On Tuesday 18th December 2018 XTC held a retrospective.

A couple of years ago I read Deep Work by Cal Newport. More recently I’ve been identifying with the difficulty to be creative, wondering where my time is going and feeling generally unproductive. I don’t believe there are any silver bullets in this space, but I do agree that Social Media, and the drip feed of news is generally unhealthy. I quit facebook years ago and do not miss it.

What is a Shit Umbrella? A person in a leadership role who shields team members from the day to day strife of interacting directly with less healthy business relationships - especially in more hostile or stressful domains where the business is used to reprioritising developers midtask on a whim.

These are my take aways from an open session about Building Communities at Socrates UK.

Denise Yu facilitated an open session on Burnout. Most of the groups focussed on their own experiences in burning out at work, the indicators of upcoming burnout, and possible ways to avoid it in the future. It seemed like everyone in the room had burned out in the past.

I love going to meetups and finding new things to read. Here’s my list of discussed blogs, books and talks from XPRolo tonight.