Week Note 61

Some weeks there isn’t a theme, just a grab bag of vaguely interesting stuff happens …

⭐ - My appraisal. If you’ve read any of my blogs or weeksnotes, you’ll know I’m pretty good at being reflective. I think I generally have a pretty fair and balanced view of myself and my performance so I wasn’t really expecting too much out of my appraisal. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a more positive response than I had judged myself again - which was a nice mid-week boost. I feel I’ve worked pretty hard this year on a number of professional and personal fronts and it was nice to have that acknowledged. Next onto goals.

🫶🏻 - New potential partners AWS and AI. Building partner relationships is a bit of a complex beast (maybe a blog post in here on this one) but I got the pleasure of meeting two new potential partners this week. One AWS focused partner that I am very excited about, not only because of their technology and customer base but also because of their relationship with AWS which could really enhance and boost our own. The second partner was a follow-up from a contact I may in Dubai, who has an interesting LLM operations and testing tool that I am very excited to get to play with a bit more. Exciting to build these into our plans for new services.

⛯ - Roadmap - part 4 - the tech radar. So the portfolio journey continues. This time re-writing my previous work into it’s final customer-facing format. I dont’ like roadmaps (for reasons I’ll blog about soon), so I was focused on using a variation on the Thoughtworks Tech Radar format which I have found is a great format for presenting portfolio in terms of lifecycle, customer adoption and why. It’s not been the easiest to put together and will likely take me at least another week to complete and get final review but it’s been a great exercise with lot of additional learning, even with all the previous weeks preparation I have done. If you’re responsible for product or portfolio then I strongly recommend it.

🪴 - Gardening. Something that I normally have to do at this time of year just like everyone else, gardening a worked it’s way into my weekdays as well as my weekends. Given that we’re had come very busy weekends over the past few months, the garden has become my very own jungle with knee length grass and large patches of brambles several feet deep. So my week has been chipping away at this problem 30 minutes at time until it’s gets back into a state where we can see the whole garden again. Exhausting work, but satisfying progress.s

📈 - This weeks stats:

📺 - This weeks background entertainment: