Content tagged with "Weeknotes"

This week was another busy one both at work and at home.

My Dad and his wife came to stay with us at the start of the week. My dad is reeaaally into coffee and I got him a voucher to go on a barista training course at Winchester Coffee School for his birthday earlier in the year. While he was doing his course, I took my evil stepmother for a walk along the beach at Lee-on-the-Solent and we had lunch in one of the seafront cafes. I snapped a photo of some brave kite surfer, out in the sea on a very cold and windy day.

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We had a great time at Peter Pan goes wrong - lots of silly slapstick

• This week the weather has taken a turn for the worst across the UK.
• Work has been relatively quiet and I managed to avoid going up to London all week. I did get the chance to spend some f2f time with my CEO on Thursday and do some whiteboarding about our product strategy for the next few months which was cool. I also finished a tech due dilligence project that I've been running on another software startup which is always really interesting and insightful. I love to see what other (non-competing) businesses are doing, process-wise, and see if I can learn anything.
  
• On Tuesday Mrs R and I went to see Peter Pan goes Wrong at the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton. We really enjoyed the show, there was lots of silly slapstick comedy.
• I started spending a bit more time looking at substack because Doug and Laura started posting more over there, there are some other interesting things going on over there too. Amongst others, I've been following Gary Marcus who is a fellow AI specialist that is pretty scathing about the current hype, Ed Zitron who has some spicy takes on silicon valley and Garbage Day which is a bit of a random collection of online "stuff. I've noticed Substack has started to pick up a fair bit of interest and traffic recently despite some big controversies earlier in the year. Also, regardless of political connotations there's still the whole "you don't own your stuff" argument for not publishing there (or at least syndicating there from an independently owned site). I enjoyed Elizabeth Tai's recent reflections on the platform.
  
• Yesterday I published about some cool happenings in music and updated my professional landing page and my now page. I'm forever wanting to fiddle and tweak my website and I'm never quite happy with the layout and the way it's all set up. I'm intrigued by the new Wordpress ActivityPub integrations and forever interested in whether I should be separating my blog outputs based on content type (for example keeping brainsteam "personal" and posting tech/programming stuff somewhere else).
• This coming week I'm in London a couple of days and then we have some time off and a mini-break in Bournemouth towards the end of the week.

This week has been jam packed with traveling, meetings, events and all sorts! For an introvert like me, it’s been pretty hard going pretending to be extroverted and interacting with lots of folks.

The biggest news this week was that my company won another award. A few weeks ago in September we won the CogX award for Best Fintech Company 2023. On Thursday I attended an awards ceremony with my colleague in order to accept the award for Best Emerging Tech Company (on the south coast) 2023.

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This week work has been incredibly busy again - a running theme this time of year.

On Monday we went to CostCo and spent lots of money bulk-buying things. Although I'm always horrified by the bill at the checkout, I love to come home and calculate how much I've saved versus buying the same product from my local supermarket in small quantities. This time it was about £60 which is pretty good!

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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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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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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.

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.

I’m pretty rubbish at #weeknotes but I want to try and get better at them.

Things I Achieved

• My main achievement for this week has been (hopefully) finishing my PhD thesis corrections - essentially your viva examiners give you a list of stuff that needs a bit of tweaking and you have 3 months to address them. My list was pretty short so it hasn’t taken me all that long to go through them.
• I managed to get out for walks most days this week which should help me shift some of the winter insulation I accumulated over christmas. While I walk, I like to listen to the Three Bean Salad podcast.
• I’ve accepted two invitations to give talks on AI and ML at public events later in the year. More details on those when I can share them.
• I’m trying to get into the habit of doing more note-taking and writing down my thoughts. I’ve only really just discovered the magic of knowledge management and second brains. It kind of amazes me that I got this far in life without being very good at.
• We are trying to cut down meat and dairy consumption. This week I used oat milk in all my recipes at home and it was great. We also had veggie (soy-based) sausages in a couple of recipes and they were delightful. I keep forgetting to order oat-based coffee while I’m out and about so that is a goal for next week.

Things I watched

• Mrs R & I watched The Rig on prime. It’s a sci-fi show set on an oil rig. It’s got an all-star cast and notably Emily Hampshire from Schitt’s Creek playing a hard-ass corporate oil exec which I found a jarring contrast from Stevie Budd.
• We went to see M3gan in the cinema - if you’re not familiar, think Chucky but instead of evil possessed doll, evil AI robot doll. It was quite fun and less of a shlock horror, more of a dark comedy. The film does not take itself seriously at all which meant that, even though it’s about AI and ML, I was able to suspend my disbelief and enjoy.
• I watched some of this video about how easy it is to use PKM notes to procrastinate instead of doing useful work. I say some of because I got annoyed and stopped watching. I feel like taking this attitude sucks all of the joy out of it. Some of us enjoy tending to our digital gardens and find it soothing and cathartic ;)

Stuff I Read

• I’ve subscribed to noted.lol, a blog and newsletter all about self-hosted software. It’s a great little newsletter and I’ve already found a couple of interesting packages through it (see below)
• I’ve been reading the BCS ITNow magazine from Winter 2022 that’s been sat on my side-table for a couple of weeks. There are quite a few articles that seem to shower the silicon valley ultra-capitalistic view of Web3 in glory but then there’s a poll about how most BCS members asked about crypto and NFTs thought it was garbage. A mixed bag!
• ChatGPT is everywhere at the moment. There are lots of predictions that it could lead to a dark internet full of generated content but I fear that it’s already led to a dark internet full of terrible takes on ChatGPT. So many articles are variations on “here is a screenshot of a prompt I fed into ChatGPT and here is the output. Isn’t it clever?” Here are a couple of actually interesting articles about it:
  • Unskilled Cybercriminals May Be Leveraging ChatGPT to Create Malware - people with limited or no software development background have been using ChatGPT to develop malware tools. Whilst I don’t buy that developers will be out of a job any time soon, the system can produce some useful code snippets that someone could feasibly string together into a program.
  • China, a Pioneer in Regulating Algorithms, Turns Its Focus to Deepfakes - WSJ - apparently China are already looking into regulating generative models. I think the cat is out of the bag on this one, you can’t contain digital assets that have leaked onto the internet. However governments could, presumably, limit access to large volumes of GPUs needed to train LLMs (and even infer on bigger models).

Software Packages I Learned About & Tried

• Zellij is a Golang terminal workspace + multiplexer - its a bit like tmux on steroids. I watched an interview with it’s lead maintainer by charm.sh’s BashBunni. I haven’t had the chance to try it yet but I’m a big fan of tmux so it looks very interesting to me.
• memos - a lightweight/foss memo tool. It feels a bit like a cross between twitter and pinterest and tumblr. I can post links and thoughts there along with hashtags and go back and find the stuff that I posted about. I am going to try integrating memos into my discovery and reading workflow for a little bit. The third party MoeMemos app for android provides pretty good mobile support.
• shiori - a self-hosted bookmark + archive system, again written in golang and fairly lightweight. It seems to do quite a nice job of saving readable archived copies of articles (like wallabag). My only gripe with it is that there’s no way to pass in new URLs by query param. This would allow me to ‘share’ sites to shiori via the android context menu and the very handy URL Forwarder app.

After a long period of not managing it, this week I am attempting to return to the Weeknote format that I started earlier in the year. This week I’ve been busy with building bots, playing games and getting a date for my PhD viva.