Nibbled Note

• Alex Jones has the best taste in biscuits. Digestive, Hobnob, Shortbread. Yes. And the corned beef pie! What a menu. What a delight. If I still ate meat, I'd definitely be making a corned beef and potato pie this weekend. When I was a child I'd sometimes help my mamma bake sweet and savoury pies, including corned beef and potato. I wonder if I'd be able to re-create the perfection.
• I woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep. I ended up working the allotment 05:30 - 08:45, when my career cruelly curtailed my wholesome work. It's a frickin' wonderful way to start to the day, I'll say. It gives me life being there, even though a dozen mosquitoes viscously drained my life blood and left me for dead visibly bleeding.
  • Allotment man: Do you know you can make £££££ per kg of sawdust?
  • Me: Where does it come from?
  • Allotment man: The farm.
  • Me: Uh, I've got enough on at the moment, thanks though!
  • It took me a while to realise we probably weren't talking about very expensive sawdust.
• R says I'm lithe, like a seal.
• This week was a great work week and I'm not really sure I can explain why without blowing my own trumpet too much or boring you with details. Let me try. It had a nice balance of leadership work, advocacy, and tech work itself.
  • Firstly, I'm really proud of all the team's work 😊
    • In particular this week, one of our team members published an excellent blog post (internally right now) to finally announce some of our big ambitions – woop woop!
    • We have some technical proof of concepts almost ready to demo.
    • We also put out a new special logo courtesy of a wonderful colleague getting involved and helping out with their illustration skills.
  • Chats with other teams clarified in my mind a possible roadmap for my team, to move toward our vision in a more positive and realistic way than what I thought was happening a week ago. Working to get buy-in for this thought.
  • Some process change I proposed was accepted by a broader group and I'm excited about it. Think it will help unlock my team's potential with improved collaboration and knowledge sharing across different groups.
  • That sounds very generic business. That's right, we'll harness business synergies to deliver on our product & tech growth strategy whilst meeting all personal KPIs and departmental OKRs.
  • Had conversations with 2 people about bootcamps, an opportunity to work with our team for a few weeks to see how we work and gain experience – absolutely 🙌
  • I shipped some actual code, helped a few people with technical things.
• Last week I went to the office and, under the harsh lights of the toilets, realised how scruffy I looked. My t-shirt collar all loose and frayed. So this week I bought a bunch of new ones off eBay (newish, with or without tags) saving enough £££££ to buy/sell some sawdust if I change my mind. I also splurged on some The Level Collective t-shirts, a nice looking Sheffield brand.
• Train. Cautious sausage. Silly sausage. I make little reminders through the week and write them up properly later. I think this was for last week, but I don't remember what it means.