Life is roaring along. We shipped REALbasic 2007 release 5 yesterday. I took over midway through the release 4 cycle, but r5 was my project from plan to completion. It feels anticlimactic, however, since we branched the source tree and started in on 2008r1 weeks ago – 2007r5 already feels, internally, like old news.

My free time is full of party planning. I am having trouble knowing how much to worry about things. We have made a few changes to the plan that should help mitigate risk: no liquor sales, for one. There are a lot of people involved in this project and getting all of the information to the right places so that effective decisions can occur is just hard. Conflict management is hard too – lots of diplomacy going on right now. It will all come together, I’m sure, but in the meantime I am spending a lot of time thinking the plan over, trying to coordinate all the pieces and people, and simultaneously trying to hang back and let people own the tasks they’ve taken on. This is just like work.

Speaking of work, again: the organization I’m trying to build is starting to come together. We have a plan, we have a team, the team is growing, the plans are moving, nothing ever works quite as smoothly as I hope it will but we keep making progress, so: onward.

I think last month’s introspective phase is pretty well over now, and I am back in outgoing mode. I learned some things.