JA's very bad day

[jaeclectic]

Or to be more precise, very bad moment just after 3 PM, which retrospectively made it a very bad week:

I meet every week with X and D. At last week's meeting, we agreed that we would do 2 releases in the next few weeks. And X proposed a date for the first release that was quite ambitious: 2 weeks from today.

I had myself been thinking in terms of defining 3 or 4 releases. However, this sounded much better than the previous plan: which was to do individual releases for each of the 20-odd changes we are going to make, and have an additional round of review for each change (and I just didn't believe it would all get done by the end of March as required). Since 2 releases sounded so much more reasonable, I was willing to scramble.

So I spent the week scrambling. And sent these two people: two different mockups for the two releases, a draft notification email describing the two releases, and various other communications which implicitly or explicitly referenced the two releases. I even suggested that we should assign release numbers 2.0.1 and 2.0.2.

And today, they were both very confused when I said that we still needed a target date for the second release. Because they thought there was only one release.

Which would make almost everything I've done this week wrong.

And because this moment of revelation occurred in the 70th minute of an hour-long meeting, they just want to talk about it next week.