Weeknotes

I would summarise this week as writing and reporting. A week of less meeting and more in IC-mode. I find the flexibility to spend some weeks going deep on certain areas to be very useful. I started the week re-reading the corporate blog to get a better feel for the content. Aside from the usual product marketing I think it’s important for engineers to contribute to an organisations public output, as it’s something that helps instil good writing practice and explaining complex technical topics in a straightforward way to a diverse audience. I was reviewing the content from different engineers to get an idea about the types of content we were publishing but also the style, both visual and written. I enjoyed spending the time reading some of the posts I’d missed when they were originally posted and it was an opportunity to work with out marketing team to think more about the guidelines we use to provide consistency the editing and output. I am also going to be taking away some ideas about how to encourage more engineers in the organisation to write down their ideas and things they have been working on. ...

This week has been a very bumpy week with some exiting conversations but also some very difficult ones. I would say this is also one of those weeks where the incoming tasks and outweighed the completed. I’ve certainly earned by weekend’s rest. Week started with follow-on from last week’s RedShift issue - difficult conversation about cost of change. It was swiftly followed by another escalation by which point I was already done for the week. ...

A long week spent in technical deep dive conversations with our engineers on topics ranging from support problems, to tools to new ideas - great stuff. The week started focusing on a customer issue. AWS Redshift, single table, 63B rows of unsorted data. Not exactly the sort of thing you come across every day for sure. Lots of discussions about the various options of handle to handle this and help the customer get back to something that was sorted and performant when running large queries. Lots of ideas discussed. Short answer: spend more money for more computer and wait. ...

2 days in the office this week (both Leeds and London) and a week of contrast between the highs of leadership sessions and new portfolio to the lowest of fighting Kusto with my Azure side project. The week started at 5:44, as I boarded my first train on the way to our Leeds office. Expecting to go there to meet a few collogues for an operational meeting (reviewing the progress of our sales strategy) but was very pleasantly surprised by having our entire product team there, our new cohort of graduates and a new starter I hadn’t had chance to meet yet. It was very unexpected but I got to have lots of great conversations about everything from odd Claranet history, to new product ideas and creative ways to a few organisational challenges. Despite not getting home until 21:30, I was left feeling really positive about the day. ...

Week 31 was defined by one main topic - Sales!. Spending lots of time with our sales folks, some time with new vendors and finding some creative ways to look at opportunities. Had approx. 2 sales call every day this week, talking about both new customers but more about account plans for existing customers. Exploring the use of OSINT ideas and tools like DNS Dumpster to help get deeper understanding of our customer’s environment beyond our current visibility. Helping sales use this type of information to have more meaning conversation. ...

While the past few weeks have been tightly focused on a couple of projects, this has been one of those more fragments weeks, lots of things going on in lots of areas of the business and another week (similar to week 26 that has been defined by death by the 30m calls. Project-R continues to drag on - an RFP document of p180 and 175k words. Expect this to give Ulysses a run for it’s money in the end. ...

This week has been about cloud management from first principles - with both my engineering and my portfolio hat’s on. Reviewing SLAs, OLAs and standards as part of Project-R - great and valid questions coming out of this process. Identifying and filling in gaps and inconsistencies where I find them. Lots of discussions and a little way off from implementing the changes but being customer-driven is exactly how you enhance your services for the better so this has been a great exercise. SLAs in particular can get very complicated, very quickly especially when it comes to compound SLAs and overlapping SLAs. I’ve added this to my blog queue because there is definitely more to write on this topic. ...

I was on leave again this week and I had planned to spend it doing all the domestic activities that required action but despite a few odd jobs, mostly got distracted by other family activities. We’re spending some time focusing on the house because we’re thinking about moving next year. We’ve lived where we are for almost 10 years now, a lot has happened here and we both feel it’s time for a change. Our house currently just sits outside of the town (5 minutes drive) and we’re looking to move back into the country and get the horses living on our own land. A big ambition and probably typical for the stage of our lives we’re in. ...

This week was the first of two weeks of well earned rest. You’ll see from the past few weeknotes that I’ve been spending a lot of time working with one particularly large new potential customer. I love doing this, it stretches me personally, makes me re-validate assumptions and think from a customer’s point of view. Despite my excitement for this time of work, it can take it’s toll mentally, so I’m glad to have the time off. ...

This week was a whirlwind of code and calls. Where did the week go? I feel like I was on auto-pilot until at least Thursday. Some interesting stuff though. The consistent theme of this week has been death by 30m call. I feel like I’m spoken to most people in our organisation at some point this week on everything from Project-R, to vendors and portfolio to tech practices and managed services. While exhausting, and this happens to time-to-time, on reflection it feels satisfying to have helped a large number of people. ...