I’ve taken time this week to catch up on some sessions from the Women in Tech Global Conference 2024 organised by WomenTech Network. Although the conference was back in April there were so many sessions I still have a pretty long list to get through! This week I listened to Lucinda Cross’ talk on reinventing yourself – she makes a very good point that procrastination, perfectionism and overanalysing are not self love! She says to

I set up this blog about a month ago and haven’t had the nerve to actually publish anything yet. So I’m taking that leap and here we are – the first of (hopefully) many My Week posts. She also says to think about how you have celebrated yourself and to celebrate both successes and falling down – as this is how we can learn lessons.

Tereza Driendl’s talk on how to make tough decisions quickly was equally insightful – I really struggle with being decisive and fall right into the trap of taking too much time to gather all available information and analyse it again and again and again. I then have information overload, conflicting advice and the fear of making a wrong decision and spend days or even weeks agonising over what should generally be a fairly simple decision. She talked about a couple of decision making methodologies – the decision matrix and the OODA loop. Both make perfect sense when you think about them – I’ll have to try them out. I moved house recently so there are plenty of decisions still to be made…

At work I’ve been on support triage – as a development team we are all responsible for supporting our clients so we take turns triaging support tickets, resolving queries and escalating any tickets we can’t resolve to someone who can. It’s valuable for a few reasons, not least that we learn more about our clients and the other projects the team are working on. We also gain technical knowledge as we look into problems that we may not have had to solve before.

I’ve also been learning about the singleton pattern – one of my colleagues with years of experience and an incredible amount of knowledge has been taking some time to talk through design patterns and best practices with me. A lot of the concepts in development can be pretty abstract, which I can struggle with getting my head around so talking things through with someone who really understands how they work (and is very good at explaining them) really helps me get to grips with why we use the patterns and standards that we do. I might do a separate post on this. Or not. Decision making time.

We had the sweepstake draw for Euro 2024 too – with the proceeds going to charity. No pressure Croatia but I’m counting on you…