Monthly retrospective: January 2025

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last year I tried a thing – another attempt at weeknotes. Weeknotes became monthly retrospectives. Monthly retrospectives sometimes became every two months… and then they dried up completely last summer. I’m sorry. I was busy and, to be honest, this blog is not as important to me as it once was.

But then, an anonymous commenter said that they miss them and asked me to fill the gap to the end of 2024. That might happen (or it might join the great list of unwritten blog posts in the sky), but let’s have another go at the present. So, 31 January, 2025. Monthly retrospective…

At work

Things have really stepped up a gear at work. Last year I started to work on a future vision around which the Office of the CTO could structure its “thought leadership” content. Some important people supported it and I found myself co-presenting to our executive board. The next steps will remain confidential, but it’s no bad thing for me. And, the follow-on work has given me a lot of exposure to some of the marketing activities – my last fortnight has been full of market analysis and ideal client profiles.

But the last fortnight was not just those things. I had the hairbrained idea that, as productivity is is one of the outcomes we seek for our clients, maybe we should “do something for National Productivity Week”. After writing a series of blog posts (see below), and a fun day recording video content with our brand team, it feels like a one-man social media takeover. In fact, we had so much content that some of it will now have to go out next week. But that’s OK – productivity is not just for one week of the year. These are the posts that are live on the Node4 website today:

And the last post, next week, will be about building sustainable productivity approaches.

There are also a couple of videos up on LinkedIn:

And, earlier in the month (actually, it sneaked out on YouTube before Christmas but I asked for it to be pulled for an edit), there was this one. Not my best work… but it did lead to the purchase of a teleprompter which has made later videos so much easier!!!

Learning

Also on the work front, this month I completed my ILM Level 5 Award in Leadership and Management. Node4 runs this as part of a 7-month programme of workshops, with two coursework assignments that relate to four of the workshops. Over the last 7 months, I’ve covered:

  • Developing your personal leadership brand.
  • Inclusive leadership and motivation skills.
  • Managing and implementing strategic change.
  • Developing a High-performance team culture.
  • Manager as a coach.
  • Personal impact and emotional intelligence.
  • High impact presentations.

At home

Home Automation

I bought myself a Shelly temperature and humidity monitor for the Man Cave. It’s Home Assistant compatible, of course, so lets me use cheap overnight energy to stop the cabin from getting too cold/damp.

Also on the home automation front, I picked up some cheap Tapo P100 smart plugs. Like my no-name Chinese ESP32-based plugs, they are a better form factor than my older Kasa HS100/110 plugs so they don’t take space from the adjacent socket. But they lack any kind of reporting for energy usage so I should have got a pack of the slightly more expensive P110 models instead. I also struggled to add them to Home Assistant. They were recognised but wouldn’t authenticate, unless I reset my TP-Link password (which seemed to be the workaround – even if the password was the same)!

Getting away from it all

Aside from the tech, Mrs Wilson and I got away to London for a weekend, to celebrate a friend’s birthday. We were almost blown away by the tail of Storm Éowyn at Primrose Hill viewpoint but had fun (I’d never been before, but it’s in so many films!).

Tomorrow, I’m off to France for the UCI Cyclocross World Championships. Not competing of course (and disappointed that British Cycling is not sending a Women’s team or an U23 Men’s team). Just spectating. And probably consuming quite a lot of beer. And frites.

Writing

There have been some personal blog posts this month too:

In pictures

Some snaps from my Instagram:

Monthly retrospective: August 2024

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I know it’s nearly the end of September now, but here’s my look back at what I got up to in August…

The two most significant events were:

Right. Rant over. What else did I get up to in August?

