I write here in order to work things out and understand myself better. I write here in order to put things down that I have been carrying around in my head, so I don’t need to carry them around anymore. I write here in order to capture a moment and have something that I can look back on, remembering what I thought and felt at the time.
Despite writing for myself, I find it incredibly rewarding when I make a connection with someone else across the Internet. When I post a blog entry, it gets sent to both micro.blog and Twitter. Micro.blog is a lovely place to hang out and I try to check in there on a regular basis. I spend quite a bit of time with the WB-40 podcast Signal group too. The micro.blog and WB-40 people are my people.
My interests are broad, and as I grow older I have a profound sense of there not being enough time to know all the things I want to learn. You’ll get a gist of my interests through browsing the blog archives, and learn what I’ve been up to by looking at my weeknotes.
Home
I’m a dad to two boys, one a teenager and the other almost in his teens, and husband to a wonderful wife of nearly 20 years. We live in Berkhamsted, a lovely market town in Hertfordshire, UK, about 25 miles north-west of central London as the crow flies.
Work
I’ve worked in Financial Services since 1999, for a Swiss Bank until 2010 and with Chinese and South African firms since then.
I took the Computer Science degree route to getting my first job and spent a few months programming before becoming a technical analyst, project manager and then running large programmes and portfolios of work, including setting up and running project management offices. I’ve been fortunate to travel extensively for work, and even more fortunate to have called New York City my home for a year in one of my early roles. The business areas I’ve worked in have included Human Resources, Risk, Compliance, the CIO office and most recently IT Infrastructure.
I currently work for a small advisory arm of a large South African bank, managing the IT change portfolio and ‘ways of working’ for our staff and offices in five financial centres outside of Africa. Working in a small part of a large firm seems to be a real sweet spot. I love the team and the work that we get to do. I recently led a challenging programme to design and implement a new ‘green field’ IT infrastructure stack in each of our offices to replace the legacy stack that we inherited; a crazy amount of work that we had to get done to a hard deadline, but incredibly rewarding when our colleagues started to reap the benefits of the new platform.
I’ve been a governor of a local primary school since 2013, a wonderful role that I wish I could dedicate more time to. Over that time I’ve held various roles including Chair, and I am currently serving as Vice Chair and Chair of the Finance Committee. When times have been tough at work and I’ve felt undervalued, being a governor has reminded me that I do have something to add.
Play
I love to read, and have kept track of what I’ve been reading for over a decade. My interests are frustratingly broad, so I try to mix fiction with books for work, history, biographies etc. and tend to add one or two books to my wish list every day. I spend a lot of time wishing I was curled up with a book. I’m a prolific highlighter and have recently started using Readwise so that I can remember what I have read.
Music has been a passion of mine from an early age. I love to sing around the house (or perhaps I just love the sound of my own voice) but am a listener rather than a creator. For over a decade I’ve been part of a local album club, which is like a book club but without the homework; it’s the best night of the month. Since investing in a turntable a few years ago I’ve tried to support the artists I enjoy by buying their records and have a slowly growing collection.
After 20 years of doing less exercise than 99% of living things on the planet, fear of my own mortality saw me take up road cycling in 2013. I love long endurance rides, and once rode from London to Milan through nine countries in nine days. This year I rode my first Audax, covering over 300km (200mi) in a day.
I’m addicted to podcasts and listen to hours of them every week, usually on my bike trainer or on my commute when we’re not in the middle of a pandemic. The backlog of podcasts is similar to my backlog of books, and I try to curate a varied set of things to listen to.
Getting in touch
If you want to get in contact with me you can find me on Twitter as @adoran2 or email me at [email protected].
Last updated on 3 September 2021.
Unless otherwise stated or indicated, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
