Content tagged with "Work"

Inundated by 'quick questions' that prevent you from carrying out your main role? Slack has made it very easy to invade your focus time and before slack people would turn up at your desk in the office and say "can I borrow you for a sec...?"

The big problem, especially for software engineers and deep knowledge workers, is that these "quick questions" and just being borrowed comes with context switching cost. The person who asked it may not realise that their 2 minute question just cost you half an hour of work time because you need to get back into the zone (or a nerdier analogy - you need to page the contents of your brain out to disk and loading it back into memory is slow work...)

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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!

Read more...

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.

Read more...

Introduction

Airbyte is a tool that allows you to periodically extract data from one database and then load and transform it into another. It provides a performant way to clone data between databases and gives us the flexibility to dictate what gets shared at field level (for example we can copy the users table but we can omit name, address, phone number etc). There are a bunch of use cases where this kind of thing might be useful. For example, say you have a data science team who want to generate reports on how many sales your e-shop made this month and train predictive models for next month’s revenue. You wouldn’t want to give your data team direct access to your e-shop database because:

Read more...

I had a great time speaking about AI risks and rewards for small and medium businesses at the Rare Earth Digital debrief in Nantwich last night. The Crown is a lovely venue too and the quirky, wattle and daub wonky architecture reminded me of my childhood home.

Read more...

Over the last few days, I’ve been working out how to get FOAM to automatically sync my notes to their respective Git repositories when I save them in the editor. Here are my findings.

Why?

I keep notes on different areas of my life siloed from each other. This allows me to completely prevent commercially sensitive stuff from my work life leaking onto personal devices and prevents me from accidentally publishing something personal (e.g. my shopping list for this weekend) to my public digital garden. Using FOAM in multi-root mode I can then transparently load all of these different sets of notes into the same workspace and connect relevant things together (for example, I could link to a public note I made about MySQL in a private work-related note I made to myself about debugging a client issue).

Read more...

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.

This week has been fairly uneventful for us in the Ravenscroft household. It’s largely been business as usual. We did our usual pattern of 2 days in the office and 3 days at home.

---

I’ve been continuing my somewhat meta “thinking about thinking” stream of thought from last week with a thorough refactor of my personal knowledge management practices. I started writing an update about it here which turned into a full fledged blog post so I’ve published that as a separate piece here

Read more...

Here’s the 2nd installment of my weeknotes. My attempt at #100DaysToOffload didn’t go particularly well but I’m optimistic that I can keep up with 1 post a week, let’s see!

---

This week I finished How to take smart notes on my kindle I’m making my way through some of the blog posts on Zetteltasken.de. One thing that strikes me about the puritanical zetteltasken approach is that it is designed for more for someone who writes articles or books for a living rather than code (although I do write articles with my academic hat on from time to time). That said there are certainly some interesting practices I intend to assimilate into my personal knowledge management practices. I really like the idea of pre-processing your notes before you store them so that they can be re-used for downstream tasks with minimal thinking. I’m wondering to what extent I can add code snippets, patterns and algorithm documentation to my PKM for low-overhead retrieval and use in new projects and to synthesise new ideas and approaches that I could try out.

Read more...