This post brought to you courtesy of Lunesta.

<flips on Europe's "The Final Countdown">

This week ... code freeze for MindTouch Deki Kilen Woods 8.08, which will have all the tools to help out the sales team. I get a sense that the company story (the culmination of the sales, product, engineering stories) has a sense of fluidity. We still have engineering work items which require lots of oversight, but I'm feeling really good on the timeline (more than I've ever felt).

Mozilla Developer Center might finally launch this week - and it'll finally be off our plate! Woooo! This alone, makes me so happy.

And the last thing is: I'm going to kick things into an even higher gear at work. I have accepted the fact that I will have to be a developer/ developement lead/product manager/director of engineering for now ... while I train others to take my place. I've decided to start becoming more of a "manager" and start doing one-on-ones (as I used to do with my old boss Tom).

For a while, I struggled with my role: I thought that I had sufficiently set up a well-designed process that could run itself, so I stepped away from sherparding the actual product releases. Of course, there was a flaw, and that flaw wasn't realized into far too late ... and the product quality and the product release dates shipped.

I also never managed to distinguish whether my focus should be on tactical or strategic things - I tried too much to be strategic, and that caused me grief the past few months as well. My goal is tactical. As a direng, I am responsible for delivering  tactical victories, not strategic victories. I believe if I had fought back more against the uppers, I could have saved a few weeks of engineering time, which would have gone into the product, which yields a tactical victory every time.

To me, MindTouch's greatest assets is the ability to take our forward-thinking ideas and implement them effectively, on a timely manner.

My personal goals for this week:

• continue being a nitpicky bastard for the 8.08 release until it's ready to ship (next Tuesday, cross your fingers!)
• start my one-on-ones with developers this week - this will also have the added benefit that i will know everything that goes on on the engineering side of things, so I can more effectively report back to Aaron and Steve on the state of things, and how it all fits together
  
• make this week's developer meeting more useful or cancel it (I had a great track record of meetings last week that were actually of use).
  
• organize postmortem and the next product release meetings (the ones where we determine features to include).
  
• I will also keep a tight calendar of this upcoming release, breaking down items into per dev/per item, so I can more accurately track work items. We are switching back to a longer developement cycle, so this change is warranted
• Get some training on the ESX server, since I'll probably be abusing it reaaaaal soon

Ok, these drugs are starting to make my mind wander too much, so I'm gonna pass out.

Yay for reset buttons!