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.
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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.
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The following day, I was in our London office to meet with the Digital Apps team to discuss new portfolio and the roadmap for some internal tooling. Like many of our internal tech teams, they straddle the divide between doing customer-facing/paid-for work and internal work to support others and finding that balance is always tricky. I’ve worked with this team now for many years, they’ve come along with me on my own journey and while there was I time when we’d not seen each other face to face for while, we’re now getting to meet about once a quarter (I wish it was more) and I’m always excited by their energy and passion for what they do. There is something special how having a development team who builds products in this organization and I appreciate what it adds.
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Reviewing the Top-50 customers and their respective account plans. I’m now splitting the responsibility between myself and my CTO to ensure that between us we spend good quality time with these customers. A good spread for organisations across different industries so this is really valuable insight to what’s working and what’s changing and what we could be doing better.
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The azure reporting side project has taken me down the path of the Azure Resource Graph explorer and writing Kusto/KQL queries. Two reasons for this: it’s much more efficient that calling the individual APIs themselves (like 50x more efficient - ask me how I know) and it’s actually a bit more reliable. I have a love/hate relationship with it though as it’s sometimes difficult to debug, Azure’s data is sometimes poor, undocumented or inconsistent and there are still things that are not available by this method. However, this type of non-critical-path, swearing-laden hackfest is really the only way I learn - so that’s a plus.