Is it a new week or last week? You tell me. Honestly, this has certainly left like a week that has came rushing in on the tail of the previous week with most of the things I was working on continuation of what I had been working on previously. Obviously not everything I do can be finished in a couple of days and concluded in a week, but those tasks that seem to drag on from week-to-week can certainly be difficult. A few updates this week then … ...
Wow! This was a serious week, and where did it go?! A week of reviewing contracts and cost models where the impact is quite significant. Having spent many times over the past few years deep in the belly of excel and breaking down (and justifying) costs for very small assets/activities, well this week was no different. This was one of those where I’m reflecting of methods of pricing - per asset? per environment? cost-plus? Do you want us to management this? Do we need to manage this? If we manage X and Y are we double-charging for Z. Why is this thing cheaper than last year, but this other thing is more expensive? All of these questions are things where I have to bring my technical brain, my financial brain and my sales experience to try and reach the best outcome for both the company and the customer all while often dealing with non-technical procurement folks. Challenging, certainly but I do love this sort of thing because it can go in any direction. It’s also great to test what you thought was a good model with audience who doesn’t know all the detail - lots more takeaways on this. ...
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 instill good writing practice and explaining complext 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 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 organizational 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 mins 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. ...