Hello Judge of the Week readers!

You may have noticed the lack of a feature last week, and the similar lack of a feature this week. The Judge of the Week team is committed to celebrating judges from all over the world who have been nominated for being exceptional. We have a large queue of nominations that we’re looking to turn into features, which might make one wonder why we’ve missed for two weeks.

Like any other judge project, the budget for Judge of the Week is largely motivation. Unlike other judge projects, we are influenced not just by the motivation of our own team, but of everyone we contact for an interview. There are times we do not get responses right away, and that’s okay. We don’t want the task of featuring someone to celebrate their work to turn into a burden for that person. That’s antithetical to what we’re supposedly about. There can also be a waxing and waning of bandwidth on the part of our own team members, and sometimes these circumstances collide to create situations where we don’t end up with a feature.

I would like to point out that this team has, despite of these barriers to our proposed weekly publishing schedule, published a feature every single week from June 8th, 2016 through March 27, 2019. That’s two years and nine months of never missing a week, or 146 consecutive weeks. Some of those were special features, which more often than not require more work from our team than regular features. I don’t think I need to tell any of you just how impressive that is.

So why the stall now?

The short answer is that we’re in a transition phase. We’re bringing on a team of new interviewers that we’re trying to mentor up to reduce the burden of our individual interviewers and spread out the work to not require significant sacrifices on the part of a select few members just to maintain our production schedule. We also have some improvements we have wanted to implement, and this seemed like as good of a time as any. We’re looking to revamp many of our “stock” interview questions to try to improve the quality of our interviews. Our goal is to get the team to a place where we’ve got a steady queue of interviews ready to publish a few weeks in advance, giving nominees plenty of time to look over and provide feedback on their interview before it gets published. Our workflow was like this a while ago, but some slippage along the way has caused us to have a week-to-week model that isn’t really tenable. I don’t want that level of stress to be the norm for my team, and I want to ensure we’re doing everything we can to create a product we all can be proud of.

So please pardon our dust as we improve, rebuild, and get ready to hit the ground running again with the goal of an even longer consecutive streak of publishing weeks. We will post again when we’re getting ready to start running features, so in the meantime thank you for reading and we’ll be back with you as soon as we can!

And while we are doing that, we know you know someone who is an outstanding judge, so please do them and us a favor and nominate them TODAY!

Jacob Milicic
Project Lead – Judge of the Week