🇬🇧🇺🇸 Bi-Weekly Progress #5

Two more weeks went by. One filled with work related stuff and one filled with battery recharging activities as I was gone for a week in a holiday.

Vuuh

We slowed down the recruiting activity for a few weeks (or even months) because we recently found a few colleagues that are due to start in the following weeks. The ramp-up efforts will be mainly on my (but also on my current existing colleagues) and I will need to explore and find better ways to make our work more efficient.

From things like internal tooling, to processes like how we deal with code reviews (they become a bigger and bigger part of my schedule), at the same time with implementing big features for our current partners.

I will need to focus more on planning and coming up with technical solutions and documentation rather than writing code. While I still need to write code, I will start delegating more and more to the rest of the team, especially the harder tasks that are time sensitive. I avoided doing that until now to shelter them from the stress of having to deliver on a tight schedule and allow them to work at their own pace, but now the pressure starts to catch up.

Onboarding and integrating colleagues will need to be done carefully to not damage our culture (that's probably the biggest concern when scaling up as a company).

If you are not paying attention, bad habits slip through the cracks and if left unchecked they become part of the culture.

Things like blaming others, trying to hide the bad things, people not communicating, people waiting for instructions instead of being pro-active, etc. We can't let these things become the norm, and I have to pay extra attention to not let these things become habits.

Holiday

With a short mountain hike and a trip to Rome, I managed to recharge my batteries a little, and disconnect from the work related stress. Although I still had work related thoughts from time to time, I focused more on having a good quality time. Although the weather was not perfect (very humidly hot), it was a nice experience. It was actually the first out-of-country experience of 2021 (actually since 2020 since the pandemic started).

Next steps

Vuuh wise, the priorities will be on onboarding new colleagues, focusing on the tasks at hand at Vuuh, things such as improving various features, bug fixing and identifying ways to reduce our manual workflows (or heavily repetitive ones).

Personal projects wise, I don't have many things planned. I am playing around with the thought of starting focusing more on growing my personal brand, so I can leverage it later on when scaling up Vuuh. Being a small company, we are not attractive enough for some developers, and we want to change that. Ideally, developers would queue up at our doorsteps in the future, instead of us spending time and resources headhunting with a low probability if success.