After three weeks off, waking up just after 6am for five days in a row was a shock to the system. On Saturday I woke up when my wife brought up a cup of tea and then promptly fell back to sleep, not waking until well after 9am. I think I needed the catch-up.

I feel lucky that I looked forward to getting back to work. I enjoy it. Although I was already busy and didn’t get through all of the things I wanted to, it was good to be back.

Walking to the office on Tuesday was a shock as the temperature was minus 5°C, with a very chilly wind blowing in my face. My big headphones double up as earmuffs (which is a big reason why I don’t think I could go back to earbuds of any kind) but for the first time I can remember, my head was still getting cold. Throughout the week the rain came and froze overnight, which made for very hairy journeys on foot to the train station each day.

This was a week in which I:

• Had Monday off to drop our eldest son at the airport for his trip back to college in Texas, USA. It’s been lovely having him at home over the past three weeks, and he’s made the most out of being able to see and catch up with his friends. The US ‘spring break’ holiday isn’t as substantial as our two-week Easter holiday here in the UK, so we may not see him in person again until the summer. He seems happy there, and I’m so glad he’s doing something that he wants to do.
• Welcomed a colleague back from leave after they had taken time off for a major operation as well as Christmas. They had been out of the office for over a month and had been sorely missed.
• Focused on the final preparation for the reopening of the shared meeting space in our office, equipped with technology that we will own, run and support. We met with our audio-visual design consultant to discuss the final minor issues and agree a few small tweaks to the setup. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re ready to go.
• Spent time with one of our senior colleagues in our sister company to talk through the design philosophy for one of the larger meeting spaces. Our experience is that we need to keep the technology as simple as possible. Adding components adds complexity and leads to meeting rooms performing poorly. There are some compromises we’ve decided on when keeping it simple, but it’s the place we want to start from.
• Took our head of Marketing and Communications to the shared space to review and provide input on our preference for the lighting colour temperature for the reception and corridor.
• Had the weekly meeting with the project manager from our sister company for an update on their refurbishment project as well as the work being done by the landlord. Our catering service reopens next week; it will be interesting to see a busy company café after having been without it for most of last year.
• Picked up the work to find a more permanent office in a city where we set up a legal entity for the first time last year.
• Joined a meeting for a technology security project we are running, and agreed how we will approach certain aspects of the work.
• Met the project team who are working on replacing our default PDF editor to agree how we will approach the change management for the rollout.
• Joined a project meeting for our document management initiative to review our status, and to ensure that we have agreed the prerequisites before we start with our first end-users.
• Took delivery of our lovely new chairs for our internal boardroom. The room now has a ‘new car’ smell to it.
• Had our first management team meeting of the year, with almost everyone in the virtual room. I also had a very long and expansive one-to-one meeting with my boss. I’m going to miss these when they are no longer part of my working life one day.
• Went out with most of our London team for lunch, after having failed to organise anything prior to Christmas. Going out in the first week of January might actually be better, as it’s less hectic everywhere. Enoteca da Luca was fine, but somewhat disappointing both in the food as well as the service.
• Took my wife back to the hospital for a checkup on her eye. The consultants are pleased with her progress but gave her yet another course of eye drops to use.
• Had an abdominal ultrasound, the latest step in trying to diagnose why I occasionally get stomach pain. I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that it is caused by some combination of lots of cycling and poor posture.
• Got the rear wiper blade replaced on our car. I felt like a chump when I paid Halfords a few extra pounds for fitting, and then watched as the mechanic swapped it over in less than 10 seconds. Hopefully by the time it comes to replace it again, I’ll remember how easy it is and will do it myself.
• Bought ourselves a new sandwich toaster to liven up lunches at home.
• Got an email from Microsoft to say that the cost of our family Microsoft 365 subscription would be going from £79.99 to £104.99 per year, ahead of our renewal in February. I’ve cancelled the auto-renewal for now and will try to look at buying a discounted code from somewhere to top up our family account. Although it makes sense to use Copilot at work, I don’t see any need to pay for it for personal use when I already pay for another AI service.
• Did more cycling indoors as the temperatures meant that it is still too dangerous to go out.
  

