5star

The Manager's Path Cover I should start a list of books I wish I read earlier. This one would definitely be on that list. Thankfully it is fairly recent, so I don't have myself to blame. Most people that I know in some kind of lead or management role stumbled into them. This was certainly the case for me. One day you are the lone developer in a small shop or start-up and without your fault it does start to grow. All is well until you have a handful of people in the team, suddenly there is a need for some structure and dare I say the word "management". A lot of developers, including myself, are introverts and also prefer the technology side of a company. Taking on the role of a lead or manager will force you to talk to more people and reduces your time on the keyboard. I never wanted to manage people, but working at my start-up (guideguide, war stories another time) I realised that someone had to do it and if I cared for the company it probably had to be me. This is where "The Manager's Path" comes in. It explains the path you might take from being a lone contributor to taking on more responsibilities like mentoring, leading on the technical side, to managing teams and finally being a CTO. It explains every role in great details with real life examples and asks questions to assess your own situation. Even if you are happy to just being a developer this might be helpful to understand the other side and what to expect from your lead. Maybe it also helps to decide that management is not for you yet and you want to learn more about the technology before you take the next step. Or you decide you just are happy where you are and might never go further than on the technical side. I did see myself in a lot of the chapters and wished I had someone tell me these things 20 years ago. Now I will keep it on hand as a reference to look up when I have to reassess roles and help others to grow. While my title is Technical Director at the moment, in the book I am somewhere between manager of team(s) and manager of managers with a sprinkle of CTO. I wonder if there are similar books for other professions, reading this book might be good, but a lot of things are specific to technical careers. A five star from me. ★★★★★ The Manager's Path on Goodreads My random highlights

Mauro talked me into taking part in the La Ruta Minera sportive, conveniently he broke his collarbone before and didn't join. On paper this looked like a lot of fun. It is a bit shorter than Gran Fondo La Mussara and a "bit" more climbing. The event starts and finishes in Berga, which is an hour away with the car. There is no good rail connection, so I rented a car for the long weekend. I booked a hotel through the sportive organisation from Friday to Sunday, with the race being on Sunday. The Hotel HCC Ciutat de Berga was nothing special, but the front desk was very friendly and he did the sportive last year. He even checked out my gears to make sure I was not trying with a 11-25 cassette. They allowed bikes in the rooms for this weekend and also provided extra early breakfast and late checkout on Sunday. Saturday was for relaxing and sight seeing. The old town of Berga is pretty and for the nerds they have the only Free Software Street in the world. Sunday the race. I felt good. I had stuffed myself with pasta the previous days. I had water and gels. The bicycle was mostly OK (some problems with the bearings in the front wheel). All systems go. Maybe the uphill start should have given me a clue, but the temperature was nice and so was the landscape. The first climb was easy to manage around 600m of climbing. But the second one already took most out of me, 1000m of climbing with one ramp of 23% gradient. Distance wise this was only the halfway point and lots of climbing remained. Before the next big climb the temperature went up to 37C with nearly no tree coverage. On the last hill the heat took everything out of me. I stopped a few times in the shadow just to cool down again. The finish line obviously was also a climb. Overall there were only two sections that were flat and allowed me to slipstream a bit. That my descending sucks also didn't really help. But ... I did finish and it is a beautiful area of Catalunya. The organisation was also lovely, it felt like a big family. There were less than 600 cyclists taking part, which is a lot less than my previous sportives. I am probably not going to try this again, but will visit the area when it is a bit cooler :-) Some more photos in my google photo album.

Last year I attended the the Gran Fondo La Mussara, it is a great event, well organized and with a beautiful route. Sadly I was not able to finish it. I had to give up after 110 of the 189 km. I was not properly prepared due to various injuries and illnesses in the beginning of the year. And I got another injury during the ride. But I decided to give it another try this year, so I registered early as this event sells out pretty fast. Registering early including an hotel turned out to be a problem. The hotel forgot all registrations and notified the organizers with one week to spare. Luckily I found another hotel, which turned out to be a bit more expensive, but much better. It is just one kilometre from the start, has really big rooms, you are allowed to take your bike to the room and they organized a special early breakfast for the riders. So if you are in the area I can highly recommend Brea’s Hotel, maybe not for a romantic weekend, but for riding or doing anything at the Fira it works out brilliantly. Another fun bit this year was the panic about disc brakes at sportives in Spain. Luckily this got sorted out beforehand and doesn’t affect my events this year. But I won’t be registering for any others until this is settled for good. The Gran Fondo is a very well organized event. The start and finish line is at the Fira Reus. This is also where you pick up your race pack, jersey and the pasta party after the event is held. The race pack contains your start number with timer chip, a booklet with all kind of information about the race, one very useful sticker for your top bar with the food stop locations, one sticker with the height profile and some energy food. The jersey was the one let-down. I generally don’t like to be forced to use the jerseys provided by the sportive, and this time it really showed why. It was much too small for everyone and the quality was really bad. The zip didn’t work well and got stuck all the time. As this was probably the cheapest version of Santini jerseys it also only had three smallish pockets. I can’t see anyone of the 5000 participants buying from Santini in the future. The problems I identified last year were: ...

In September I published a review of the Bloomsky Weather Station, which I summarized with “a nice toy with brilliant hardware and rubbish software.”. My main complaint was that it was impossible to share an URL of the station and to get to the data, photos and images in any way. Today all of this has changed. Now there is a map with all the stations, and each station has it’s own URL like mine for example. It includes the current data and webcam image and last timelapse. This will already make most people happy, but they didn’t stop there. Now every user has his own private dashboard with access to previous timelapses and historical data. historical data The historical data gives you nice graphs for the available period and also has a table view with the detailed information. The feedback of the graphs can be a bit slow especially if you choose a large time span, but it does look really pretty and gives you a quick overview about the weather changes in a longer time frame. timelapses The timelapses view is straight forward, you can see a calendar with the available timelapses and you can download the one from the selected date. No bulk download yet as far as I can see. ...