Despite the news I won’t be joining the exodus from Twitter to Mastodon or deleting my account. I understand the inclination and I’ll miss everyone who makes the switch but while I suspect there is every chance it will either become (even more of) a horror show or a ghost-town in my corner of things I’m going down with the ship. I’ve tried migrating before and it just didn’t work for me – maybe I’m just too old and set in my ways now. Twitter has been the centre of my community for 15 years and if the Muskrat brings it down I’ll find solace in my blogging here and dust off a few of those Slack log-ins I guess.
I don’t really know why last weeks note was so much more popular than usual but it really was. I think in the end it was visited five or six times more than any other post in this ‘season’. Honestly I’ll never understand why some things strike a nerve or not but I guess that is part of the fun. I always say I only write these for myself – and that is mainly true but I don’t mind the dopamine hit of a popular post (your definition of popular may differ!).
The defining topic of this week was people. It was a very HRy week.
I did a bunch of admin to get things sorted for two new starters in a couple of weeks, went down a rabbit hole of ‘workforce planning’ processes to make sure our people data actually reflected our real world deployments, which was important so that my upcoming vacancies were mapped to the correct roles, so that I have some vacancies to talk about at SiliconMilkRoundabout in a couple of weeks. I also did a couple of probation check-ins, a few 1-2-1s and spent half a day swearing at our contractor suppliers ‘portal’ while being very polite to the people trying to get it to work for me.
I subbed in for Miranda at our DDaT SMT and volunteered to do a couple of sessions at our upcoming DDaTfest (our all-hands) – shockingly enough those sessions are about working in the open and recruitment. At least I am a two trick pony I guess.
I also volunteered to support the Gov Product People Unconference in January.
Pretty much every day I am dropping an interesting (your definition of interesting may differ!) link into one of more general Teams channels. There is every chance that this is driving people crazy at this point but I’m hoping the way to stop me is for other people to contribute.
Oh and my last weeknote spurred someone to get in touch about me doing a bit of mentoring for them – which is lovely as I’ve known them a bit for years now. I hope I can be helpful.
The most exciting happening of the week though was that Christmas Sandwich Season is upon us. The happiest time of the year.
Road to 50 – 2003
The Black Album – Jay-Z
Digital by Default 