End of an ambition...

Today, I cycled to a meeting. Not extraordinary in itself: people regularly cycle in the city, and it's a good way to get around. But it was an external (i.e. different companies) meeting in a faraway town, and on the way home I realised that it was more significant than I'd thought. For the last few years, I'd been moving slowly into management. I still did my technical work: the teams I had were generally young and not familiar with the technologies and techniques that were needed on my projects (I tend to pick up the more difficult, less charted areas of work. In fact, I can't remember when I was last asked to design and build something that had been done before; it's possible that that hasn't happened anywhere outside my education), so I'd teach them, pick up the bits that were too hard to learn quickly, and manage the workload as well. And so, reader, I tried to do all the things (except golf) that made me fit into the management miasma: wore the right things, went to the right meetings, fought my team's corner. Which in retrospect was a mistake: in doing these things whilst trying to do real work as well, I left myself wide open to management politics. And lost: which is all I'm ever going to say about that particular fiasco.

Anyways, I ramble. The significance of cycling today is not just part of my return to a simpler life (less stuff to worry about, more time to concentrate on work and play), it's also a symbol of my return to my techie self. My management politics days are over, and now I can get down to some serious work. I still dress smartly whilst there, but I'm no longer afraid of the image implications of turning up to a meeting on a bicycle. It's a lovely day out, I got 4 hours work in on the train instead of being bored witless on the M25, and I got some much-needed exercise out of it too. Period. And if anyone has a problem with that, they can ask themselves whether they'd rather have their systems designed by someone who genuinely thinks about them, and has thought about their impact on the world, or someone who just looks that way. And if they choose the second answer, then they really do get what they deserve.

Enough: I have life to sort and coding practice to do. With a small coda: a good manager knows how to tell their team what to do; a good leader understands what it is and gives their team the encouragement and space to do it well. We need more of those.