A four-day working week with a long weekend away at the end. I needed it. At the start of the week I noted that I felt as though I was going through a tough period, but one week on I’m doing much better.
The highlight of the week was a trip with fifteen other colleagues to the town of Kitzbühel in Austria. This was the inaugural version of what is likely to become an annual trip, with staff being nominated and voting on who would win the award of a weekend away. Most of us came from our office in London, but we were also joined by three of our colleagues from Beijing.
The whole weekend was excellent. I have never skied and didn’t fancy starting to learn now, given how often I hear and see people who have been away on a skiing trip coming home with an injury. Most of my colleagues went on the slopes, but I was joined by a few others who had also opted not to ski. Our days were filled with eating, walking, laughing and generally having a great time as we made memories together. By Monday evening I was shattered from the late nights and early mornings and my social battery was low, but I was so grateful to have been chosen to go on the trip.
Aside from swanning around an Austrian skiing town, this was also a week in which I:
- Created and submitted a personal development plan for the first time in many years, as part of an internal leadership programme that I am on.
- Joined the rest of our Technology team for a meeting with our recently-appointed local CEO. We had a great conversation and gained an excellent insight into how he’s thinking about our business.
- Interviewed a couple more candidates for the software development role in my team. In the words of Bono, we still haven’t found what (or who) we’re looking for.
- Discussed and agreed a tactical solution for a privacy/security issue raised by one of our offices.
- Met with colleagues to discuss the potential use of a SaaS AI tool to speed up a key part of the workflow in their team, and agreed next steps.
- Had a demo of a tool that helps an organisation to manage the vast amount of change notifications that come through the Microsoft 365 Message Center.
- Reviewed a proposal for on-the-ground project management services for helping us to set up a new office in a new country. We need help coordinating vendors and suppliers for facilities, furniture and technology.
- Met with a CIO from another division of our group who has asked for help with managing a small office located close to us, but far from them.
- Joined our development team for the fortnightly retrospective and sprint planning meeting.
- Had my monthly call with my executive partner from our technology research and advisory firm.
- Met with one of our vendors, a technology staffing provider, to introduce them to our CISO.
- Met with colleagues in our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum for a check-in on our plans for the year.
- Had a catch-up with the founder and CEO of a company we are working with to measure and manage the environmental impact of technology.
- Joined our weekly Learning Hour meeting where we heard more from our internal Learning and Development team.
- Attended an International Executive Committee meeting for one of our business areas. It’s always so fascinating to hear about things from the perspective of a different team.
- Met with colleagues who are exploring how we use data to support strategic business opportunities.
- Attended the latest M365 Change Community Round Up meeting. This monthly session is criminally under-attended, with around 45 people joining. The content is superb and the presenters are great at picking things up in the chat so that it doesn’t have that ‘one-way webinar’ feel. If you have any responsibility for Microsoft 365 in your organisation, or want to know what major features are coming down the pipe, it’s well worth attending.
- Went to my youngest son’s school for a careers evening. We heard from the Head of the Sixth Form, the Head and Deputy Head Pupils, and a guest from the University of Birmingham. The content was excellent. Now that university education is no longer ‘free’ in the UK, it feels like there is much more of an important decision to be made about what’s next.
- Was pleased for my eldest son, whose team finished second in the distance medley relay at a race meet in Houston.
Media
Podcasts
- Kiran Stacey gave a great explanation of the government’s plans for changes to the special educational needs and disabilities system on The Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK podcast. It seems to me that the introduction of individual support plans (ISPs) will bring a critical change to the dynamics of obtaining additional support for a pupil. With the current education, health and care plans (EHCPs), school staff work with parents to try and obtain funding from the local authority. Staff and parents are on the same team. With ISPs, the parents will now be trying to obtain assistance directly from the school, which may pit them against each other and, if awarded, will directly impact the school’s own finances. If an ISP is refused, parents will have to go through the school’s complaints system, creating work for staff and governors, and potentially bad feeling between everyone involved.
- On Sharp Tech from 6 February (I’m behind and trying to catch up), Ben Thompson gave a great explanation of how Meta is antifragile. When big-company advertisers boycott them, the prices of ads reduce, which means that other companies are able to buy more ads and reach more people, strengthening Meta’s advertising ecosystem.
Articles
- I found this article from someone who is apparently using “personal business agents” to get their job done more efficiently to be an interesting read. The diagrams are in Chinese so I asked Claude to translate them for me.
- A friend wrote a heartfelt article about being South African and ‘loving the suffering’:
What is it about all these South Africans that makes them do something that would seem both preposterous and unfathomable to most of the rest of the world’s population? The answer is complicated and simple. The simple answer is, we love suffering. The complicated answer is we need suffering.
- “Hobby coder accidentally creates vacuum robot army”. Internet of Things becomes Internet of Crappy Things once again. The interesting thing is that there is finally some legislation coming which may improve the situation:
Regulation is arriving, slowly. The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act will require mandatory security-by-design for all connected products sold in the bloc by December 2027, with fines up to €15 million. The UK’s PSTI Act, in force since April 2024, became the world’s first law banning default passwords on smart devices. The US Cyber Trust Mark, by contrast, is voluntary.
- Simon Willison posted a great write-up of how he vibe-coded his “dream macOS presentation app”.
Video
- Finished watching Small Prophets on BBC iPlayer. A beautiful thing, so lovely that I hope they don’t make another series.
Audio
- Enjoyed hearing The Pretty Things’ S. F. Sorrow at the latest WB-40 Album Club. I haven’t listened to it for a very long time. Surprisingly, this is the first album that we’ve listened to that was released in the 1960s.
Books
- Nearly done with Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
Next week: Texas.
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