This week was a crunch week, and I my calendar tells me is going to be the start of a crunch month. Long hours, lots of context switching, but also lots getting done that will hopefully bring in some interesting work over the rest of the year.
- 👔 - Project-R2 crunch week as we get ready to submit BAFO. Lots of moving parts, small changes, last minute questions and internal project planning as we prepare for what we think is an almost inevitable win of the customer engagement. If we win this then there is going to be weeks of hiring, onboarding, more project planning and customer site visits. All this last minute work is worth it though because if the data tells me anything, it’s that we are going to learn as much from them as they are from us. I expect to be involved in this one, if not directly, for several years to come.
- 🤖 - If things weren’t busy enough, the ocean of small admin activities - objectives (team and personal), to-do actions and the email backlog was seemingly endless. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was spending a bit more time on automation and building useful agents, well this admin area is certainly somewhere where automation continues to be a help and I will need to continue to invest in. I think I’ll be posting a few more things onto /devlog as I advance some of these things.
- 📥 - The week another two RFPs landing on our desk. I feel sorry for our bid team who are co-ordinating so many at the moment. We’re certainly noticed that the timelines are now shorter, which I think is based upon an assumption that both reading and responding is supported by AI. While there is some truth to that, I often still take the time to read end-to-end because there are often small nuggets of information or detail that I find just doesn’t come out from my first-pass AI summary. We’re also working on some style guides for written AI because slop is real and I’m getting increasingly frustrated with having to edit large quantities of it. While it certainly speeds up the overall submission process, the work of our editors (of which I am occasionally one) is a painful task.
- 🏉 - A ruby triple feature this weekend where we attended the Harlequins Women vs Saracens Women and made it home in time to watch the England vs Italy men’s game. Sunday was my daughter training at home as usual, but by that point I was happy to spend a few quite hours at home before the week begins again.
📈 - This weeks stats:
- 339 minutes of podcasts
- 5,623 average weekly steps
- 72 book pages read (House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company - p137-p208)
📺 - This weeks background entertainment: