Dealing with a bereavement using online services — A recent death in my family made me switch to being a user in managing a significant life event. I had a number of joys and frustrations in dealing with this so I thought, in the spirit of working in the open, I’d capture them as user research to share…

It’s been a heady week of news nationally; the GOV.UK Strategy rethink spawning numerous twitter responses from the digital community, Apple launching its strap-on face furniture that could raise the stakes for how VR/AR is used and empty wallets in the process, plus political shenanigans aplenty in the UK and…

This week I managed to travel 1,112 miles to attend an event, get there and home again in the space of 41 hours, and not stay in a hotel. The only bad part of the experience was the ‘vegan sausage in morning roll with sweet pickle’ breakfast. It was really…

(I’m shamelessly stealing my colleague’s favourite description of our current pattern of work for this weeknote title) In short, there’s a lot going on; customers about to go live, The Big Project on the verge of completing, my own project kicking off, more demands on what we need to get…

It turns out grand children have no respect for proper release planning. Rather than waiting for her place in the next sprint, young Lilian Rose decided that the early hours of Sunday morning was a more appropriate time for delivery than her planned caesarean section 3 weeks from now. I’m…

I’ve been thinking about things that bring pleasure this week, partly after watching American Beauty and seeing it so starkly portrayed, but partly through some of the work I’ve been doing. …

Blog post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Trying out Daily Notes My reflections recently on how my weeknotes are often influenced by the most recent events (what I like to call the ‘Oscars Awards Syndrome’) has led me to trying out Daily Notes this week as a way of better recording events throughout a week. Private ones though. This was influenced…

What a difference a week makes — Writing weeknotes is a cathartic process. Particularly last week where I’d logged off, convinced that everything had been bad, and then worked through events properly in my mind as I wrote things down the next morning. …

More downs than ups — This week was meant to have been the quiet week, where everyone is off on Easter holidays, leaving me swathes of free time due to lack of meetings, and allowing me to get my teeth into work always being set aside for another day. Monday looked like being just like…