Content tagged with "Personal"

🎬 watched The Creator and gave it 4/5

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).

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I don’t get apathy at work because I care way too much about pretty much everything. This isn’t necessarily a good thing in an office job. I was chatting with a friend about how caring can become a maladaptive trait at work, when you’re asked to do something that really doesn’t matter and no one cares about, but you just can’t bring yourself to do mediocre work.

I feel this so hard, one of the reasons I had to leave my corporate job and get involved with co-founding a company back in 2016

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Another week has flown by and September is coming to an end. Autumn, incidentally, my favourite season, is here. As ever, September is a monumentally busy month at work as clients and colleagues alike come back from summer holidays. It’s also the time of year when I like to kickstart personal projects and chores around the house.

Due to some bad timing with colleague holidays this week, I spent some time doing some front-line data science work and I welcomed the opportunity to get my hands dirty and reflected on how python package management is still nightmarish in 2023. I think my own advice from a couple of years back is still pretty relevant.

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Last week we were on holiday in Cyprus. It was lovely. The trip was supposed to be a relaxing "lie by the swimming pool and do very little" kind of trip to try to force us to relax and reset after what's been a pretty busy year. I think we successfully achieved it.

We flew from London to Cyprus and got a coach to our hotel. We stayed at The King Jason, an adults-only all inclusive resort in Protaras a few miles up the coast from Ayia Napa. We are not really "party people" so I didn't want to be too close to the late night revelers. The hotel was superb and from the moment we arrived to the moment we left I felt looked after and relaxed.

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I've been meaning to write about this for a while - we actually moved offices at the end of May!

My company Filament has, since 2017, had two UK offices. One up in London and one on the South Coast in the solent area. I live on the south coast and I spend most of my time at the latter office. I've always been a huge advocate of hybrid or even full remote working - since long before COVID made remote working more "socially acceptable." All of our staff have always had the option to work from home when they want or come in and spend time on site if they prefer. We have a small number of fully remote staff who live on the other side of the country from our office space. People who live near one of our hub offices tend to balance their time between home and the office according to what works for them.

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Just got back from watching The Meg 2. It got really bad reviews on pretty much every major review site so I was expecting it to be just plain bad but, like the first movie, it was so-bad-its-good. Statham was on form and some of the one liners were great. I’d highly recommend it to folks who like cheesy action flicks.

Stuff that happened this week:

• I worked on some internal projects and wrote about my experiences of setting up Airbyte for some client use cases.
  
• Mrs R and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary with an afternoon tea at the top of Portsmouth's Spinnaker tower. The food was delicious and the view was spectacular. Thankfully it was a lovely sunny day for it.
• I spent some time in our Whiteley office and went up to our London office on Friday for a couple of  meetings.
  
• On the way home from London I made the very expensive mistake of losing my car keys which meant walking 30 minutes home to get my spare key and walking back to the station to get the car. I then had to shell out £400 for a new key from the car dealership after being advised by an independent auto locksmith that my car's lock is "too fancy" for them to be able to reliably break into. I won't be doing that again in a hurry.
  
• Mrs R and I finished Season 2 in our Justified rewatch as we prepare for Justified: City Primeval. Margo Martindale certainly deserved her award for her portrayal of a bone-chillingly cold villain.
• I found some cool new feeds to follow:
  • Tracy Durnell - a freelance sustainability consultant who writes about all sorts of interesting stuff in her digital garden
    
  • Elizabeth Tai - an essayist, sci-fi writer and digital garden
  • Shout out to Doug Belshaw's Thought Shrapnel which I've been following for a while but which has recently come out of hiatus.
• I've just finished the 2nd book in William Gibson's Sprawl series

This week we have a few office days planned and a few house chores to do. I'll be up in London attending the Airflow Meetup on Thursday evening.

a quick walk along Lee-on-the-Solent beach to burn some morning lark energy this morning

I really related to this blog post just as I also related to Kev Quirk’s recent article about forums: https://kevquirk.com/bring-back-the-humble-forum

I feel like this split isn’t just in cyberspace but also in real life where some people err towards buying stuff and throwing old stuff out whilst others make do and mend and run repair cafes and makerspaces and install parties.

The most problematic thing about this blog post for me is the idea that people have to “choose a side”. Most of the general public have no idea that these counter cultures exist nevermind that they should choose a side or how to go about doing that.

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