  • Well, for starters, I actually wrote a blog post (not just the one about my holidays). Inspired by one of the challenges my team faces, I wrote about choosing between chats and channels in Microsoft Teams (and the types of channels that should be used). Spoiler: if you want to collaborate, or to communicate with more than a few users, choose a channel. Though, as one colleague pointed out, if the decision needs a flow chart, it’s probably too complicated…
  • I needed to visit the Apple Store in Milton Keynes and found that it’s moved, expanded, and has a huge new screen across the entire back wall. My pictures don’t do it justice but it’s a big improvement on the old store…
  • I found myself commenting on a former colleague’s LinkedIn post about Klarna replacing human employees with AI. There’s enough in there for a whole blog post… but I think it’s worth a look at Marcus’ post and the various replies…
  • I also weighed in on my colleague Glenn Akester’s post about the Crowdstrike outage (not a “Microsoft outage”!) looking at what happened, and critically, some of the lessons we can learn to reduce the impact of similar problems in future.
  • I also got involved in a discussion about Gartner Hype Cycles, after it seemed the whole world picked up on one article by the Economist that seemed (prematurely, in my opinion), to be suggesting that AI is through the hype now (and that not all technologies go through the hype cycle).
  • Following on from the AI post, we move to the underlying data:
  • I’ve had a Bookings page on Microsoft 365 for a while but it doesn’t get much use. That was until I added it to my LinkedIn profile and posted about Node4’s partnership with Elastio for ransomware protection. The first contact came soon after. Admittedly, it wasn’t a customer but it was good to connect, understand someone else’s proposition and bear it in mind for the future!
  • A colleague flagged a CIO post by Brian Solis about “the end of digital transformation and the rise of business model innovation”. He was asking if the digital transformation term is tired and if AI will make business leaders rethink their business models to make good use of it. Again, I think, given time, I could write a whole post on this topic but here’s the top line:
    • It’s an interesting article but predicated on the author’s view that much digital transformation missed the transformation part and digitised existing processes. I think that’s the key there – abuse of a term for marketing purposes… 
    • Many people skipped the business transformation part (what we used to call business process re-engineering). The author seems to be saying that we now need to do that, but using AI… and dreaming up a new term “business model innovation”.
    • I don’t think we need new terms to confuse the issue. What we need is to double down on Digital Transformation. AI is part of the toolset, but it’s also the latest shiny thing. I still think this post that I wrote five years ago has legs. 
  • On that note, I’ve started to write a book… on digital transformation (to be co-authored with my colleague Bjoern Hirtenjohann). More on that as it starts to take shape.
  • Diving into tech for a moment, this post explains why I’ve been receiving emails from Microsoft about a deleted Azure subscription. They were concerning but everything seemed to work, so I put them to the back of my mind. It turns out that it’s just really bad communication and, retiring outdated “Access to Azure Active Directory” subscriptions is removing a legacy method for integrating Azure AD (now Entra ID) with Office 365 (now Microsoft 365). There’s more on the Access to Azure Active Directory subscriptions in this post by Jason Fritts.
  • Before I wrap up this month’s retrospective, here’s a couple more articles that piqued my interest:
    • Sonos’ CEO was forced to admit that S2 isn’t coming back, because the technical architecture has moved on and it can no longer work. Time will tell whether this becomes a really damaging point in the company’s history. They’ve ridden out controversy in the past (over technical obsolescence) but it really is important to listen to customer feedback on your app. Personally, I find it unusable and mostly rely on Spotify’s integration with my Sonos speakers…
    • High-end racing bikes are now vulnerable to hacking. Yep. You read that correctly. Wireless gears can be hacked… potentially to impede other riders’ progress.

Watching and listening

It seems I haven’t been posting any photos recently (not since my holiday), so in place of the normal section on photography, a couple of things I’ve been enjoying recently:

  • Watching series 1 of Sherwood on BBC iPlayer. We haven’t got further than episode 1 of the second series yet (and season 3 has been commissioned), but I found series 1 fascinating from the perspective of someone who was only a child at the time of The Miners’ Strike but has seen the long term implications of the UK’s move from manufacturing to a services economy.
  • Now that you can only pause an Audible subscription once a year, I’m trying to find things to spend my surplus credits on (and then cancel my subscription). Non-fiction can be a bit heavy sometimes (and I listen to a lot of podcasts) so I tried some fiction… KL Slater’s “Message Deleted” was quickly consumed via my AirPods as I went about my weekend activities!

That’s all for now – watch out for September’s retrospective in a week or two!