Media

Podcasts

• On the typically excellent Politics Weekly America podcast, guest Anne Applebaum puts forward a shocking but highly plausible theory why Donald Trump wants the USA to annex Greenland (emphasis mine):
  

Anne Applebaum: And the Danes were, at that time, just mystified because the U.S. has a series of treaties with Denmark that have allowed the U.S. to place military bases on Greenland for decades. And actually, in recent years, they’ve withdrawn many of those bases. So there used to be more. And actually, at one point, there were American nuclear weapons based in Greenland. If the U.S. wanted troops there, and if it wanted to put them there in conjunction with the Danes and cooperation with the Danes, there would be no problem. And so the argument that U.S. needs this for some kind of security reason just falls through immediately. It makes absolutely no sense.

Secondly, there’s an argument about minerals and maybe oil in Greenland. Again, if you want to dig for something in Greenland, you can do it now. You can apply for a license. The Danes will let you go. It’s actually proven to be very difficult to work there because Greenland is very cold and there is a lot of ice. And that is very hard for anybody who wants to extract anything from the soil of Greenland. And so there hasn’t actually been, at least when I was there a year ago, they were telling me that there were almost no U.S. companies that wanted to do this anyway.

In a phone call with the Danish prime minister, and this is, again, about a year ago, they began talking about Greenland. And Trump was unable to articulate in that phone call why he wanted it. And this was very distressing to Danes, because if you can’t explain it, then we can’t find an answer for what it is that you want. And so the conclusion I’ve come to is that he wants it as a statement of power and dominance, that he thinks it would make the United States look bigger. And that’s his real interest in it. That may sound silly or stupid, but actually, if you think about how empires were formed in past centuries, it’s not really all that different. You know, we’re going to stick the flag there no matter what. The fact that Trump just wants it because that’s how he feels is a terrifyingly crazy reason to do something that could end in the breakup of NATO.

• A big news theme of the week was how Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok is being used to create sexualised images of people, including children. By the weekend, the ability to use this on Twitter/X had been restricted to paying customers. On Sunday’s episode of Quiet Riot, Alex Andreou talked about the fear he believes the government has that inhibits them from speaking out. There’s more on this sorry topic in the Articles section below.
  

Alex Andreou: I honestly think it is a kind of fear of this sphere of technology that prevents people from regulating it effectively. Because actually, if you take it back to first principles, you would never be awestruck by the way a toaster works. You would never say, “Oh, I don’t know if it electrocutes people. Might it actually be for a technical reason?” Who cares? You make the toaster. It’s your responsibility not to electrocute people using it. I don’t understand why people see it as any way different, especially in a situation where someone fully owns this website, this platform, this AI that operates on it. Like, just do it.

Articles

• Ton Zylstra has a lovely post about his year in reading, getting through 80 (yes, eighty) books in 2025, completely outside of the Amazon ecosystem.
• I’ve got two whiteboards in my home office and I’ve been pondering about how I can use them more effectively. I haven’t found any great posts on the topic yet. However, I did find that back in 2018, Alan Cooper posted about how he has used them at work to make interviews more effective:
  

Whiteboards were also a vital hiring tool at Cooper. Back before any universities offered degrees in our field, determining whether someone had the aptitude for interaction design was problematic. So we offered various practical tests. Our most effective one was devilishly simple. I’d quickly draw a big dialog box on the whiteboard, then hand the marker to the candidate and instruct them to, “Make it better.” The candidate would offer some change to the dialog, whereupon we’d say, “Make it still better.” After two or three iterations of this game, we could pretty much tell if they were charlatans, theorists, or consulting designers. And most of all, we could tell if they were visual thinkers by the way they used the whiteboard. Eventually, my colleague, Wayne Greenwood, named this “The Five-Step Design Test.” He said, “It’s five steps to the whiteboard and you’d better have an answer by the time you get there.”

• Craig Coben in the Financial Times writes that “In finance, there can be too few reasons to leave”:
  

Indeed, the smarter move might be to stop trying to replicate what you had. Take the impairment charge and redirect your skillset towards work that actually wants what you are offering: lecturing, consulting, public service, even writing. Restructure your career before someone restructures it for you.

• Joan Westenberg’s The Case for Blogging in the Ruins is an excellent read:
  

I keep thinking about how many interesting folks have essentially stopped writing anything substantial because they’ve moved their entire intellectual presence to Twitter or Substack Notes. These are people who used to produce ten-thousand-word explorations of complex topics, and now they produce dozens of disconnected fragments per day, each one optimized for immediate engagement and none of them building toward anything coherent.

It’s like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones.

• Anil Dash asks “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?” He touches on the “idealistic and positive goals” that got many people into technology in the first place and how challenging it is to keep these front and centre. (Which in my view is why the Society for Hopeful Technologists has emerged.)
  

As I’ve been fond of saying for a long time: don’t let your job get in the way of your career.

Build habits and routines that serve your own professional goals. As much as you can, participate in the things that get your name out into your professional community, whether that’s in-person events in your town, or writing on a regular basis about your area of expertise, or mentoring with those who are new to your field. You’ll never regret building relationships with people, or being generous with your knowledge in ways that remind others that you’re great at what you do.

If your time and budget permit, attend events in person or online where you can learn from others or respond to the ideas that others are sharing. The more people can see and remember that you’re engaged with the conversations about your discipline, the greater the likelihood that they’ll reach out when the next opportunity arises.

Similarly, take every chance you can to be generous to others when you see a door open that might be valuable for them. I can promise you, people will never forget that you thought of them in their time of need, even if they don’t end up getting that role or nabbing that interview.

• Bryce Elder’s FT AlphaVille article on “Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter” is just perfect.
• Erin Kissane and Alexis Madrigal pointed the way to reducing time with your phone— make it greyscale. Inspired by this micro post, I tried it out for myself and can confirm that it does indeed leave your phone in a usable but dispiriting and unattractive state. To do this on an iPhone you do the following (thanks to ChatGPT for the summary):
  

1. Set greyscale as your chosen filter
   
   • Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Colour Filters
   • Turn Colour Filters On
   • Choose Greyscale
   • Turn Colour Filters back Off so your phone stays normal colour until you toggle it.
2. Assign it to the Accessibility Shortcut
   
   • Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut
   • Tick Colour Filters
3. Use it
   
   • Triple-click the Side button (Face ID iPhones) or Home button (older iPhones) to toggle colour ⇄ greyscale.
   • Tip: if you select only Colour Filters in the Accessibility Shortcut list, it toggles instantly; if you select multiple features, you’ll get a little chooser menu.
     

• Ethan Mollick’s post on Claude Code is the best thing I read this week. It is perfectly pitched for my level of understanding. I think I’m now of the view that coding in high-level languages will become niche, in the same way that machine code and assembly coding did:
  

I opened Claude Code and gave it the command: “Develop a web-based or software-based startup idea that will make me $1000 a month where you do all the work by generating the idea and implementing it. i shouldn’t have to do anything at all except run some program you give me once. it shouldn’t require any coding knowledge on my part, so make sure everything works well.” The AI asked me three multiple choice questions and decided that I should be selling sets of 500 prompts for professional users for $39. Without any further input, it then worked independently… FOR AN HOUR AND FOURTEEN MINUTES creating hundreds of code files and prompts. And then it gave me a single file to run that created and deployed a working website (filled with very sketchy fake marketing claims) that sold the promised 500 prompt set. You can actually see the site it launched here, though I removed the sales link, which did actually work and would have collected money. I strongly suspect that if I ignored my conscience and actually sold these prompt packs, I would make the promised $1,000.

• Molly White defines 2025 as “The year of technoligarchy”.
• Paris Marx says that X/Twitter should be banned, and I don’t disagree. The Guardian has a good summary of what blew up this week. Here in the UK, we have lots of regulations on what traditional print and television media can publish, but technology platforms have so far been regulated far less effectively. I’ve seen the remarks that banning or blocking X/Twitter would be a free speech issue, but I don’t see it — there are many other platforms that you can use to exercise your right to speak out. It goes beyond a question of a platform moderating its user-generated content, to a set of tools that provides people with the ability to create sexualised images of people, including children. As an absolute minimum, governments and corporations should no longer use it as a primary communications medium; other tools are available.
• Elizabeth Lopatto says that Apple and Google are hypocritical, and Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards, to keep the X/Twitter apps available in their respective app stores given their own guidelines and the companies’ previous statements.
• John Gruber agrees: “It’s wise for Cook and Pichai to pick their battles. This one, I think, is worth picking. This is a moment when the App Store and Play Store can stand firmly on the side of longstanding and correct societal norms.“
• Jonathan Freedland writes in the Guardian about how Trump is “ruling like a global emperor”.
• I’ve been pondering my stance of not paying for any Substack subscriptions based on their monetisation of hate. In times like this, I would love to read newsletters such as Comment is Freed, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.
  

