Part One of Pain: Done

And that's part one of pain mostly done---there's still one more thing that technically happens right smack in the first of the next month, but the build up to it is close enough proximity to this month that it might as well be a part of it; hence the ``mostly done'' qualifier.

The thing about technology demonstrations, is that everyone expects things to run smooth. That is normally the case, especially when one controls all the inputs to the said technology demonstration.

But what happens if a critical component is dependent on a reluctant contributor whose technical chops are not completely under one's control?

Well, there are two ways to play it.

1. Be strict and demand code reviews before we even bother with integration; or
2. Be lenient and just integrate what is provided.

On hindsight, I should have played the bully card harder---I don't mind dying on my sword [proverbially] if it is my team that cocks up, but I mind a bit when I'm doing so because of a third party whose stuff we are integrating who cocked up network resource programmming 101.

The onus is still on me though---I take full responsibility for not instituting the first of the two options which led to the technology demonstration failures. Thankfully, that issue could be worked around with some tight timing of restarting the components and getting the crowd worked up to interact with the demo, so I didn't actually die completely (still lost some reputation, but at this point in my life, considering that I have no intention in climbing the corporate ladder, I don't give too much a shit).

All in all, the technology demonstration was a qualified success---the overall vibes was positive despite the initial failure.

Being a manager is hard---everything that one does and decides are exercises of balances. On the one hand, one wants to ensure absolute control in order to bring the variances down to improve quality, and on the other hand, there is a need to let people make mistakes to learn from to better build up their capabilities, be it team members [whom I'm more willing to ``tank damage'' for] or even third party contributors. The need to balance between these two is mostly the reason that I am driven crazy more than half the time.

The temptation to take everything into one's hands is always strong, but it is important to realise that by doing so, it defeats the purpose of building a team in the first place. The reason we put a team together, is to leverage on the extra brains & hands to achieve greater parallelism, thus allowing the total effort in work-days to be fitted into a much shorter effective calendar-day count. Pulling everything back to oneself does nothing to allow projects to be delivered faster, and in the worst case, can cause bigger issues in general due to the increased cognitive load required to deal with the nitty-gritty [that the team members should be able to handle] while still maintaining a view of the big picture [that only the manager/leader can do].

I think that is the biggest lesson to learn when transiting from being an individual contributor into a manager/leader.

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shapez 2 has been my new diversion from the vagaries of pain. It all started with this video from one of my favourite YouTubers:

Now, Josh's a mad man who captures the same kind of energy as Zisteau (he's more a Twitch streamer these days than a YouTube video maker, while having his Twitch streams archived here). I love games like Factorio, but what I like about them aren't the survival aspects(!), but on the factory aspect. And shapez 2 scratches that itch.

Of course, the first thing I did was to look for the original shapez. I could have bought the Steam version as part of the pack, or I could buy from GoG.com which was at 90% discount. And so I was pushing through last week while spending some time here and there on shapez after hours to chill out, even as I was drilling the music that was for the upcoming performance with the King's Flute Choir on 2024-09-01 on Davie.

Now that I'm mostly done with the major upgrades in shapez, it was time to start on shapez 2, and start on it I did.

It is definitely as fun as Josh made it in his video---having come from shapez, there are quite a few quality of life improvements that I enjoyed. The 3D-render of the game space took a little getting used to (shapez was laid out on a 2D-grid similar to Factorio), but that was not a problem. The key difference between shapez and shapez 2 lies in a few new ``meta'' levels of building. All things in shapez are single units of machinery, be it extractor, or belt, or stacker. shapez 2 has all the stuff in shapez, but has space platforms, which are like their own self-contained modules that are made up of the shapez elements, as well as layers, which brings extra expressivity even at the shapez component level through effectively doubling and then tripling the original 2D grid space.

Oh, and it's really colourful and cool.

Pillars of Eternity is currently seeing my party in the city, which is a slow part of the game; I do go back to it every now and then. I've since completed The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures some time back, and am likely to start on its sequel, The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve soon.

And I suppose that's about it for now. Till the next update.