Featured image: author’s own

Retrospective: June/July 2024

Posted on By Mark Wilson

In 1999, I left the only company I’d worked at since graduation. After 5 and a half years (plus a year or so during my degree), I moved on from ICL and followed a colleague to Capita, to be part of a new Microsoft practice. I still remember the conversation on the night before I started: “so, what’s it like to be unemployed, Mark?”. Leaving a place where I was comfortable and respected to start again elsewhere was a big deal for me so I wasn’t amused. Even more so as I’d taken out a mortgage on a house a year or so earlier.

I can’t remember the timings but it soon became clear that a recent re-organisation had changed the focus. The Microsoft practice was no longer a priority. My colleague left Capita soon afterwards. I remained, in a strange organisation, like a fish out of water. I made the most of it, built up my technical skills, and annoyed a few people by taking an outsourced client through the Technology Adoption Programme for Exchange Server 2000. (I was told that “our standard is Exchange 5.5. – you can’t just put in a new version”. Well, I did.)

I stuck it out for 18 months before I left to travel and work in Australia. That was a shorter trip than originally intended (a different story, which involved returning to the UK to settle down with Mrs Wilson). The point is that I learned not to build my career around other people. If I moved jobs again, it would be for me (or in one case, redundancy).

So why tell this story? Well, I’ve written on previous posts about my journey into my current team – and I feel like I’ve found a place that suits me and where I can make a difference. But June was an unsettling month as we prepared for a change of leadership for the Node4 Office of the CTO. It’ll all work out – but I won’t pretend I found it easy. And it reminded me that, however much respect I have for my outgoing CTO, there’s only one person responsible for where I take my career – and that’s me.

Right, enough of the career history lesson. What did I get up to more recently?

At work

Work highlights included:

  • Renewal of my Microsoft Azure Solution Architect Expert certifications.
  • Attending the second and third modules of my level 5 leadership and management training (inclusive leadership; and driving and implementing strategic change). I missed the first module in April, so will have to go back next year to learn about developing my personal leadership brand.
  • Two days at Commsverse – a Microsoft Teams conference organised by, among others, two of my former colleagues (Mark Vale and Martin Boam), at a really cool venue (Mercedes-Benz World). I have a whole load of blog posts planned from that event, though the backlog is pretty huge now. In the meantime, here’s my Twitter thread:
  • I managed to get a couple of posts published on the Node4 site, even if my own blog has been a bit quiet:
  • I also got my paws on this one, though only as an editor:
  • A trip to the North East, to help a client define their future technology direction, including facilitating a workshop with around 15 of their team to identify the challenges that they face.
  • Preparing for the audit (and hopefully renewal) of Node4’s Azure Expert Microsoft Solution Provider competency in a few weeks’ time.
  • Time spent together as a team, planning the future for the Node4 OCTO.

At home (the tech)

CCTV

I’ve been looking to install some CCTV at home for a while. Whilst many would recommend I go down the Ubiquiti route (UniFi Protect), I decided to save some money, using Reolink cameras with my existing Synology NAS.

So far I’ve installed an RLC-811A, which was also my first foray into PoE-powered devices (with a UniFi PoE adapter). Despite the low price, it’s remarkably good camera, both day and night, with the added bonus that it’s supported by Home Assistant.

Correlation or causation?

Sadly, it wasn’t enough, but was it really just a co-incidence that, as I changed my addressable LEDs from blue to red and white, England scored a goal in the Euros final?

And some writing

One blog post that did make it out of the door:

Ignore the hype, but think about getting AI ready

At home (the rest)

Whilst I’m not getting to many of Matt’s cycle races at the moment, I did head up to Darlington with him for the British National Circuit Race Championships. The race didn’t end as we hoped – he crashed – but his on-bike camera footage has 2.8 million views on Instagram at the time of writing!

He was back on the bike the next night as we went down to London for the Via Criterium at the London Cycle Festival. Oh my. What an awesome event. And a good result for Matt too…

And he’s got some decent results in some of the other crits… here’s Otley:

That bike didn’t last much longer though… this happened a week or so later, but he did at least jump back on and ride it to the finish!

And only a couple of days ago, he got caught up in a crash at Sheffield. I’ll be glad when the crit season is over.

