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Reading 2021
Shiang: Empire of Salt book II by Conn Iggulden, second part of the trilogy I started reading at the end of last year. The Sword Saint: Empire of Salt book III by Conn Iggulden Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. This felt big. Henry VIII is kind of a big deal in British history, his marriages […]
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Being hired at Automattic
I started working for Automattic as a senior back-end software engineer in June. It’s an amazing place to work, the culture and processes are really distinctive – which I’ll explain more about another time. For the uninitiated, Automattic are the people who make WordPress.com, tumblr, Pocket Casts and much more besides. When I was considering […]
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Reading 2020
Used to spend my commute reading, which obviously didn’t happen after March. I read a bit less fiction this year and hardly any re-reads. First Law: The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. really well written, classic fantasy. Loved this and the direct sequel. The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Interesting sci-fi, loved the human computer. follow […]
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RIP Strats
Strats was a quick project I’d built upon the Strava API. I used Strats after nearly every single bike ride as a way of gauging my progress and seeing who else had tried some of the same hills and how they’d got on with them. Strats was essentially a way of displaying the friend leaderboard for all of […]
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Weeknotes: 11th May to 17th May
What would you have liked to do more of? More focus time. It felt like too much of my week was playing work Tetris. To do this I’m going to try the trick of blocking out some time in my calendar and using skypes red light. More time on the enes project, the time I […]
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Weeknotes: 4th May to 10th May
What would you have liked to do more of? Move on to implementing a couple of bug fixes I planned. What did you learn? I knew of Wardley maps but my knowledge came from looking at some in some blog posts. Reading the book has shown me not only the maps but the other ideas around them, […]
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Weeknotes: 27th April to 3rd May
Decided to try writing weeknotes again, this time following a bit more of a structured approach inspired by Andy Callow. What would you have liked to do more of? Contributing to the opportunity overview for one of the potential projects I’m involved in starting up. I think I can make some really valuable contributions to writing […]
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Weeknotes: 23rd-30th March
This week was annual leave (or rather taking back some of the lieu time I’ve built up recently). It’s not the tandem riding with Sara, afternoon teas and long lazy luxury lunches I’d planned though. It’s been teaching instead. I’ve really enjoyed it. Hugo has too, he’s been able to finish his work hours ahead […]
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Weeknotes: 16th-22nd March
Monday was quite a stressful day with the uptick in coronavirus seriousness. Hugo has been learning about how to use Google classrooms at school and his excitement about that was quite infectious. We decided to postpone our scheduled release which has some really exciting features like contract issuing and online offer/contract acceptance. It’s been an […]
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Weeknotes: 9th-15th March
I’ve been concentrating a lot on catching up on various things, lots of odds and ends to tidy up. I’ve also been concentrating on my leadership course. At the prompt of the leadership course, I read Dan Pink’s Driven in preparation for a talk on motivation I’m doing. His theories about motivation really chime with my experience: […]