As you may know if you’ve been reading this blog for very long, I moved to a new team in a situation that was not entirely of my own choosing. The new team has no one I know on it, to start with. The projects they deal with are internal, whereas I’m used to backend systems that have an external impact (as well as internal). Nothing will scale beyond maybe ten thousand users, whereas I’m used to services that have to withstand millions of hits in a day worldwide.

I’m used to services that, by necessity, have a pager attached.

It’s weird not to have one.

My new team is also pretty isolated from the rest of the company. In fact, my team is pretty isolated, period, and that makes me sad. I know they brought me in to bring that sort of experience, but the process so far is lonely.

There is no reason I should have already started to drift away from my old team. Maybe after a couple months, but not a couple weeks! And yet in less than that, when I hung out with the old team on Friday night for boardgames, I had that disconnected feeling. Suddenly what was familiar and comfortable was no longer familiar.

New associations are displacing old ones, and it’s happening so fast that it depresses me, frankly.

The team (the new team) is still in its forming/norming stage. I suppose it will take a few months before we get to storming and performing.

I miss my old team. It tears me up inside.

On the up side, I’ve been cooking all weekend, which I haven’t done in a while. It’s difficult to work up an excuse to cook when you know you might be interrupted by a high-severity issue when your hands are in the chicken.