If I was to title this week’s weeknote it would be something like “Weeknote 77 - Wow’s and WTFs”, a week of scribbled notes, hurried calls and a tonne of ideas. It was one of those weeks where I could have table flipped but the thoughts and ideas that came out of all my meetings kept itching the back of my brain and it’s that dopamine hit that really keeps me doing this job.
- 👨🏼🚒 - I have noted before that disaster recovery is the hot topic of the moment and we’re getting a lot of customers caring about this topic who never cared about it before. This week we conducted an internal risk review to looking at our customers and identify those who had a DR solution, those who did not and those who had solutions but had gaps such as resourcing missing or un-tested solutions. Big programme of work kicking off as part of this - it doesn’t matter if you have it or not, no company should be left behind without DR.
- 🧯 - Also part of the DR story, I initiated a nice little exercise to review backup and DR on a per-asset basis - boring right?! Turns out not, there is a lot of dependency on IaC deployments for stateless DR events, but customers not having deployed or tested a secondary location to test that into. We also found some scenarios that I would call “classic” that require a two-stage backup restore process - fun!
- 🧑🏻✈️ - I’ve been using various AI tools in my daily workflow for some time. I’ve now started to do the extra little bit of work to turn some of my small library of prompts into Copilot agents that I can share with others. The first of these is a prompt to help product managers write and review our service descriptions. It’s been an interesting exercise of prompt turning, knowledge writing and just trying to get all those gut-feel reactions to certain output out of my head and into the agent. Definitly want to write some blog content on this one.
- 💷 - One thing that has been really important to me since I took the role of Deputy CTO is to make sure that all the leaders of our technical practices have a complete view of finance and sales information related to their area so that they can make better more wholistic and business impacting decisions. This is the stepping stone of providing them more autonamy to make the types of decisions that I would make. This week has been the start of sessions to present some of this data to them and gather feedback on if there is any other data we have that would be relevant to them. Some great workshops with insightful questions.
📈 - This weeks stats:
- 238 minutes of podcasts
- 5,932 average weekly steps
- 11 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p124-p135)
📺 - This weeks background entertainment: