Friday night I went out to the company’s comedy night, so as soon as I got home (at about 10:30) I crashed.
Friday, May 30
The morning began with Tim Rayburn, one of the consultants at Improving and an old friend of my dad that connected me with Improving, dropping by our room and talking to us a little about what it means to be a consultant (or something along those lines). My memory is terrible and I didn’t write down anything he said (I should have) but I do remember that he emphasized the fact that as consultants we have to be constantly improving ourselves by learning new things. He pointed out that doing so will take up a large portion of our free time and because of that we are forced to prioritize our life. He mentioned a pluralsight course related to that subject called “Becoming an Outlier: Reprogramming the Developer Mind.” I haven’t taken the time to look into that yet, but I plan on doing so this afternoon.
Between that and lunch I didn’t do much other than finish my work on the expanded badge views (in order for them to be ready for review). After lunch we took some time to prepare for our review. This went ok; Along the way we discovered a few links that weren’t working so we had to figure out how to fix those. There were also a few things related to badges that I felt needed to change so I made some tweaks there. Both of these things violate our agreement to have a cutoff time for changes before review but at least some of it was necessary in order to have a successful review.
Jef was the only one in the audience this time, but there was still pressure to perform well. I think we delivered on that; I don’t recall any big hiccups and our preparation really helped. My burn-down chart came in handy when explaining our scope reduction, so I’m glad I took the time to make that. This review was certainly an improvement on the last one. Afterwards Jef wanted us to do a modelling exercise so that we would be ready to do some modelling next week. That went pretty smoothly, and then we started our retrospective.
We had a lightning round of pluses and deltas before we got into the bulk of our retrospective, which was an exercise called influence mapping. For this Jef had us map out (in any way we like) the influences that led us to improving. I went with a listing of my parents’ degrees and job titles (as an attempt to connote genetic influence) along with a three part timeline. A timeline may not have been the best idea for me; I myself have admitted many times that my memory is terrible. After our timebox ran out we each took a turn explaining our influence map. It was interesting to see various backgrounds of everyone in the group.
When it became my turn it was clear to me that my map was a little sparse compared to the others, but I managed to think of a few more things to talk about (and I think I even went of on a tangent at some point). I mentioned being very lazy in the past, so after I was through Jef offered some very kind words of encouragement. He said that based on what he’s seen throughout the boot camp I am not a lazy person; he stated that it’s more likely that I was simply bored and lacked direction, and I think he was right. So that was nice.
This weekend marks the midpoint of the bootcamp. The last four weeks have flown by, and I hope to come out of the next four ready to become a consultant.
Some Thoughts on Overthinking 
I watched the sprint review video. Great job!
“My burn-down chart came in handy when explaining our scope reduction, so I’m glad I took the time to make that. This review was certainly an improvement on the last one. ”
I was really impressed with how you used this burn down to be really transparent about when the team ran into some trouble with their capacity and how they made decisions to reduce scope. They way you answered the questions was factual, non-defensive, and very transparent. Great job of helping stakeholders to understand problems you ran into while building trust around how team makes decisions.
“He said that based on what he’s seen throughout the boot camp I am not a lazy person;” I agree — There’s nothing I’ve seen in you that points to you being lazy. You are more likely an over achiever! You simply need direction and some valid goals to accomplish so you know where to head. Your behavior more indicates that given a set of goals and clear direction, there’s nothing in life you won’t accomplish!