In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet. For just a moment …

  • 🧰 - On Monday, I had a great session with our development team working on our migration and modernisation tooling. As you can image, migrations, replacements and upgrades of software and infrastructure are something we do every day. Sometimes this is a big thing, as part of a big project but sometimes this is simply a single VM or PaaS solution. As we do this across many platforms, we’ve spent the past few years building out our own tooling for this purpose and to encode some of our many hard-won lessons. This week I got to see the latest update on this, with some great integrations with our managed service tooling, some excellent improvements to help our project managers on larger projects and better support for evidence gathering when working on projects with external auditors. As the initial sponsor of this project many years ago, I always get a kick to see it continue to make progress.

  • 🧑‍💻 - Tuesday I got to have two 1:1 sessions with a couple of team leads at our customer. These are discovery sessions for me where I let people tell me their problems, their priorities and we discuss ways I can help. Technical conversations between technical people with no selling. I absolutely love getting time to do these types of sessions with customers and it really helps me build stronger relationships, manage politics and make sure our services continue to be interesting and developing quickly enough.

  • 🚧 - Middle part of the week was discussions about disaster recovery, one of those serendipitous moments when product are talking about a topic at the exact same time as an important customer. Disaster Recovery in a large part of the industry and for many of our customers hasn’t really changed from the fail-over and audit tickbox exercise of the past twenty years. Suffice to say I have lot of thoughts on what needs to improve here and there is a long email on the topic that I need to turn into a blog post at some point.

  • 🚦 - Project-R rolls on in the background, but aside from a few hours of document tweaks it was a pretty calm week. It’s certain the calm before the storm and I’ve been having plenty of internal conversations about people nervous of what is to come. Keeping calm and carrying on.

📺 - This weeks background entertainment: