These were intense two weeks when I took on too much, and some days were really hard for me. It’s difficult to tell about everything that happened, but I’ll manage to cover a few highlights!

Work

Several times I felt like I was completely stuck, but then a new day would begin, I’d start thinking about a new facet of my tasks, and inspiration would come, new ideas would arrive. I want to learn to trust myself, to believe that new solutions will come during the work process, and not waste energy worrying that I’m stuck, that today I don’t know what I’ll come to tomorrow.

One of my biggest fears about work right now is misunderstanding my area of responsibility. I’m very afraid of missing something I’m actually supposed to be responsible for, and overstepping into territory beyond my authority. In theory, this should be resolved by a job description, but I’ve never encountered in real life a job description that actually helped with this (in my entire long working life, I’ve worked in a classic corporation for less than a year, so this isn’t surprising). And I don’t yet have an answer for how to figure out the boundaries of my actual area of responsibility, except through communication and exploration, but this is difficult and anxiety-inducing, especially considering I haven’t yet passed my probation period at the new job.

Signalis

There are games that don’t particularly appeal to you while you’re playing them, but leave a deep impression and enrich your world. For me, these are Norco, Disco Elysium, Kentucky Route Zero - and now Signalis. I didn’t enjoy the gameplay and was annoyed that I couldn’t remember all the names and replika models I encountered throughout the game, but now that I’ve finished playing - I can’t stop thinking about this world. I’m not building theories about how all the intertwined threads of narrative and memories fit into one overall picture, but rather experiencing this world sensually and visually.

But if you like building theories - there are many videos about this on YouTube. And there’s also an excellent article - it’s in Russian, but now that’s not an obstacle at all.

Crypto and Electronics

From time to time, I develop an interest in cryptocurrency and electronics. I think this is how my desire to know how this world actually works and how everything functions manifests itself, as well as the desire to build my own world bypassing the life-breaking official institutions.

I’ve conceived a couple of simple art projects using electronics, the ordered components arrived today, it’s a shame that almost all my evenings next week are occupied.

Social Life and Sensory Overload

I attended two pre-holiday events: the corporate New Year party and a pre-New Year skate session in the my surfskate community. Not the most interesting events (I like regular skating and regular work better), but it was still pleasant and probably even necessary to informally communicate with new colleagues.

But I’m writing about this because after both events I felt completely exhausted, and I think I’m finally ready to admit that interacting with a large number of people drains a lot of energy from me, and to take this into account in my plans (instead of imagining that I’m a superhero who doesn’t give a damn about anything).

In general, I’m increasingly noticing episodes of sensory overload: too many people too close, too many conversations that I can’t help but hear. I think it was like this before too, but I had more energy to compensate for it without noticing.

Oh, another interesting thing: at the corporate party there was a black tie dress code, and I was dressed accordingly (and I even had a black bow tie), and I even put on makeup for the first time in about twenty-five years. And this isn’t really me at all, I don’t feel like this, but what I saw in the mirror, I unexpectedly liked. Maybe this is a signal to try roles beyond the range I consider suitable for myself.

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

I read several books, I want to talk about The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu: the feeling from many of the stories is similar to watching “Black Mirror” in many ways - on one hand, it’s a future that seems very close, very easy to imagine, on the other hand - schematic characters, needed only to outline the plot. Like drafts, sketches for a story, rather than the story itself.

What the Internet Is For

In the Top 25 Moving Image collection from It’s Nice That, I randomly encountered the stunning work of Adrian Hanft. This is exactly what the internet is for - these inspiring encounters!

He also has a Substack worth subscribing to!

River of Grass

I have a strange tenderness for films about restless people trying to find a shortcut to their dream in life (or at least get out of their restlessness). River of Grass is exactly that, absurd characters trying to get out of an absurd situation, the film is beautiful and tender, leaving a feeling of emptiness and unlived life.

Work stuff

This week I had a meeting with our company’s advisors where we discussed what I’d accomplished over the month and future plans.

Overall, the meeting went fine, but something happened that I’d forgotten about from working at a company where women held all the leadership roles: men don’t hear or register your ideas until they arrive at them themselves and decide they’re their own ideas.

It’s incredibly frustrating, but I have zero energy right now to change this situation. Maybe that’ll shift over time.

I was pretty anxious before and during this meeting, so the next day I was completely incapable of productive work, only managed to get through a few almost mechanical tasks. I expected this would happen, but I was still really annoyed with myself.

The magic formula

There’s one phrase that always helps me when I’m feeling overwhelmed and like everything’s going wrong. I found it back when I was a team lead, and that phrase is “This IS my job.” It’s saved me from unnecessary emotions countless times:

• Team conflict isn’t something getting in the way of your work, but dealing with it IS your job;
• Negative user feedback about the product isn’t something preventing you from working on the product according to plan, working with that feedback to make the product better IS your job.

As soon as you arrive at this thought and accept it, you stop being angry that things are going wrong and “interfering” with your work. You start doing the important things more calmly instead of just the familiar and comfortable ones.

The value of practice

I wrote “as soon as you arrive at the thought and accept it…” but honestly I’m simplifying. You can’t start doing something differently just because you learned about it, you need time for new knowledge to turn into a skill, to integrate into your way of doing things, for neural connections to form.

And practice (as a process, as opposed to results and achievements), not knowledge, is what makes you fluent at something. It’s basic, but I was a kid who found a lot of things easy, and for a long time I was convinced that knowledge alone was enough to excel at anything.

Books

Listened to “The Shortest History of Music” and it’s nice. From time to time I make attempts to understand how music works, and generally they’re pretty unsuccessful, but with each attempt I understand that world a little better, and this book is a good brick in the foundation of that understanding. Not sure if it’d be interesting to people familiar with music theory and history, but for me it had lots of interesting facts and discoveries.

Work-life balance and successful success

Lately, I keep coming across thoughts that work/life balance doesn’t really exist, and if you want to achieve something substantial, you need to forget about any kind of balance.

I see two meaningful opposites here:

1. I understand intensive work that you find meaningful, that aligns with your values, and such work brings high results: money, status, self-realization;
2. Undemanding work to cover basic needs, leaving plenty of time for self-realization outside of it (I see many young people choosing this path now).

And it seems like when people talk about work-life balance, they mean the second option. But in my view, the first option, though it’s tougher, is also impossible without this balance, because a person (especially with age) has a limited amount of resources, and I’m not even talking so much about physical ones, but about resources for generating ideas, making quality decisions, developing vision and turning vision into reality. So when I hear about endless work without time for quality rest, recovery and switching off, I always question the quality of that work.

But it’s quite possible I’m wrong, of course - after all, I can’t say I’ve achieved anything substantial myself.

Winding road

This week at work was quite nerve-wracking because I couldn’t put together a vision for the product I’ll be working on - everything was falling apart, seemed unfamiliar and scary. But then I reminded myself that this is exactly what I wanted from my next job: not to repeat what I already know and can do, but to learn something new, grow, reach a new level. So the fact that I’m feeling this way can be seen as a sign that I’m on the right path.

TV shows

I finished watching “The Day of the Jackal,” and if you think about it, it’s quite a strange story: none of the main characters evoke sympathy, almost everyone there is frankly bad. The Jackal isn’t Dexter with his code and elaborate reasoning about the boundaries of what’s acceptable - what he does, he does for money, and innocent victims don’t stop him at all from achieving his goals. The fact that he got upset twice about innocent people dying and shouted “Fuck!” doesn’t change the overall picture at all. There’s no justification for the Jackal whatsoever.

At the same time, sympathy for Eddie Redmayne made me worry about him out of all the characters anyway, and “how the hero gets out of an impossible situation” is one of my favorite genres, though here it’s spoiled again by that same permissiveness. And the finale in the style of comedies about charming casino robbers with a setup for the next season looks pretty cringe.

Guests with fish

My partner’s colleagues came over to our place for a non-alcoholic party with dried fish (fish being the central idea of the party). Some of them are more than twice younger than me, and such gatherings are always both interesting and somewhat of a test for me, because they talk about things that were quite recent for me as if they were ancient times, and these things possibly form part of my identity.

In any case, I was glad the party was alcohol-free.

Work Stuff

This week I had a lot of strategic work, and while in last week’s review I wrote that I barely use AI for work now, this week it was the opposite: I returned to my most favorite and useful way of using AI - as a thinking partner. I asked Claude to help me write a product vision and strategy, but not by doing it for me, but by asking questions, clarifying, pointing out weak spots and suggesting unusual perspectives. This way of working, where we build the vision through dialogue (primarily in my head), seems to me the most valuable and productive way to use AI.

However, there was some vibe-coding too - instead of explaining a complex idea to colleagues, I made a prototype that demonstrates it in action. Though I’ll only find out tomorrow how much this actually helps with understanding the idea, when I show them the prototype.

I also needed to draw a simple BPMN diagram, and it turned out that in 2025 there’s still no way to do this quickly and without problems. All the web services I tried (primarily bpmn.io, draw.io, excalidraw), have small flaws that nevertheless make working with the diagram inconvenient, and for me this is a thinking process, and I want to be minimally distracted by aligning arrows.

