No note last week - lots of things overrunning due to an unexpected issue, and by Friday afternoon I just needed to get away from my keyboard!
So this is a combination of two weeks.
Highlights
- after many months of missing it, dropped into the monthly Zoom call for Harold Jarche’s Perpetual Beta Coffee Club (PBCC). PBCC means interesting people, and I need to remind myself that the fact it is not directly connected to my day to day work is the reason I need to make the effort to drop in.
- doing some work with Microsoft Customer Voice (aka Forms Pro) found some anomalies in how context variables are presented in the output data, with differences between survey responses and survey invitations. This was the issue that mashed up my schedule last week, as we are running a custom survey service with some clients and doing a chunk of analysis in PySpark on the resulting data - cleanly extracting these variables is critical.
- started seeing some forward motion on the project I mentioned in the last note where we are replacing a legacy bespoke website that supports one of our services with a combination of SharePoint 365 for applications and a management app in Power Platform. Somewhat re-assured that my gut instinct (that the process we are supporting is a little complex) was validated when analysis showed that the key record (an application) has 16 possible states… 🫤
- spoke with pioneer of distributed work Luis Suarez, hearing more about his new venture Asynco
- some good socialising!
Learning
- The Code Quality Advantage: How Empirical Data Shatters the Speed vs Quality Myth by Adam Tornhill — some clearly made points about the economic value of taking the time to make sure features are well-written and well-tested - my brief notes are here
- skating around the maths I need to revise to continue with The Theoretical Minimum - a series of lectures by Stanford professor Leonard Susskind (see week 9).
Watching
- American Fiction — this film richly deserves the awards it has received, a deeply humorous poke at the stupidities and blinkers of the publishing industry, that at the same time manages to touch serious pathos without becoming sentimental.
Reading
- thoroughly enjoying Cal Newport’s latest, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
Listening
- via BBC Sounds stumbled upon How to Win an Information War, the story of German-born Englishman Sefton Delmer who ran a deep fake German radio station from England during WW2. Based on listening to this abridged version I’ve just added the book to my Kindle.
And finally
How about this for a blast from the past?
