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Editing journals/2019_03_14.org

* March 14, 2019
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:ID:       6277ce8c-97fa-49d1-ba7e-e86f7473138f
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** DONE Second March 2019 mentorship meeting with Cris :mentorship:cris:meeting:@personal:
CLOSED: [2019-03-14 Thu 9:30] SCHEDULED: <2019-03-14 Thu 8:30>

We spent a while talking over the snafu from earlier in the month where I missed
a patch release deadline for the Unbox branch. I noted how I was waiting for the
staging release of the week  to go out, and it never did, so I never got a
release branch cut for the patch or QA'd.  Andrew was frustrated that it didn't
go out on time. I was trying to avoid avoiding responsibility, but also felt
that our entire release process is a bit rough.

Cris noted that while it may be true that there were external factors, I
probably could have done a better job communicating to the team doing the
regular releaes that I had something that had to get out earlier. I failed to
note that I hadn't even considered creating a release branch off the last
release branch for my patch, but had assumed we were going to early-release the
entire release branch. That wasn't accurate either.

We also talked  for a while about [[https://medium.com/@Cris_Bettis/pioneering-new-tech-kirk-picard-and-the-borg-collective-d14b50324f81][the blog post]] Cris had written about
pioneering work in orgs being like Star Trek captains. I  pointed out a recent
conversation with Andrew where Ed had encouraged him to justify the FIGmd
project anew. In that talk, Andrew noted that Elation wants generalist, high
quality engineers, not niche engineers. It seemed to me that our org in general
is at an inflection point where they want a bunch of Captain Kirk's, but are
finding it very difficult to hire/train Kirk's. Indeed, orgs themselves probably
don't build Kirk's so much as find them. And if you're having trouble finding
them it's an indication that your org is growing.

At some point you need people who know specific things. You have to have
delegation at that point and away teams will often be comprised of a similar
cast depending on the nature of the mission, rather than just whomever wasn't
busy at the time.