Weeknotes #9
Week commencing 2nd September 2019.
Focus for the week
This week started pretty slowly after a traumatic weekend in hospital with my wife, running around to try and keep her and my son safe and cared for I didn’t start Monday feeling that great. Thankfully we were all home safe and sound but a little less than rested.
Monday was mostly admin just to keep my head in the game and ease myself into the week. I spent the evening building a quick performance dashboard in Vue.js, if that’s your thing, we’re publishing progress on the LGSS GitHub account under our Vue Dashboard project and thanks to the wondeful world of version control, you can see the exact work I did this week here. 🚀
Tuesday was great. I had an early call with one of our apprentices, Anthony. He’s working on automating our performance data1, building a series of small but perfectly formed integrations to automatically get data out of the different tools we use. This way, we’re building reporting into our daily work, we don’t have to spend time generating reports, the tools will do it all for us. Anthony’s already built automated reporting for Availability and ‘Prospect to projects’, the number of proposals that we successfully take on and deliver. He’s even published the work as SLA_Dashboard_APIs on the LGSS Github. Thanks to Anthony and people like Anthony, we’re another step closer to making our work more visible, open and more understandable for all.
Wednesday kicked off with a leadership team meeting over at Vantage House in Huntingdon, fyi, parking there is awful. I worked on the dashboard in Costa for a bit before the meeting and then we talked about our team, approach, recruitment, support and our priorities for improvement which to be honest, were all a bit of a blur.
After the meeting, I headed off to collect a Deep Lens camera from AWS2. The Deep Lens camera is “deep learning-enabled video camera for developers” whcih apparently “allows developers to get started with deep learning with a single click.”
I’ve got some time aside to put it to work next week, all being well it should recognise my face and spam everyone in the office whenever I walk in or out…like the narcissitic crazy person that I am not.
AWS DeepLens allows developers to get started with deep learning through sample projects with practical, hands-on examples which can start running with a single click.
To round off Wednesday I had another impromptu catch up with Lauren which is always an absolute pleasure, we talked family, design, opportunity, leadership and business strategies.
Finally to finish up the week I had two meetings about contracts and facilitated two other meetings; one to improve our DevOps skills and another for service improvements to some HR’y finance things. After all that, our whole team headed to the Milton Keynes office to say goodbye and thank you to Ratesh (a self confessed car-nut) who left us for an absolute dream job of his (at Mercedes).
Thanks Ratesh, you’ve done incredible work with impact.
What I’m thinking about
I am pleased
- My family are still in one piece
- We got to say goodbye to Ratesh as a team, despite the difficult and often silent challenges people are facing
- I have a new toy to play with
- This week is over. It was tough to say the least.
Recommendations
- Set Free – the latest instalment from Simon Amstell is on Netflix. Beyond it’s obvious hilarity, it’s vulnerable, witty and deeply honest 📽️
- New Adventures Conference – Is back for another year, it’s the conference that kick-started my career, plus I’m quoted on the Conference page because y’know, it’s nice to give anything back to an event that gave me so much. I urge you to take a look and if it’s maybe your thing, go. You will not regret it.
Here we go: New Adventures 2020—our fifth and most ambitious event so far. This one is going to be very, very special. Limited early bird tickets available right now! https://t.co/oVC2UtBX7P
— New Adventures (@naconf) September 6, 2019
Footnotes
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I wrote about our performance metrics in Weeknotes #4 ↩
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Legal blurb about being loaned the AWS Deep Lens camera: By accepting this device on loan for testing and demonstration purposes, you confirm that your receipt is neither prohibited nor inconsistent with any applicable laws, regulations, or binding orders, including applicable ethics or procurement rules or policies, your receipt will not create a conflict of interest for Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”) or its affiliates, and there are no on-going competitive cloud infrastructure procurements for which your receipt of this device could conflict AWS or its affiliates from participating in the competition. By offering you this device for testing and demonstration purposes, neither AWS nor its affiliates have any expectation of favourable or otherwise beneficial treatment, and our provision of this device is not intended to reward or influence any business activity or competitive bid and is offered independently of any past, current or prospective commercial transaction. ↩