I’ve been just as busy travelling around the country with Ben, as he visits the universities he might like to apply to. I missed the Warwick weekend but with Exeter, Bath, Bristol, Nottingham and Cardiff it’s been full on. And, just as when I did the rounds with Matt a couple of years ago, it’s left me wishing I could do it all again, knowing what I know now!

And, as for that car that I spent lots of money insuring recently. Yeah, not what I had in mind…

Watching

I haven’t written much recently about our TV watching, but in addition to my Tour de France addiction that has to be fed each July, Nikki and I have enjoyed:

  • All the light we cannot see, on Netflix. Set towards the end of World War 2, this mini series shows how the paths of a blind French girl and a German soldier collide, guided my the medium of radio. As a bit of a radio guy, I found it quite magical, along with this (unrelated) tweet: Where was Hilversum, anyway?
  • Douglas is cancelled, on ITV. Episode 3 is difficult to watch, but persist – the twist at the end of Episode 4 is worth it!

Travelling

I wrote most of this post as I was preparing to head off for a couple of weeks’ travelling with my youngest son. In fact, that’s why the June retrospective is mashed up with half of July… I’ll be off travelling for the other half.

It’s also meant a very busy week getting ready. New purchases from outdoor shops: lightweight sleeping bag; new walking trousers; new trainers. And cleaning my down jacket (because it might still be cold at night in the Swiss Alps). Rab Equipment are ace:

Tomorrow morning we should be catching the Eurostar to Amsterdam. Or we will be if today’s Microsoft Azure/Microsoft 365 outage and the separate but still severe Crowdstrike/Windows outage don’t affect my journey! I really must stop catastrophising…

Photographing

Elsewhere

A few things that caught my eye over the last few weeks…

  • Improving your messaging:
  • Milton Keynes Geek Night:
  • Wellbeing:
  • Initial view on Copilot-generated meeting notes:
  • Lazy coding:
  • It’s going to get harder to buy a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement:
  • More on getting your message across:
  • Tech life in China:
  • AI image generation:
  • Business strategy planning:
  • It seems I have a new soapbox… more on Copilot meeting notes:
  • And this is what two professional writers think of AI (and more):
  • Another post where I suggest that AI may not be very good for society…
  • Especially when senior Microsoft personnel seem to “forget” that we have copyright laws:
  • I do get cross when people suggest that a company running Microsoft software is somehow making bad choices and should be avoided:
  • A thread on how AI was amazing. And then it started making things up. It’s not much help if I have to check the output…
  • I feel this discussion will continue to run on for a very long time yet:
  • It affects employee engagement too:
  • You did read the terms of service, right?
  • Customer service calls in real life:
  • It seems that we really are spending more time in meetings:
  • Apparently I’ve spent over 15 years scrolling through Twitter…
  • A slightly different take on introversion:
  • Just imagine if AI did become self-aware:

Featured image: author’s own

Monthly Retrospective: May 2024

Posted on By Mark Wilson

May’s update was late, and June’s is in danger of rolling into July, so here’s a few highlights from my life in and around tech…

At work

On the work front, it was a short month – I was on holiday for the last week and with public holidays too there was lots to cram into a few short weeks. Nevertheless, I still managed to:

  • Continue to develop Node4’s new ransomware scanning service.
  • Finalise a dozen product data sheets for our public cloud services.
  • Submit some blog posts to our marketing team to support upcoming campaigns.
  • Keep pushing some pre-sales activities forwards.
  • And mine and Bjoern Hirtenjohann (/in/BjoernHirtenjohann)’s internal Node4 podcast on public cloud was released:

But the biggest activity in the month was presenting at Node4’s Infrastructure Symposium. One of our Practice Directors brought all his teams together to learn about the products and services that we jointly deliver. With four (or five, depending on how you look at it) companies all merged, there’s been a lot of change at Node4 over the last year or so. Getting everyone together is a great way to break down boundaries and understand the direction we’re headed in. And for me it was a chance to outline that our cloud offers span public, private and hybrid delivery models – and that we will deliver what’s right for the client, not for us. We call this Pragmatic Cloud (and I freely admit we didn’t come up with the term, but it I like it a lot).

