Three things to talk about this week: Selworthy, Selside, and soldering very small chips.

A day on Selworthy focused on Javascript – replacing one video library with another, writing a plugin to make that transition easier, and tidying up some code. By the end of the day, I had feature parity between the old version and the new, which is good: it’ll make swapping that in easier, and make future features possible. A little painful returning to some many-years-ago Javascript, but good to see that some of the decisions I made a few years ago still made sense.

Like a Pokémon from a bush, a new piece of work has emerged, called Selside, working with the team at Sensible Object to build a piece of tooling for a new product they’re working on.

The tool is not complex, technically: it’s just a web UI for content and asset management. It’s a task I often end up doing: replacing or augmenting a spreadsheet that’s beginning to serve more tasks than just a collaborative spreadsheet can.

But the tool is more than software: it’s also about building a workflow. It has a lot of stakeholders across the company, with equal but very different needs, and various needs to balance. They also needed to start using the tool ASAP, so in three days I built up a first version – perhaps more an MVP than a 1.0 – and they started using it.

This is a task I quite enjoy, because tooling always turns out to be more than just tooling. I’m going to spend some time over the coming months continuing to develop the tool and integrating with more stakeholders. I also hope we’ll develop the workflow itself – incorporating feedback from across the team, to make the process the tool supports better.

In “hardware is hard“ news: the Silicon Labs prototype I’m building is… proving challenging. My first attempt at hot-air reflow with a stencil to solder the QFP48-sized package microcontroller looked successful. However, bring-up failed badly and it looked like I’d managed to first bridge 12V and GND – easily fixed – and then, more annoyingly for the microcontroller – I’d also bridged 3.3V and GND somewhere in the reflow process.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t fix this second bridge. In the process of trying to fix it, I fair mangled a pair of QFP microcontrollers. To make things worse, owing to a busy week, I managed to do all of this late on Friday, which made me feel pretty rubbish – it felt like a lot of my problems were coming down to poor dexterity on my part. And, after a week of successful client work, I’d hoped I’d be able to have similar successes with my own, self-initiated projects. Instead, it felt like I’d ended the week on a low.

But there was time to think about it. The real lesson here is not about soldering tiny SMD packages; the real lesson is about binding my identity to my work. Sometimes, when work is hard, or goes badly, I feel bad about myself. In fact, this is just a small blip. If it had worked, maybe there’d have been issues with my board layout that required a second run, or the code might have needed more work than I realise. So it’s not like this is the massive blocker that defines the project.

It also made me realise it might help to re-evaluate why I’m doing the project, and set some explicit goals for it. Because I think there’s still reasons to be doing it, and I it might help to check if I’m meeting my goals or not. And perhaps it’s then worth taking another crack.