This week has reminded me of my days as a sprinter, on a 4x100 relay. Everyone is running full speed and I need to use a very short runway to match them and seamlessly grab that baton and go.

Shipped

I survived week one at Natera. The firehose metaphor has never been more apt.

The company provided a locked-down laptop that requires VPN access to do anything at all. I’ve never worked this way before, and it will take some getting used to. The lack of control is annoying, but it comes with a corresponding lack of responsibility, which is a trade I can live with. The friction also means I’m far less likely to casually work after hours, and it’s flat-out impossible to do anything from my phone or personal machine. There are worse guardrails to have imposed on you.

I did take the time to set up my shell exactly how I like it, with all the tooling I prefer, and created a dotfiles repo that automates everything. If I ever need to switch laptops for any reason, the whole environment comes with me.

Read

About a gazillion onboarding documents, benefits applications, HR policies, and roughly a dozen code repositories with their associated documentation spread across wiki pages, Jira tickets, and Google documents. I think the last time I read this much in this short a time was finals week my last semester of college.

Played

After a two-month break due to scheduling conflicts, my Gloomhaven group got back together. We’re approaching the endgame now, maybe three quarters of our way through the story including side quests, and every scenario seems to come down to the wire. The balance is exquisite. I look forward to every session we have together.

Cooked

The Publix a few houses up the road from me has an unusually good fish counter, and this week they had fresh Dover sole filets. I’d never cooked those before, so I grabbed a few and pan-seared them with a lemon caper sauce. Fantastic.

Some friends of mine have a young daughter in her first year of Girl Scouts, so naturally I had to buy a year’s supply of cookies. We met up at the neighborhood brewery and I spent the afternoon catching up with them, munching on Thin Mints, and drinking a stout named after Henrietta Lacks. If you don’t know the name, she’s the woman whose cells became the first immortal human cell line, contributing to enormous advancements in health and cancer research, completely unknown to her or her family during her lifetime. Given my new employer’s mission, the coincidence landed differently than it might have a month ago.

Noticed

Spring has sprung, and my seasonal allergies have kicked in. Mine hit very early in the season, caused somewhat ironically by juniper pollen, and they’re mercifully short.

I’ve worked alongside several of my new co-workers before at previous companies. Some are longtime friends. I helped build from the ground up software systems very similar to what they are building here. So much is familiar, and yet so much is new. The familiarity helps me settle in. The differences keep me on my toes and remind me I cannot be complacent about anything.

Thinking About

How to balance two instincts that are both firing at once. My tendency in every new environment is to take things in, observe, listen. But my other tendency, the one that always follows close behind, is to naturally rise into leadership roles. I want to intentionally accelerate that here. Partly because a large organization is easy to get lost in, and partly because there seems to be a vacancy in the org that is somehow exactly Eric-shaped.

What’s Next

Grabbing the bull by the horns, as they say. I want the people around me to simultaneously feel like I’ve always been here and wonder how they ever managed without me.

Vibe Check

Baton in hand. Running.