I also celebrated my 9 year anniversary of joining risual/Node4 in May. And, for those who were confused by my comments last month, I was saying that my recent move has been overwhelmingly positive and I’m in a better place than I have been for a long while!

Elsewhere

Away from work…

  • My youngest son, Ben, passed his driving test. I was ready for a big insurance bill, but what I wasn’t ready for was: a) no decrease on the bill for the 19 year-old’s insurance (now with 2 years’ experience); and b) a 350% increase in premiums between him passing his test 2 years ago and the 17 year-old passing now. Even with a black box, parents as named drivers, etc. the car insurance bill for the two old cars that our family share with the teenagers was around £4500. For contrast, the bill for my Volvo (with just me and Mrs W as drivers) actually fell and is now back under £500. Public transport is just not reliable enough where we live, so the choices are: a) drive the teenagers everywhere; or b) pay the money. I’m still getting over this assault on our savings… some families just won’t have that money and I dread to think how many uninsured cars there are on the road as a consequence.
  • My eldest son, Matt, continues to race his bike up and down the country. After a catastrophic failure of the fork steerer tube, his Canyon road bike was hastily replaced. That meant a drive to Wakefield to collect the new bike, but it is rather lovely. I don’t get to all his races these days but I did manage to watch him in Ixworth and I was in the team car again for the Lincoln GP. Unfortunately, when he went to Ireland to race the Rás Tailteann I had to make do with watching for updates on Twitter!
  • Ben and I have been planning our Interrail trip – and now we have bought our passes along with inbound/outbound travel. Plus, we’re going to be taking the NightJet sleeper train from Berlin to Vienna! There were a few challenges with seat availability (things have changed since last time I went – we can use high speed rail, but there’s limited availability and we need to pay a supplement). This is more of a problem when dates are fixed so we had to change our route a little. On the flip side, with the start and end locked in, the middle section of the holiday is now free for us to be flexible.
  • I completed the home network upgrade. Was the switch from AmpliFi to UniFi worth it? Time will tell. It’s certainly more flexible but it’s cost me more and my house does not lend itself to structured cable runs. Maybe I should have just replaced the broken AmpliFi mesh point but it felt like I could fall into the trap of the sunk cost fallacy.
  • On the home automation front:
    • Octopus Energy sent us a Home Mini, which should give more granular data on electricity consumption, once I get the Home Assistant configuration right (I’m still tweaking).
    • I’ve also continued to play around with Home Assistant, including a bed occupancy sensor (which I can link to turning off the lights). I will admit that’s probably a step too far into nerd territory.
  • The month ended with a short break in Spain. Originally scheduled for May 2021, we never did get to go on a family holiday to Barcelona and the Costa Brava, though Matt made it out there on a training trip to Girona earlier this year. So, half the holiday, with only one of the “children” (though he is now twice the size!), Nikki, Ben and I spent a glorious few days in an around Begur.

Writing

These retrospectives are a bit of a blogging catch-all, but I did write a post on LinkedIn that turned into a blog in its own right. You can read it at the link below:

Photographing

Bits and pieces

  • 300m short of 200km!
  • Choose your PIN wisely:
  • Commentary on technical debt and the British Library’s ransomware attack woes:
  • Who doesn’t love a bit of Top Gun?
  • Thoughts on location tracking for family members:
  • Why it’s better to find a real application compatibility fix instead of just giving users admin access:
  • And why encrypted messaging is difficult:
  • Finally, shipping sunlight for green energy. Not as bonkers as it sounds!

Featured image: author’s own

Monthly Retrospective: April 2024

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Another look back at some of the things I’ve been up to over the last few weeks…

At work

April marks a year since I started my transition to a new role at Node4. I didn’t move over full-time until July, but that’s when I stopped running what was formerly risual’s Architecture team and joined the Office of the CTO. This is not the forum to share the full details but suffice to say I had manouevred myself into a position where I was very unhappy – neither close to the tech nor able to best use my skills to provide value to the organisation and to our clients.

The change in role has been a breath of fresh air: the focus has changed a few times and there have been some bumps on the road; but one thing is core – I get up each morning and think about how best to add value. Whether that’s building out collateral for our public cloud portfolio, developing a new offering to guard against ransomware, helping clients with their IT Strategy or getting some structure around our “thought leadership” outputs.

