Weeknotes #33: little big things

Week commencing Monday, 4 September 2023

Outside the theatre where The Little Big Things is playing
The Little Big Things

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 2/7; Exercise 3/7 and Move 4/7. (42%, terrible). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 36,122

Life

  • The Little Big Things is a wonderful new musical based on the life of mouth artist Henry Fraser. It’s opened at the lovely Soho Place Theatre. We went on Friday night where there was a full standing ovation. I followed Lord Lloyd Webber down the stairs afterwards. If that’s not a seal of approval then I don’t know what is.
  • Business software 1: I do like a sequence diagram when explaining a product feature. I should do more of them. I did a couple to explain projects I am handing over.
  • Related: websequencediagrams.com makes it easy. I subscribed in my last job. I may do in my next.
  • Business software 2: Jira is a tool used by a host of software companies. People love it; people hate it and people love to hate it. But lots of people use it. It’s (almost) endlessly flexible. And in my job, it has all the info in it. So, why don’t people use it to get the info instead of scheduling meetings?
  • Related: labels are good in both Jira and Confluence: use them with abandon.
  • Related, related: tidied up a lot of tickets this week and wrote my final piece of documentation which was, in reality, an update to an existing doc but it felt like I was completing something. The list of closed tickets looks remarkably short.
  • Related, related: Team lunch on Tuesday was nice, although service was slow and a couple of people had to run off at the end for calls.
  • (Not business) software: when did WordPress get an AI assistant that reviews what’s been written? Interesting take on last week ’s Weeknote: “Overall, the content is informative and provides a good snapshot of the week. With some structural improvements and additional visual elements, it can become even more engaging for readers.”
  • I’ve previously mentioned the UK government’s position on messaging app encryption. Today a u-turn that the government says isn’t: “A new statement concedes that the tech to access messaging without breaking security protocols does not exist” BBC: Government denies U-turn on encrypted messaging row.
  • Thursday. How are you supposed to know if his advances are welcomed or not? Still, does anybody who is a ‘close protection bodyguard’ say that’s what they are?

Media

  • Started the second series of Apple TV’s The Morning Show. We enjoyed the first season but – and I have no idea why – we didn’t engage with the second. Suffice to say that we needed the recap and still have gaps in our recollection of the first. Episode one is confusing (are you fired or not?) but by the end we were hooked and went straight into episode two. And later in the week, episode 3.
  • Currently, politics is divided but this interview with David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary feels inclusive and suggests our future policies could be better than the ones we have.

Archive

To save the links getting lost in the future I checked the Internet Archive to see what they had saved for the posts linked here. If the source above no longer works, these should.