Why I started Weeknotes Weeknotes are like a work journal, a personal journal, a micro-blog and occasionally a brag document all rolled into one. After reading this post about weeknotes and then following #weeknotes on mastodon for a few weeks I decided that I would give it a go. I’ve had a go at journaling in its many forms before but it’s never really stuck, but I though maybe this time by writing in public it act as encouragement to keep me going. ...
“Are you walking?” - Yes “Is your background moving?” - Yes If you’re reading this then it’s likely you’ve just asked me one of these questions, and as the 20th person who’s commented on it in the past 6 weeks I’ve probably just sent you the link to this post. This is not one of my usual blog posts. Sometimes, blogs take weeks of thinking and days of typing and editing to develop but other times a blog is one of those things (like with a digital garden) that you just type to avoid having to have the same conversations over and over and hopefully more people get something out of it if it’s written down. ...
Hamilton Helmer introduces the concept of “7 Powers” in his book titled “7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy”. In that book he identifies seven areas of business strategy that when executed well, create the potential for persistent differential returns (i.e., the company consistently outperforms it’s competitors and creates lasting financial value). In this post I will review this model against one specific type of business: the IT Managed Service Provider to demonstrate both historical trends in strategy and also where some future opportunities can be found and fought over. ...
What is Portfolio Architecture? About a year ago, I assumed the role of Head of Portfolio Architecture. However, even within the first few months, I encountered a common question: ‘What is portfolio architecture?’ Well, this is one of those posts that have been sitting in some draft form or another since the first few days of me taking on the new role. It’s not exactly the type of job title that one can easily ask your nearest AI and get a straightforward or relevant answer for - so I thought I’d add to the corpus of knowledge by writing down something here. ...
A love letter to RSS It has recently come to my attention that the technology I assumed foundational to the internet as I know it, RSS, is not something that everyone is aware of and using. The internet has gone through several generations and people’s interactions and habits along with it. Web 1.0 was an era of web portals, Web 2.0 the era of search and social and now the more recent generation where decentralisation, AI and IndieWeb are the topics of exploration. ...
I’m back! It’s been a almost a year since my last post, primarily driven by going deep into a new role at work (more on that to come). Despite the lack of posts, I’ve certainly not stopped writing and I now have a range of new research topics that you going to hear more about from me over the next few months. What’s changed I’ve also not stopped with making one or two changes to this site. Those of you paying attention will notice there is now a refreshed RSS feed for these posts and for those of you that prefer audio all of my posts now come with audio transcription narrated not by AI but by yours truly. Drop this new audio RSS feed into your podcast player and keep up with what I’m working on. ...
Over the past few weeks I’ve been exploring the use of wardley mapping to map my skills for career development. I think it’s important to think strategically about your career development, whether you’re early in your career looking to land that dream job or later and looking to transition into a role or company that reignites your passions. In my last post I talked about my journey developing my first skills maps and some of the mistakes I made along the way. Next, I wanted to cover how I’ve been using those maps and how I expect them to develop over time. ...
Over the past few months the tech industry has been going through the shock and awe of corporate downsizing that occurs when the economy feels like its about to enter a recession. Big Tech is making layoff after layoff, typically around 10% of the workforce and those are the ones we know about. Many tech companies (and others) will start following suit, even if not as publicly, as the market shrinks and spending slows with companies trying to save cash and preserve profits. Capitalism in many ways sucks! ...
In Aug 2021 I wrote my original post describing my knowledge management and productivity workflow, including the various tools I’d stitched together and some of the challenges I was having. Over a year on and I’ve been making some more significant changes to that tooling and as 2022 comes to a close I thought I would look back on that original post and reflect on what I’ve changed, fixed and learnt along the way. ...
Intro (what even is it?!) I have been a developer and a DevOps engineer (or whatever the latest title is now) for most of my career and I like my systems to be reliable and well architected. I like being confident that when the unexpected happens, and it always does, that the systems that I am responsible for can handle it and not wake me up at 2am. When I talk to developers, I’m often talking about testing and the testing pyramid - we all know it’s value and the positive investment that it is. The more testing of our systems we have the earlier we see bugs, the more reliable the application. It’s a fairly simple statement but its still worth reiterating because of how easy is it to neglect in fast-moving customer/feature driven teams. ...