Ideally, I’d want BPMN to appear in mermaid. I really love mermaid.

Mentoring

This week I had a meeting with one of my mentees, she had a question about team motivation and burnout. I prepared various cases from my experience for the meeting (and I have quite a lot of that experience), but her case turned out to be much harsher than anything I’d encountered. I shared with her how I would act in this situation, but overall I wasn’t prepared to help her with my experience, and realizing this was quite unpleasant.

TV Shows

The week turned out to be cognitively challenging at work, so in my free time there were lots of TV shows (this helps me switch off and not chew over work ideas in circles 24/7). Watched all the released episodes of “Pluribus” and several episodes of “The Day of the Jackal”.

Pluribus, of course, is full of ideas you want to think about and keep developing, but I can’t say it captivated me, while “The Day of the Jackal,” about which you can hardly say there’s anything new (essentially it’s management porn), unexpectedly keeps me on the edge of my seat. I’m not trying to compare them, it’s apples and oranges, but for the state of “can’t think anymore,” it seems apples suit me better.

Movies

Finally watched “One Battle After Another”. Maybe I’m in this kind of period, but instead of focusing on the film as is, I was watching DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, and thinking about aging. Gave the film 4 stars and a heart.

Games

Started playing Signalis (abandoned Silksong at the end of the first act, I have a life and I’m an adult, and I can’t spend hours fighting bosses, though maybe I’ll come back to it). Haven’t progressed that far yet, but already drawn into the atmosphere and story.

Looks like this was a week of generating ideas at work and consuming content all the rest of the time. I don’t really like this ratio, but sometimes there really is no energy left for creating outside of work. But I think the fact that work requires straining creative forces is a reason to be happy.

Party

For the first time in a couple of years, I met up with friends at a bar to have fun. In recent years, the outside world hasn’t been very conducive to having a good time, but this time I decided I wanted to break this trend of depending on what’s happening outside - at least for a while. And to my surprise, I managed to do it (even though I’m usually the first one to want to go home and sleep at parties). I danced and jumped around - for the first time in about eight years. I sang terribly at karaoke - for the first time ever in my life. I came home in the middle of the night.

The next day brought a mild hangover and fatigue, and I probably won’t want to repeat such revelry anytime soon, but it felt like something I needed - to let go and do a few unwise (but harmless) things.

Books

I finished Lean Analytics - and it’s the most useful professional book I’ve read in the last few years. I really loved the frameworks describing different types of businesses, and I’m already applying something similar at work, and it takes decision-making to a completely new level.

I also finished “The Crying of Lot 49”. I can’t say I totally get it, but I enjoyed it for some reason. There’s a certain poignancy to it and a desire to get to the bottom of things that touched me.

TV Shows

I finished the fifth season of “Slow Horses”. It’s not the greatest series, but even the fifth season is cozy, pleasant, and engaging, which is already saying something.

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Tarantino’s “Cinema Speculation”, and besides rekindling my interest in cinema, it did something interesting to me: it freed me from needing to find justifications for watching movies (and TV shows) other than the fact that it can be interesting, gripping, exciting. Cinema doesn’t have to be wise, intellectual, or anything else. It doesn’t owe anyone anything, and probably nothing else does either.

And “Slow Horses” is a perfect illustration of this idea.

Movies

We watched “The Roses” with Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, really enjoyed it. Funny and sad about adults who lose themselves and each other because they didn’t take care of themselves.

So here I am, at the age when you start loving family dramas and understanding their characters!

Work and AI

Interestingly, I rarely use AI at work now, even though I used it constantly both at my previous job and while searching for a new one. I think it’s because I’m still in the process of accumulating information and building a mental model of a new area of knowledge (new company, responsibilities, role), and my brain needs to fully grasp this on its own before communication with AI starts bringing real value. I’ll keep observing.

A colleague showed me a cool thing - an AI voice recorder called Plaud Note, and I was really impressed by how it works right out of the box - it recorded a meeting perfectly, tagged speakers, highlighted meaningful action points. It’s exactly what I need.

I also really want a similar system that could maintain and update knowledge bases for projects and products, record changes after decisions are made - that would significantly ease my life and work, but I haven’t come across such solutions yet.

And this week we got our first snow! (A month and a half until New Year’s, and the streets are already ready for the festival of consumerism)

Birthday

This week I turned 46. I actually feel like I’m 17, and there’s no particular desire to take stock of things, especially considering that I’m currently in a very transitional period into a new work and social role. A lot is being reflected on, but not in a taking-stock format.