The month ended with Node4’s “Go To Market” conference, in Nottingham. It’s an opportunity to set the agenda for the coming year and make sure we’re all headed in the same direction. This was the first time I’d attended and it was also a brilliant opportunity to meet some of my colleagues from across the business.

I managed to get myself into the video somehow, despite not officially being one of the presenters…

After two days of socialising, I was completely wiped out and needed some time to decompress. It’s left me thinking a lot about introversion. On the flip side, I also need to work on my FOMO… being one of the last to go to bed on the first night was not smart. At my age, I should know better.

Blogging

As usual, I didn’t find much time to blog this month, but I did write a thing about Enterprise Architecture, based on Dave Clark and Sophie Marshall’s good work…

The Enterprise Architecture Stack

Away from work

It’s not often that I go to the theatre but I saw the 1990s TV sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey was returning in theatre format with the original cast. I then failed to book tickets, missing it in Milton Keynes by a week. I asked myself if I could be bothered to go to Birmingham instead? Well, why not… I had a birthday so that was an opportunity to do something different!

I loved it, but it’s definitely written for an audience of a certain age (and I fit that demographic). For those less familiar with the original TV programme, it’s still amusing, but it does help to understand the characters and how they have developed over 30 years.

A matinee theatre show in a major city gave us an opportunity for a day out. So, afterwards we wandered down to The Custard Factory in Digbeth, for food and drink at Sobremesa and Rico Libre.

Oh yes, and I couldn’t help but be amused when I spotted that the image on the vinyl wrap in the train toilets contained an empty vodka bottle…

Playing with tech

If last month was about Meshtastic, this month has been Home Assistant. After initially installing on a Raspberry Pi to try it out, I quickly moved to a dedicated device and bought a Home Assistant Green. There was nothing wrong with the Pi installation, but I could use a Raspberry Pi 5 for other things. I’m still getting to grips with dashboards but Home Assistant has pulled all of my various smart devices together into one platform. This thread tells some of the story:

Annoyingly though, iCloud’s “was this you?” messages are not very helpful when you have automated services using your account:

I’ve also been upgrading the home Wi-Fi, moving from a consumer AmpliFi mesh to a solution based on UniFi equipment. That’s been an adventure in itself and will probably be a blog post in its own right.

And, I “went viral” (well, certainly had far more engagement than my normal tweets do), with a family service announcement for Wi-Fi updates…

Elsewhere on the Internet

  • On the need for critical thinking:
  • On outdated anti-WFH rhetoric:
  • On brilliant advertising:
  • On the decline of reporting:
  • On the value (or otherwise) of a degree:
  • On blogging:
  • On whether or not it’s useful to refer to “cyber”:
  • On the reasons that things sometimes cost more than you think they should:

    Travel

    As is usual, supporting Matt with his cycling races has meant a fair amount of travel and this month’s Premier Inn destinations have been… Tiverton and Stockton-on-Tees. Stockton was the overnight stay for the East Cleveland Classic, where I was in the team car all afternoon – and what an experience that was!

    There was also a race in Leicestershire where Matt was in the break for 2 hours before getting caught and then boxed in on the final sprint.

    But the big one was supposed to have been the CiCLE Classic in Rutland, until it was unfortunately cancelled on the day due to biblical rain. I do feel for the organisers in these scenarios, but even more so for the teams that had travelled from overseas.

    Away from cycling, but very exciting, is starting to plan an Interrail trip with Ben this summer. I only have two weeks’ leave available, but i’m pretty sure we’re going to have a brilliant time. It’s not the first time for me – I went solo in the early 1990s – but things have changed a lot since then.

    This month in photos

    Wrap-up

    That’s all for this month… May’s nearly over now but I have some notes ready for a review – hopefully not too long after the end of the month!

    Featured image taken from Node4’s Go To Market video, on LinkedIn

    Monthly Retrospective: March 2024

    Posted on By Mark Wilson

    I managed the weeknotes for 9 weeks. The last one was posted as I was sitting on a plane, about to take off for a long weekend away with my wife. And then I started to take stock. I don’t have time for them. What had been a weekly reflective activity had become a chore.