Video

• Started watching the new series of The Night Manager. It’s fine, but as I get older I tend to find these kind of shows a bit silly. The suspension of disbelief required has to be matched by the quality of the acting. I also think I would be a terrible secret agent, given how much critical stuff you are required to commit to memory.
• Conversely, we abandoned Down Cemetery Road after 15 minutes. Everyone in it is a ridiculous caricature. Life’s too short to spend it on stuff like this.
• Really enjoyed One Battle After Another (2025). Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn are both such great actors. The film didn’t feel as long as it was, and I was never completely sure where things were going.
• Watched A Damsel in Distress (1937) as part of my ongoing project to watch all of Fred Astaire’s musical films. Her name is one of those that you just know, but I don’t think I’ve ever watched Gracie Allen before. She was an absolute delight in this film, with so many great little one-liners where she misinterprets what’s being said. The ‘whisk broom’ dance to Put Me to the Test was so much fun. The story wasn’t great, but this was much more enjoyable than Shall We Dance (1937) that I watched last week.

Web

• The MTV simulator is such a delight. At one point this week I had this running on my TV’s in-built web browser, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to make it full screen.
  

Books

• Manton Reece’s post alerted me to the fact that his book on Indie Microblogging book is ‘finished’. I paid for this some years ago but lost touch with where the project had got to. I picked up the ePub copy and have started devouring it.
  

Next week: Reopening of the shared spaces in our office, and a trip to an art gallery.

On Wednesday I turned 49. One of the fun things about being born on New Year’s Eve is that the next day I can already say that I will be 50 this year. Because my birthday sits in the middle of a break from work, this part of the year is always very reflective for me.

When I turned 40, I was surprised that I had a bit more of a mid-life ‘wobble’ than I thought I would. I distinctly remember walking to my office, pondering where I was and what I wanted to do with the rest of my career. I started looking for a new job, which ultimately ended up with me becoming a contractor 18 months later, working for a client that is now my employer.

Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself in this same place of reflection, a year earlier than when it hit me last time. I’ve got 27 years of my working life behind me and — if I stay healthy and retire at 67 — 18 years ahead, which makes it feel more important that I spend my remaining time well.

Catching up with podcasts and reading over the Christmas break has got me thinking about what I should do with my career. I consider myself a technologist, but my career took an early turn into systems analysis and project management, and I am now a generalist technology manager CIO-type person.

(As an aside, I’ve always struggled with what my specialism is, which makes it very difficult to have a snappy way to present myself. I’ve watched with envy and admiration as my friend Lisa Riemers introduces herself as “usually the techiest person in a comms team, or the commsiest person in a tech team”, which is a superb description. The best I can come up with is a fumbly explanation of being “a generalist technology manager, with a background in managing large programmes and projects”, which feels as though it falls short of what I can do.)

Is managing teams of technologists how I should focus my remaining time? Or should I instead be looking at getting back into the technology, which ultimately was my first love? Simon Willison’s end-of-year summary of 2025 in large language models is an excellent read, and got me wondering whether the future of people working in technology departments will be those that can do all of the soft skills stuff, plus work with coding agent tools such as Claude Code to quickly create prototypes and applications? A ‘full stack IT manager’ who can bring code to the table, perhaps. Is exploring this a safer bet to keep myself employable until I retire, or should I continue my generalist, managerial focus?

I’m still thinking about Steve Kamb’s post on The Glass Cannon Strategy that I linked to a couple of weeks ago. In it, he transcribed Ben Thompson’s advice from an episode of the Sharp Tech podcast:

People are so hyper aware of what they’re bad at.

