Took a unplanned weeknotes hiatus. It’s a bit of a shame because lots of interesting things have been happening (massive understatement much?) but I’m trying to be okay with that, because it was probably what I needed.
This week has been distinctly not asynchronous work wise, so I’ve not had the flexibility to offset work as I had been in previous weeks. As I result I’ve noticed it’s been much harder trying to keep anything that’s not work on track during the day.
Whilst my homeschooling may have reached all new lows, the kids have been pretty ace (correlation?). On Wednesday I skipped breakfast due to an early start to the day and my youngest (7) brought me buttered crumpets and cup of tea during my first call. Very nearly wept with joy.
I have found that my wireless headphones just about reach the kettle in the kitchen downstairs, which is useful for mid-meeting coffee replenishment.
With lots of external video calls this week, it’s interesting to hop around different products. We use Google Meet which is basic by comparison to the likes of Zoom, but good, I might even say better because of it. I’ve had to use Teams quite a bit, which is also okay but seemed to be less tolerant of bandwidth issues. Cue quite a lot of “Sorry.. we can’t hear you.. can you say that again?.. you’re breaking up.. try leaving and re-joining… ”.
We’re coming off the back of a fairly large bit of upgrade work on one of our systems. Had a collective review today (us and our team mates on the supplier side). We picked out some useful learning that we can apply next time around (..and I dare say we can apply when working with other suppliers). Good stuff.
DEEPLY frustrating exchange with another supplier who wanted to charge us half a day to get further detail about consultancy work THAT WE’D ALREADY PAID IN ADVANCE FOR. Lord.. give me strength. I hate publicly moaning about this stuff — but I feel like it needs exposure on some scale to go.. hey.. this is not okay. Especially on the day rates that are being charged.
Had a meeting with the supplier for our impending server migration to the cloud. Learned lots. Lots to think about in terms of how we can quickly verify an application is working properly before we commit to it permanently living in Azure. It’s hard to do anything quickly with some of the legacy applications we have knocking around, so that’s an interesting challenge to ponder in the near future.
