My last working week before Christmas meant, looking back and looking forward. I’m not going to spend too much time looking back during this weeks weeknote, you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for my blogpost on that so this week has more been about preparations, hand-overs and looking forward.
- 🖊️ - I spent a decent amount of time this week writing down my strategy for the cloud practice. This not not about some manger aggrandising but something that is important for the wider business to understand the things we’ll be focusing on as a team (and consequently things we won’t be). It’s actually something that has been an ask from the engineers themselves for some time, that they would like to have a clear communicated strategy, something that focuses them all towards a goal. Hopefully what I am working on will achive that. This week was the first draft. It will take a first pass through the other directors and then the team leads before a final version is presented to everyone else. This is not the first time I’ve written such a thing and I base my approach on the famous (infamous?!) AWS 6-pager format. While I am not dogmatic about the approach, having something in written form backed by real data I do believe is important. So let’s see if it passes the first sniff test.
- ❔ - I was pretty light on my Project-R2 contributions this week. I was only a contributing member for this weeks workshop and preparations were underway for presentations while I am away. I did however spend some time reading and responding the the first batch of questions. I always like this bit because the questions often tell you more about a company and their current experience than anything they might say directly. Mostly strightforward stuff, but their have been a few questions that have required some thinking. Even if this whole process isn’t successful there have been a lot of things a long the way that will result in service improvements over the next year.
- 🧰 - I had a session this week on tooling where two teams got to come together and agree on a joint roadmap. There are lots of things we’re working on at the moment and lots of tools we’re likely to replace in the near future as we’re scaling beyond what they are capable of. There are some fundimental things however that are under the microscope - monitoring, cmdb discovery, finops. All of thes will result in further good deep-dive conversations in the new year. What was good though was the re-affirm that our princiapls of collaboration and build the interface build the tools still applies.
- 🎄 - So, this is indeed my last working week of the year which means a bit of rushed end to the week, but fret not I will still be writing weeknotes during the Christmas period. I still have a lot of reading to do so I’ll still have a few insights to share. I’ll also be working on my end-of-year reflection post so there is that to look forward to.
📈 - This weeks stats:
- 270 minutes of podcasts
- 3,355 average weekly steps
- 30 book pages read (1984 - p69-98)
📺 - This weeks background entertainment: