Blog

Monday Freya had an inset day, Han and I couldn’t figure out the logic of having an inset day on the Monday of the last week of term. On Sunday night as we sat down to watch the Euro’s final with the kids it dawned on us. Well played Mr West, well played! I was looking after Freya’s friend Martha too, I had planned to drive up to Bude to meet Darwin and go surfing (well mainly pushing the girls on their boards) It was a 3 hour round trip for around 40 minutes of surfing in the rain, but it was fun nonetheless and good to catchup with Darwin....

Another week that’s felt like I haven’t done that much, but on reflection I’ve done quite a bit, I think it’s more of a case that I’m doing lots of disjointed things wily-nily rather than having a coherent purpose to anything. I dunno, probably overthinking it. Monday. Wet and horrible day, I didn’t do a great deal, polished up my contracting post, went out for lunch with Han, that was about it....

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had lots of chats with people thinking about contracting, so I thought I would try to distil some of that advice into a blog post. It’s a chunky post so here’s an index: First of all some context Pro’s of contracting Con’s of contracting Getting started Finding contracts Budgeting Conclusion First of all, some context. There are many different types of contracts and contractors, so advice may vary....

A bitty week this week, one of those that feels like it’s been busy but nothing really done. Monday Monday started well, Priyanca and I had a great chat with some product folks from Scott Colfer’s Product whatsapp community about discoveries. This is in preparation for our talk at SDinGov in September, we wanted to practise what we preach and validate some of our own experiences. The talk was productive and has led to some interesting further conversations about how we might improve the visibility of discovery practices, warts and all, looking forward to seeing how that develops....

This week has been mainly catching up with lots of folks so I thought I would structure the weeknote by who I have talked to: Oli Oli and I are both based in the south west and both part of the agile in the ether community but we’ve never met face to face before. On Monday we righted that wrong and met for lunch at Double Locks in Exeter. Oli has just joined Public Digital after 20+ years in the civil service....