The shape of a good retrospective
By jon
It started, like most of these things start, with a small irritation that wouldn’t go away. Three weeks in, the irritation had become a meeting. By the time we shipped, it had a name, a roadmap, and four people who cared about it.
It’s easy to write something like this and have it read as smug. I want to be honest that the version of me writing this is not the version that lived through the worst of it. That version was tired and not especially gracious.
The first version of this was much shorter. The second was much longer. What you’re reading is somewhere in the middle, which is usually where the truth lives but rarely where the interesting writing does. So a warning: there will be moments where I gloss something I should have lingered on.