This week has been one of an unsettling a chaotic work environment balanced out with some binge watching and listening for self-care (more than usual).

What I’ve been doing

This week I’ve been rolling my sleeves up and helping unblock a few projects (again!). That’s meant reviewing documents, writing for code again (it’s been a few months) and lots of calls. Helicoptering in to fix problems isn’t the best thing for an organisation but sometimes it’s required.

It’s been chaos and I have sometimes felt like I was chasing my tail but I have to admit it’s felt good to work on things with a immediate payoff. It’s been mostly AWS projects and it’s been good to spend some time in the ecosystem again.

What I’ve been thinking about

How all the acquisition of IaC tooling vendors (the latest being HashiCorp) seem to get acquired around the 12-15 year mark (see: my toot about this). Think I’ll be buying some Pulumi shares when they IPO in the next 2 years.

The long-term impacts on organisations that re-org every 2-3 years.

What I’ve been reading

Very little this week, but here are a couple of feeds added to my list that are less brain taxing a just, well, nice.

  • https://basicappleguy.com/ - I’m a bit of a apple fanboy and this is one of those sites that very visually appealing as well as having some good content.
  • https://alondoninheritance.com/ - This is one of many “history of London” sites, but the comparison photos here are a lovely introduction to I city I think is pretty cool.

What I’ve been watching

  • Blue Lights - Season 2 (BBC) - Police/Gang shows are my go-to TV genre of choice. Easy to watch, great set of characters. Set in Belfast which gives it a really interesting spin. Binged in a day. Here hoping this gets plenty more seasons.
  • Fallout (Amazon) - Not being a gamer (for many years), I’m coming at this show with fresh eyes and few expectations. It’s certainly not a watch-in-the background show as there is a lot to take in, both in terms of the script but also visually. Loving the premise and it’s certainly not the dystopian show I was expecting.

What I’ve been listening to

  • Unlocking Us - the famous Brené Brown podcast is back and I’m just eating up all it’s insights and wisdom. I never come way from one of these podcasts without something to think about or research further.