David tweeted to me the other day to point out a problem with my automated Flipboard posting.
<blockquote”>@web_goddess I reckon your Flipboard script might need some more work. Keep seeing the Personal Branding link.

— dead gar (@gilmae) July 23, 2014

To be honest, I’d spotted that one myself previously but chose to ignore it simply because I didn’t think many people were still reading the blog. But never let it be said I don’t listen to my audience! His tweet was just the prompt I needed to fix up my script.

You’ll recall from before that I’ve been using Pocket as an intermediary to Flipboard. I’m a lazy coder, so I was basically just scraping the previous day’s posts from the RSS feed Pocket publishes for my account. There are two problems with that approach:

1. My Pocket account fills up with saved articles, and I don’t know if there’s any limit to how many they’ll let you store. So I had to periodically go in and clean it out.
2. Certain stories kept appearing at the top of my RSS feed, even though I’d saved them days ago. I believe this is because Pocket had subsequently flagged them as “trending” (which I could see with a little badge when I went to Pocket) and somehow that kept bumping them up the list.

So I bit the bullet today and replaced the RSS script with one that uses the official Pocket Developer API. Now every day my script retrieves my list of items, constructs a blog post out of them, and then deletes each one from my account. Pretty sweet, huh? That takes care of both problems. I’m happy.

Note: I’m still a lazy coder though, so rather than implement proper OAuth (when I’m the only user), I instead found this StackOverflow question with a helpful comment that pointed me to this handy tool. After you create your app in Pocket and get your consumer key, just plug it in there, authorise your app, and retrieve your access key. Easy peasy!

So some amazing stuff has happened in the past week. I mentioned last month that my job was going well and that I was taking on additional responsibilities. At the start of February I was struggling with the increased workload, so someone else was brought on to help with my team’s day-to-day stuff. It all came to a head last week when rumours of a massive restructure started swirling. I thought maybe I’d been groomed to move up a step on the ladder. Wednesday morning I found myself in a meeting room with the CIO, where she drew out the new org chart and then offered me a spot … several levels higher than what I’d been imagining. I was pretty floored. I needed to give them an answer ASAP, so the Snook met me in the city for an emergency pow-wow at lunch. Yes, the position came with a nice raise, but it was also a big step in terms of responsibility (and probably workload). It’s also my first ever opportunity to move into people management, something that I hadn’t been interested in before but I’d been learning a lot about from working with Jody. I just couldn’t turn it down. So I accepted that afternoon. My new title is TV Development Director, and I’m responsible for the entire TV side of web development at Mi9. IS THAT CRAZY OR WHAT?

The week since the offer has been a rollercoaster. Unfortunately the restructure wasn’t as positive for some other people, which has meant a little bit of guilt over my good fortune. I haven’t had much time to meet with and support my circle of work friends, mostly because I’m trying to finish handing off my IM role as quickly as possible while getting up to speed on the new one. Sunday night a routine deployment for my team turned into a four hour incident that I had to manage via Hipchat from home. I’m having daily one-on-ones with the CIO and trying to figure out what the boundaries of my job actually are. There are a lot of holes on my team structure, so I also need to get involved with recruiting ASAP. I’ve had to draft emails to be sent to the entire technology team. Last night I left work at 6pm, which was my earliest night in some time! I’m really hoping things settle down quickly.

But there are still high points. The CIO said that the reason she felt comfortable offering me the position after only eight months was that several people high up in the organisation had pushed for me to do it. A LOT of coworkers and friends gave me wonderful congratulations and feedback last week, both at work and on social media. And on the weekend the Snook took me over to Broadway to buy a new MacBook Pro, which I’d been coveting for some time but hesitated buying.

So far 2014 is definitely looking up!

iPhone Mail Tip: Re-Open Most Recent Draft Message With One Tap – Huh. I was not aware of that.