    And then the unwritten thoughts started to build in my mind. There were still things that I wanted to share. And the feedback had been positive, though the weekly cadence was probably too much.

    So here we are. A new concept: Monthly Retrospective; 12 posts a year instead of 52. Maybe a better chance of me getting it out of the door on time too? I don’t promise it will be published exactly on the end of each month (I’m a week into April as I finish this post), but it will be there or thereabouts…

    So what’s up this month?

    Here’s a quick summary of what’s in the rest of the post

    • We have the tech – both at work and at home. Plus a few of the many interesting things I’ve spotted on my Internet travels (I still post most of them on X, and a more professionally curated set of posts on LinkedIn).
    • We have the events – typically evenings, attended to expand my knowledge.
    • We have the entertainment – music, film, TV.
    • We have life – family and friends.
    • And we have the photos – snapshots of life viewed through my iPhone.

    So let’s get started…

    In tech: at work

    I’m busy, busy as always at work, with more organisational changes to keep me on my toes. One thing I’ve tended to avoid in recent years is working on bids. This is partly because I find there’s invariably a slow start and a mad rush to complete before the deadline, and partly because I prefer to work on a consulting-led sell where I have helped to shape the solution. In a competitive tender scenario someone else has influenced the client, so you’re already on the back foot, second-guessing what the client needs cf. what the invitation to tender says they want. In this case, one of my colleagues asked me to help out, and we have a few weeks to create our solution. It’s also a really interesting project so I’m enjoying pulling this solution together.

    Meanwhile, the ransomware service is also moving forwards, though not as fast as I would like (or, more to the point, as fast as my boss would like). All being well, I’ll have something to shout about in next month’s retrospective.

    In tech: at home

    I’m still playing around with Meshtastic, with one node travelling mobile with me and another soon to be set up at home. Here’s the thread with the progress:

    In addition to the excellent Meshtastic website, Andy Kirby’s YouTube channel has tons of information.

    Other home projects include researching which CCTV cameras to put up (almost certainly from Reolink) and how to get an Ethernet cable to them…

    In tech: some of the things I stumbled across this month

    Some bits and pieces:

    • Advice to help build genAI prompts:
    • One of the many issues with QR codes:
    • Remembering some security advice I used last year:
    • One of my favourite design projects:

    In events

    March saw me getting out to a few tech events in the evenings

    • Milton Keynes Geek Night (MKGN) is always a good night out. In truth, it’s not really geeky these days – more creative – but I enjoy most of the talks and after a dozen years of attendance, I know a lot of the people in the crowd. This was the thread I created with the highlights from MKGN number 47:
    • A few days later, I headed down to London for the Windows Azure User Group Meetup. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use Node4’s London office, so I worked from the British Library and other locations for most of the day, before heading over to Elastacloud for the event in the evening. After Richard Conway (in/richardelastacloud) introduced the evening, Steph Locke (@TheStephLocke) from Microsoft talked about AI Landing Zones before Andy Cross (in/crossandy) gave a hilarious demonstration of how the death of coding is a little way off yet, even with multiple AI agents collaborating…
    • Towards the end of the month, I went to the inaugural NN1 Dev Club event, mostly to see what it’s about. I’m not a developer (though I might like to be…) and it seemed a good opportunity to get to know some of the tech folks in another nearby town. I enjoyed the talks – both PJ Evans (@MrPJEvans)’ tales of home automation (“Boiling Nemo”) and Dr Junade Ali (/in/junade)’s tales from the world of security research (“The Science of Software Engineering”) – so I’m sure I’ll be back for more events in future.

    In entertainment

    Cover image for The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier

    When I was about 8 or 9, I read a book at school. I couldn’t remember much about it, except that it was about some children travelling across Europe, it was set in WW2, Warsaw was a part of it, and I really enjoyed it. I asked a group of friends if they remembered something like this and one asked ChatGPT. ChatGPT thought it might be The Silver Sword, by Ian Serraillier. I read the synopsis and that was it! Why I never thought to ask an AI, I have no idea, but it worked. I then had a very enjoyable few hours in the car listening to the audio book…

    On the subject of books, some more reading has arrived:

    This month’s TV has been about:

    • Explosive action (deliberate pun) Trigger Point, S2 (ITV).
    • Laid back and delightfully silly Detectorists, S2 (Netflix).
    • Stunning landscapes mixed with murder mystery Shetland, S8 (BBC).

