Weekly 2023.12

Ugly. This is weekly twelve of 2023. It is Friday, the 31 March, and I'm just wrapping up my week before the weekend begins. So the admin, let's get that out of the way. Not a huge amount of changes this week. I've been focusing on the content a little bit more, but just as an FYI, I won't be recording next week. So I will be back on the 17 April. It is Easter break next weekend, so we are down in tools, getting away, having some downtime with the family. So, yeah, I'm not going to be recording anything. I'm definitely not going to be editing anything. So I'm having a week out and then I'll be back with full force on the 17 April. The other thing I just want to plant the seed with, I'm thinking of changing the content structure a little bit, the angle of the content. To be fair, I want to provide some sort of advice or tutorials or a few lessons learned. So I want to think about that for the next one. So work this week marked a significant milestone for me. It was two years back at Asos as an engineering manager. So I celebrated in a way. I went into the office in London, spent some time with my teammates, my engineers, my peers, and it was great. Just I didn't plan too much for the day. I wanted to make sure I had some capacity to just have those water cooler moments that I've mentioned last week. So, yeah, it was great for that. And nice chance just to reflect on the last couple of years and even the last ten years that I've been part of the azos sort of ecosystem. Quite a momentous week for me this week. Quite pleased that I've got this point. And the ten year marker from when I originally joined is fast approaching in June, so I'm looking forward to that. And the other thing for this week, been getting lots of great feedback about petals, actually. So internally and externally people are starting to use this. So I've been taking that on board and looking at ways of kind of improving the experience. I'm trying to make sure that it's suitable for the teams more than anything, but also looking at ways of exposing some of the kind of trends and the high level data to leaders and managers so we can actually observe any potential concerns or improvement areas or look for the hotspots that look good as well. So, yeah, lots of great stuff going on with that. And watch this space side project. So it's been a good week, actually. Again, it's quite a productive one. Season ten finale went out of Make Love work on Tuesday when I was speaking to my old muckers, my old chums, Andy Clark and Dan Davis from the old web scene. Had a great chat, reminiscing, actually, although the tone might not have been as positive as I might have originally expected. It was very down to earth, very humble, very honest, actually. And so huge respect to Dan and Andy for calling those sort of challenges out, actually, but equally what we could do about it. So make sure you listen to that. It's called the lost joy of web design. It's available in all the popular podcast apps and Spotify. So, yeah, have listened to that and on Make Life Work as well, because I wanted to kind of summarize how season Ten has been. I wanted to write a blog post about this. When I started looking at the website I'd built, I wasn't particularly pleased with some of the designs, so I spent some time refining that and updating a few things I've introduced, like a new draw menu to the experience, so it's not like a squeeze navigation at the top. Made a few little UI changes around website as well. So got back into the code in that and it was quite satisfying to manage to get into that, actually. And just a small shout out for this week at On House Finesse. I pulled out a 16 year old mix on the Rewind, so it's one of the mixes I did back in my one fat DJ phase, my DJ pseudonym, so it was quite nice pulling that, actually. And it was released this time 16 years ago, so a lot of old music. Some of the mixes I wasn't particularly pleased with, if I'm honest with you. But it did take me back and actually reading from the comments on the original blog post was quite nice, actually, to see the old people listening and what they thought they thought of it. All right, so I know I took a lot of like gadgets and stuff typically, but this week it was all about the actual web tech. One of the websites I've been running for a few years now, Footballcal.com, is coming up for a renewal on Domains, so I was like, I'm not going to pay full price for this anymore. I registered it elsewhere and I know Cloudflare provide Domains at Cost now, so I've shifted it over to Cloudflare. Now it's only like seven pound 50 a year current exchange rates. That was an easy win for me and I've kept that going because I see the potential in that website and I don't want to give up on it. I just need to work out where it's most relevant and I don't want to lose some of the good content I've created over the years. And another website I registered this week was for Petals again. So Petals team is now registered. I've created a very, very quick website with Next JS and deployed that to Netlify, so that is up as a placeholder for now. I'm planning to put some basic content on there just to kind of explain the concept of Petals first and then potentially build some apps out of the back of it as well. So, yeah, I felt like that's my next focus for the next six months. Very early days. I haven't designed anything, I haven't put any ideas down. I've got some things bubbling around my head at the moment and I really want to collaborate with some people on this. So if you want to help me build that, do let me know. I will need some front enders and some designers. I will need some copywriters and probably some back end developers, actually. So if you're full stack or front end or anything like that, do reach out and let me know if you want to help out on the build of that. Because I don't want this to be a solo project, but I'm quite happy to drive it and give it some structure and all that good stuff. The final part of the week entertainment. So this week we've been getting into a series on BBC called Race five Pairs of Ordinary Brick Journey Across Canada and realized we missed season one. So we've binge watched all those from the previous years. We realized it was recorded pre pandemic. There are some references across Asia you're like, hang on a minute. They've got no references to face masks as a concept. Why are people wearing face masks? Okay, this is definitely pre pandemic, pre lockdown. But it's great to watch, honestly. The series phenomenal. The dynamics and the sort of relationships that it surfaces through those journeys as well. Really good fun and traveling on a tight budget. I think it makes you realize how difficult that can get, but also the painstaking decisions you have to make at points. So I highly recommend that. Actually, I'm giving that four stars, season one, at least. Season two we watched. There was a few people in there that really bugged us, but again, just binge watch them. Season three is going out now. They're dropping them weekly, so it's not like you can watch them all at the same time. I approve of this decision and yeah, want to watch. So that's your week or my week, I say pretty productive week. Lots of good stuff going on, very petals focused. And it was great to kind of mark that two year milestone back at Azos as an engineering manager. It's also been great getting back into the code, something that I don't get the chance to do much in my current role. And with side projects being very content focused, I've not really had the opportunity to code much. But this week has definitely been about the code and the tech. So, yeah, quite a productive week. Let's say. That's Me done for this week. I'll be back in two weeks with the latest on what's going on and a possible change in tone as well. So do let me know if that would work or if you'd prefer it as it is. I just love the feedback. Keep it coming in. Email me, [email protected] toot me [email protected] or just go to the website and send it through out, if that's your preference. And I'll be back in two weeks time. Cheers.