Another busy week here as “Q3” gives way for “Q4” in the business world.

Early this week we had a company retreat. On Monday we invited middle and senior management teams and on Tuesday we invited the whole tech team including fully remote staff. We rented a huge AirBnB with a games room and a projector and even a hot tub (although only our CEO and one of the braver account managers went in the tub, the rest of the team stood around awkwardly).

a long dining table with many chairs

the house was huge and there was plenty of space for the whole team.

The retreat was an opportunity to try to build some good working relationships between different parts of the business since we’ve had so many new starters in recent days. It was kind of cool seeing different people, who wouldn’t normally spend time together, hanging out and chatting over beers.

On Wednesday I gave a CTO update at my first board meeting since we raised funding. The segment went well and we had a discussion about where machine learning and AI are useful and where they are not.

The rest of the week was quieter and I got to work from home for a couple of days which was great because I was absolutely shattered after all of that socialising.

Outside of work this week I published a few short blog posts and short comments about some of the articles that I read.

I wrote some philosophical stuff about AI:

I also wrote about my decision to stop developing TurboPilot which I still have mixed feelings about. However, it does free up some mental bandwidth for some other side-projects and concentrate attention into fewer places as far as open source AI code assistants are concerned.

Earlier in the week I was playing Mass Effect 2 as part of the Legendary re-release. I definitely preferred the gunplay in the first game but, the story in the 2nd game is kind of fun. It leans more into a cheesy/stereotype storyline.

I also spotted that Nvidia shipped some new beta drivers (535.43.10) that allow my RTX 4070 to finally run Starfield reasonably well via Proton. I’ve been streaming it to my Steamdeck and getting 50-60 FPS on ‘High’ settings, dropping to ~30FPS for densely populated areas. I suspect that there will be more performance gains to be had over the coming weeks.

I wrote a TIL about automatically unlocking your Gnome session remotely with a shell comand which is very useful if I want to launch Starfield on my SteamDeck without going upstairs to physically unlock my desktop PC which has locked me out.

I put off my trip up to visit my parents in Shropshire since my Mum and her partner both have COVID. I will try to visit later in the month. Instead, we had a pretty quiet weekend which was appreciated since I had a pretty active week and I needed some introvert energy recharging time. Instead, I’ve been playing Starfield, reading, writing and snoozing. We’ve also tackled a few house chores that needed sorting out.

I’ve been making some small changes to my habits when it comes to writing and journaling that probably deserve their own full blog post. The most interesting thing has been trying to write more of my thoughts down either on paper or in Memos. Keeping track of more of the things that I do reminds me of just how much stuff I achieve in a given day. If I’m beating myself up for being unproductive, it’s useful to reflect on some of this stuff.

Next week will be another busy one again. I’m in London for some work events during the middle of the week and I’ve got a few calls starting to fill up my diary.

We also need to make our quarterly migration to CostCo as we’re starting to run low on some of our bulk items and we’re planning to go to the cinema and make use of our Cineworld memberships at least once this week.