Oils - Reviewing Our NLnet Grants After 4 Years

A common sub-theme throughout the post is the author feeling better about the project as a direct result of writing this summary report: doing the work of putting things and perspective helped him get a more objective assessment of the progress and current state, and they realized that they felt more negative about the project than they probably should.

[after producing some graphs] OK cool, I wasn't expecting the story to look this clean!

So these plots paint a clear and positive picture. The funding helped! Before making the plots, I wasn't sure how they would look.

Honestly, I was feeling a bit down about the project before writing this post. I sent more than one e-mail to NLnet explaining the early end of the grant, which were perhaps overly pessimistic.

But now I feel pretty good about what we did.

There is a meta comment here, which is that doing self-evaluation of one's work can be worthwhile and have positive outcomes. (I remember reading a good blog post about how to prepare for a performance review, but I can't find the URL anymore. The author advised doing a factual list of things we have done and then asking a friend to comment on it in a positive way.)

Wow, huge work andyc! This has been a very exciting project to watch grow.