On my birthday I was irritated because I wanted something special, a carefree day, but from the very morning everything went wrong and I had to be an adult. But on that day I learned to do an axle stall, which I consider an excellent achievement for 46 years old. Skateboarding in general is something that has been supporting me tremendously in recent years, but I’ll write about that separately.

I talked quite a bit with old friends who were congratulating me on my birthday, they’re all in other countries, we were separated by COVID, war, re-hardened borders, and I miss them very much, miss the times when we weren’t divided by losses, borders and beliefs. It’s hard to find new friends when you’re 46, give me back my old ones!

Cinema

We watched Ari Aster’s “Eddington” on my birthday, at first also irritating, gradually captivating, leaving room for reflection, but somehow belated, you know, you want to say: “But it’s already too late, we’re on the other side of all this and are already dealing with irreversible consequences.”

New Job

I continue to immerse myself in the new work, absorb information, talk to people, but it feels like it’s time to move to action before I absorb the established order too. After all, I was hired in part to change it.

Creativity

I’m trying to lower the barriers to creativity: turn off perfectionism, the fear of wasting time on something that won’t turn out to be anything worthwhile, and start creating. After all, when I look at other people’s work, I like precisely the raw works where you can see the nerve, the mess, the momentariness, I’m barely interested in polished lengthy grandiose works, it seems to me that they lose the initial impulse and sincerity.

So why do I deny myself the right to such works?

I was playing with Koala Sampler, and finally something interesting came out that I can possibly develop into a full track someday. Also once again admired (and listened to) the website of musician and programmer Alexander Zolotov warmplace.ru. This is what the internet is for, and I’m glad there are still such places in it.

Books

Started reading Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49”, and immediately remembered that I’m extremely irritated by the type of humor that permeates Pynchon. I would call it “absurdism as the city-forming enterprise,” pull it out - and everything falls apart. I don’t know why this pisses me off so much, I actually love absurdist humor and consider it one of the funniest. However, gradually the book is drawing me in and the irritation recedes into the background.

Looks like it was quite an irritable week!

Making Music

I’m trying to get back into making music. It’s hard for me because I have no formal music education, and it feels like I don’t have permission to do this. So for now, I just sit down with my DAW (Bitwig) and MIDI keyboard (Arturia Minilab 3) and play without any goal, just getting familiar with the tools, going through presets. I don’t even save the results - I haven’t created anything I’d want to develop yet. I’m just lowering the barrier to entry and teaching myself that I don’t need anyone’s permission for this. I hope this will help me start actually creating something later.

What’s also important is that having physical keys, pads, and all these knobs helps me get absorbed in the process. It reminds me of how I loved playing with all sorts of dashboards with buttons as a child: a typewriter, a toy cash register, all kinds of imaginary dashboards.

Cinema

I consider myself a cinephile, but I’ve watched very few films in recent years - didn’t have the capacity. But now I’m reading Tarantino’s “Cinema Speculation”, and the way he writes about films has helped me start watching them again.

This week I watched “The Last Picture Show” by Bogdanovich.

Job Search

After two months of active searching (and three months without work, one of which I spent resting and reworking my resume), I got an offer finally. I learned a lot about myself during these months - about impostor syndrome, about how important it is to reflect on your experience and know how to package it properly, and about how much I actually know. I think I’ll write a separate post about the job search, but I want to note that it’s an exhausting endeavor, especially when you’re running out of money.

But I only got the offer on Thursday, and before that I had several very different interviews during the week: from a clear and interesting first interview with HR to a very sluggish and tedious interview with a CEO who couldn’t care less about wasting my time and his own (he spent the first 5 minutes of our meeting setting up his background in the video call software). He didn’t know what he wanted from this interview, and I wouldn’t have worked with him even if I hadn’t gotten the offer. If he doesn’t respect my time in an interview, what will happen when we start working together?

Next week I’m starting my new job, and it’s hybrid, meaning I’ll be going to the office. It’s exciting and scary.

Mentoring

I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, learn to network, and also share my experience, so I signed up for the Mentor in Tech program. This week I had my first meetings with my mentees, and I was very worried about how they would go, whether I’d be able to help them since I’m doing this for the first time, but overall the meetings went well.

Interestingly, one mentee came with a request to work on impostor syndrome, but during our conversation we figured out that she doesn’t have impostor syndrome - she just needs help packaging her experience (which she does acknowledge) for the market.

I think that for a first meeting, reframing and clarifying the problem is a very good result.