2025 Weeknote 50 : No time like the present

December 8 – 14

📆 My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

Professional weeknotes

I’ve got limited notes this week because we’re heavy into hiring, reading, and this coming week is PowerPoint Karaoke 3, which is now an annual holiday event I design and host. More next week.

• Still working on hiring our IT Project Manager role. We’re now in second-round interviews. Should be making an offer this month.
• I posted the “Atlassian Administrator” role this past week. I’m struggling with the specific title since it’s a rarefied market and our pay rates only allow us to aim for early-career Atlassian folks. We started with “Analyst” but then we were getting “analytics” people. But it’s out there and we’re searching. Odds are we can’t get a candidate and offer out until January.
• Late Friday we learned we’ll be posting a job this coming week for a software developer (specifics TBD), and possibly a software contractor, too. It’s hard to keep up with all this stuff because I take a very direct and active role in the hiring. This one will be making a selection by late January if we move “fast” and are lucky with candidates.
• We had the annual holiday breakfast this past week, which was nice. But it was yet another thing to do on top of the other items on the list. Everyone is really starting to get burned out on all the busy-busy-busy activity. Holidays do that to everyone, but we seem to just make it way more challenging than it needs to be. I’ve just given up on being holiday-minded this year, with everything going on.
• We’ll try to do Team Topologies again this week, but as I write this late Sunday, I’m still not ready. PowerPoint Karaoke takes a lot of effort to assemble and I am just burned out across the board working 7 days a week for the last couple months.

Personal weeknotes

• My mother fell on Thursday evening, hit her face on concrete and ended up in the hospital, getting a couple stitches. Then she experienced “chest pain” for 2 days before a return ER visit on Saturday revealed she had multiple broken ribs. Apparently the ribs were not “offset” much, so they should heal in place without major intervention, and while she has some pain, it’s not debilitating, so she was sent home with some pain killers and a spirometer to keep using her lungs and avoid pneumonia. Us kids are all scratching our heads, wondering why she’s not in a skilled nursing situation. But we’re also kind of resigned to the fact that we’re not being asked (or allowed) to make key decisions yet. My father is… resistant. I understand why, but it’s still frustrating and saddening when you can see better choices but they are blocked. We all fear we’re just waiting for the crisis that’s big enough to allow us to step in.
• If there was a bright spot this week, it was that I finally canceled my Spectrum internet service. The service itself was mediocre, but they played the classic game of raising your prices slowly until you call to cancel or renegotiate, then low-ball you with an offer they could have made long ago for faster speeds and lower prices. They offered to double my speed and cut my monthly price in half. I was polite (because the rep on the phone didn’t make the bad business decisions), but resolute—businesses like Spectrum that are setup to screw over the customer through dark pattern practices can fuck right off. And now they are out of my life and I live on fast, reliable fiber that runs directly into my home.
• Finally, I’m thinking about changing up my weeknotes for 2026. The pace of posting, combined with the pace of other work, is just beyond what I can comfortably sustain. I might be better off with more of a “link blog” focused on sharing things I’ve read with a few comments. Or maybe I just move my posting entirely to LinkedIn and reserve this space for “essays” I feel moved to share. Whatever it is, something’s gotta give.

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