sense to—it was indeed related to something I did and something I read the previous week—but I do wonder if I’m just shying away from Blog Posts and throwing things into Personal Journal Posts because it feels like the ideas aren’t fully baked.

But also, sometimes it’s nice to expand something just enough and include a pile of treats on the side, like in Sameer’s post about fruit crisp.

I also, of course, wonder how much I should be addressing current events as opposed to just talking about myself. These posts can be pretty navel-gazing, though sometimes I think it’s nice to just read about someone’s regular thoughts amid the barrage of News—I don’t think there is anything I can say about Minnesota, for example, that anyone needs to hear. But I will say that if you are feeling powerless, it’s probably not going to help to read more news than you are already reading. Instead you may feel better by talking to more people and doing more things. If you’re in Toronto, here’s where to start.

Last week

I was supposed to go to the Scotties Tournament of Hearts on Sunday, but we got a monster snowstorm. The transit trip to the arena would have taken two hours in perfect conditions, so there was a pretty real chance I would end up stranded in the middle of Mississauga in the worst snowstorm the city has ever seen … yeah. I’m really sad, though!

A fairly preposterous amount of snow piled on a balcony, with a snowstorm still happening

Cars almost buried under piles of snow

I’ve also been knitting a lot, although I have so many projects on the go that I haven’t finished any in awhile. Recently I’ve been knitting gloves, which is fiddly but fun:

A half-finished red knit glove, with half a thumb, most of a hand, and one finished pinky finger

At work we ran a production test of the big feature I worked on and it went great. There were a few small logic issues to fix but nothing really significant—a great success, imo. Since this retro is coming late, I can update that we rolled the whole thing out to prod this week and it’s humming along fine! I’ve patched a few little bugs and everything is looking great. This is a huge relief, both because it was my first big project at work (and I did nearly everything on the technical side, including the initial scoping—due to unrelated circumstances, there wasn’t much support available even though I was new) and because at my previous job I was routinely told I couldn’t do “anything ambiguous”. Pleased to have hard evidence that I actually can.