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.
Tuesday.
Released contracting post, seemed to go down well. (This update feels like the episode of friends where Joey talks Ross through his usual week). Still raining, cooped up indoors, didn’t do a great deal.
Wednesday.
Went walking on the moors with my brother, outside, mostly dry, spirits lifted. We went up to the North Moors. I don’t go up that way very often these days but it’s my favourite bit of Dartmoor, it’s much more rugged than the softer rolling slopes of South Dartmoor and feels more like proper mountains.
Writing this post has led me down a mountain rabbit hole. I always thought the definition of a mountain in the UK was anything bigger than 600m above sea level (don’t get me started on what sea level means, that’s another rabbit hole!). According to wikipedia it’s actually 610m (the closest approximation to 2000ft). Anyway there are only two spots in southern england that meet that classification, High Willhays and Yes Tor, we yomped up both of them. Yes Tor is a classic granite outcropping and feels more prominent, but High Willhays is fractionally larger but much less imposing. It always feels like you’re going downhill to the higher summit, it’s an odd sensation.
We also took in one of my favourite Dartmoor idiosyncrasies (there are many) the Rowtor target railway. This was used by the army as a moving-target range and you can see the remnants of the narrow gauge railway and large granite engine house. The best thing is it’s marked on OS maps as a light railway, my inner map nerd loves esoteric stuff like this.
Thursday.
Freya was poorly off school. Chased the 8-month waitlist she’s now been on to diagnose what’s up with her.
Met with a few folks to talk about setting up something to allow people to come together to talk about discoveries and share what works and doesn’t. Watch this space.
Caught up with Darwin, we’ve arranged to go surfing in Bude on Monday. Yay!
Had two great open interactions, the kind you used to get on twitter, on LinkedIn. Still feels weird that the foghorn of corporate bullshit seems to be winning over the work in the open tribe from twitter.
Roger musing on components of good strategy
Alistair framing how to communicate the value of prototypes
Took Phoebe to her first tennis lesson after she tried it at Stoke Mandeville. She loved it but struggled with cramp overnight, must remember to stretch!
Friday
Freya and Phoebe off school. End of term can’t come soon enough for both of them.
Had regular catchup with Ben
Had a random coffee with Thorsten we talked about lots of things:
- politics
- football
- mountaineering being a ripe source of agile metaphors
- contracting
- releasing and continuous delivery being the most important part of agile ways of working (imho)
Blog club had a record 5 people! I wrote these weeknotes, Looking forward to reading Neil and James’ posts. Mark and Oli joined at the end, but Oli’s beaten us all!
In other news:
We’ve had 29 responses to our state of discovery survey, which we’re using for our SDinGov talk. If you are involved with discoveries and can spare a couple of minutes we would appreciate your input.
Reading:
Still working through Rubicon. Learning more about Roman politics is pretty enlightening. If this is the basis of a classical education, it explains a lot!!
Various AI is a planet-killing bubble articles:
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-energy-demands-water-impact-internet-hyper-consumption-era/
https://www.wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/
https://verraes.net/2022/05/conways-law-vs-rigid-designs/ via Quiet Stories newsletter the whole newsletter is great, recommend
https://medium.com/writing-by-if/earn-trust-by-proving-what-you-say-d1958d2e9623
Nice to see Matt back after the pre-election period
https://lisacrispin.com/2024/07/10/how-to-reduce-physical-and-digital-waste/
https://markdalgarno.medium.com/whats-your-blue-light-852fdd287a3f
https://www.checklyhq.com/blog/300ms-from-every-pod-startup-with-a-single-grafana-query/
Watching
Juggling football, tennis and cycling, going to be distraught when they’re all over (until the Olympics)