    None are new, but they had been on the list for a while. The jury is still out on Shetland without Douglas Henshall in the main character role though.

    I’ve also decided that I need to get out to some gigs. My wife’s not into the electronic music that I enjoy so much and I was thinking about heading down to Greenwich with my youngest son for a Day with Chicane. Unfortunately the gig is 18+ and he will be 3 months short of adulthood, so maybe that will wait a while longer.

    In life: a trip to Tallinn

    The month started with a trip to Tallinn, Estonia. Nikki and I were celebrating 21 years of marriage and we had a fantastic weekend exploring a new city. As a country that’s been in and out of Soviet control several times in modern history we were not sure what to expect. What we found was a beautiful medieval city, food that seemed more Scandinavian than Eastern European, and public transport that was cheap and plentiful.

    Our hotel was only just outside the old town, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so we didn’t actually need to use the transport much (the city is compact enough to walk). Even so, €2 each way for a bus to/from the airport seemed amazing value.

    Similarly, we ate and drank well at remarkably good prices compared with the UK – whether that was hot chocolate in Pierre Chocolaterie, hot wine in Ill Draakon (a medieval-themed bar), or one of the modern Estonian restaurants that we dined in. (For future reference, they were: Kaerajaan, Rataskaevu 16 and Pegasus). I came home thinking that, for the most part, the UK is a very dull and overpriced culinary destination.

    Other highlights were a visit to the top of the tower at the Niguliste Museum for views across the city. We also enjoyed a walk along the old town walls. Outside the old town, we took a short walk to Telliskivi and visited the photography exhibitions at Fotografiska.

    If you’re inspired by this and you fancy a trip to Tallinn (highly recommended), we flew with Wizz Air from London Luton and the Visit Tallinn website has a mine of information.

    Oh yes, and linking back to tech for a moment, I forgot that the delivery robots I see in Milton Keynes and Northampton have Estonian cousins…

    …and was amused to see people out and about experiencing virtual reality headsets in the centre of Tallinn…

    In life: a Welshman in Twickenham

    I may have been born in Northampton, but I identify as Welsh. And certainly when it comes to international Rugby Union, my team plays in red. I wasn’t going to say “no” though when I got the opportunity to watch England host Ireland at Twickenham. What a game! The final drop kick was at the other end of the pitch to me, but it was a brilliant match to be at.

    In life: sporty teens

    As ever, my sons are a huge part of what I get up to outside work. With Matt away in Spain, I was able to get to watch Ben play Hockey a bit more, including the Eastern Counties U17 tournament. Now Matt’s returned and he’s racing as much as he can, trying to get his Category 1 (and maybe Elite, if he can get enough points) road race licence. That needs my support sometimes (passing bottles, driving on the longer trips). At the other end of the scale, it was exciting to be able to watch him pick up a win at our local race:

    It’s fantastic to see the support he gets from his own teammates and some of the guys he’s racing against too (the video cuts off Richard Wiggins exclaiming “he’s got it!” just as I hit record). #ProudDad

    After a couple more races that I didn’t get to see (and didn’t exactly go to plan), he wrapped up the month with a particularly eventful weekend. On the Saturday, a couple of punctures meant his race only lasted a few minutes, but that was probably lucky as we then found the steerer tube at the top of his fork had a huge crack in it…

    That afternoon and evening, he rebuilt onto one of the spare cyclocross frames that were waiting to be set up, and then raced the Fakenham town centre crit’ on Sunday. It was a wet afternoon and my heart was in my mouth for the whole race but coming in third after an early break and leading for a good chunk of the race was a great result.

    In photos

    Wrap-up

    That’s all for this month… please let me know what you think in the comments and I’ll be back in early May to recap on April… plus, hopefully, with extra time for some other posts in between.

    Featured image by 139904 from Pixabay.