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....

Monday Dropped Phoebe off later into school, her condition means she tires easily so she has a reduced timetable on certain days. After that I headed to Wickes to get paint stuff to paint the dining room. Han needs a bigger space to demonstrate larger exercises for her nurse tutoring YouTube channel. The wall is kind of a meh beige so I’ve painted it white for now. I really hate painting, any job that takes longer to prepare for than to do won’t float my boat....

This week my brother Mark and I cycled around the Netherlands. Mark lives in Australia and we’ve kind of formed this little tradition of going on cycling holidays when he’s back over. This is our third one, our first was 12 years ago where we cycled over Dartmoor. 2 years ago we picked the Somerset levels. We both enjoyed the lack of hills last time and Mark is an active travel consultant, so of course we picked the Netherlands....