They spend so much time trying to get better at what they’re bad at.

You will never [receive outsized returns this way].

Figure out a series of hacks, systems, put yourself in a position where your weaknesses don’t matter…

and what matters is your strengths… so that you become so unique and powerful that companies will hire a hundred people to take care of everything you’re bad at.

They don’t want you wasting your time on what you’re bad at, they want you doing what you’re great at.”

I’ve never been completely convinced that what I’ve proven myself to be good at (managing programmes, working with teams of people) is what I love doing. Every time I sit down to write, I find myself loving the process. Making connections with people across the Internet has been a passion of mine for thirty years. The geek in me looks longingly at people who work with code all day. I don’t know whether diving into LLM coding is the best use of my time. The last time I was doing any serious coding, we worked with raw text files in a text editor and a basic source control tool, way before Git and GitHub were invented. Is it even feasible to dive into the world of integrated development environments (IDEs) for any useful outcome if I’m snatching an hour here and there? I’m sure I’m overthinking it. Maybe a little dabbling would be good.

What I do know is that I want to learn more until I’m happy that I have a good working knowledge of how stuff works. In a recent Stratechery update, Ben Thompson talks about Amazon’s announcement of Nova Forge, a large language model offering that allows you, the customer, to incorporate your own data into the model training:

Right now you have two ways to incorporate your company’s data into an AI model: first, you can use RAG to basically have a model search your company’s data in the context of providing an answer. Second, you can post-train a model on your company’s data. The shortcoming in both approaches is that your company’s data isn’t actually in the model, which can lead to unsatisfying results.

Nova Forge is an offering built on AWS’s internally produced AI models; because they own the Nova models, they own the training checkpoints. What you can do with Nova Forge is choose a checkpoint — say, when the model is 80% trained — and infuse your company’s data at that point, so that the data is integrated into the model itself, and not simply searched or trained-in after-the-fact.

I think this is a really compelling offering, even if Nova is fairly middling as a model. After all, what is more useful: an OK model that actually knows your company, or a leading-edge model that is hacking around the edges to give relevant answers?

I understand this conceptually at a high level, but it isn’t enough for me. What does “80% trained” mean? What 80%? And why is that better than training the model 100% and then extending the training with your own data? (Does that make it a new 100%?) I don’t know where I can go to get into the weeds on this without getting mired and lost in too much technical detail, but I want to learn.

I’m not big on New Year resolutions, but I have been thinking about trying to get back into the habit of messaging old friends to say hello. (Although I will try and avoid turning into one of the small collection of LinkedIn connections that message me every year on my birthday. Do they do this for everyone? It must be exhausting.) I’m also going to try and answer the phone to people I know the first time they call instead of letting it ring out and calling back at a time that’s slightly more convenient to me.

Aside from pondering my life as I approach my half century, this was a week in which I:

• Spent some bike-related time with our youngest son. Early in the week I was about to leap on the indoor trainer but he suggested we go out. He did great, tackling a 65km ride and opting to climb Tom’s Hill right at the end. The only blot on the ride was three ridiculously close passes in a row by some dreadful drivers that had me fuming. The weather turned too cold and icy for any more outdoor cycling, but we reset a very old iPad and installed TrainerRoad so that he can attempt a structured training plan. Watching him do his first ramp test was a proud moment.
• Went for a 10km run with our eldest boy, the same day that I’d been out cycling with the youngest. It was fun, and great to be out running with him again. But at this point, I started to have my suspicions that they had colluded and were attempting to hasten my demise.
• Took a couple of trips to the indoor running track at Lee Valley with our eldest. Both times, the ratio of travelling to running time seemed way out of kilter, but it was great to have an excuse to spend some time with him.
  

• Found it challenging that the daylight hours are so short. As soon as you’ve done any activity, it seems as though the sun is going down.
• Had fun talking to Evan Schwartz, the software engineer behind Scour. He got in contact after reading my recent post on tools for discovering the IndieWeb. I love giving feedback on products and getting on board with other people’s ideas. We had a great discussion, and before the day was out he had already implemented one of the features that I suggested. It’s a really interesting tool to play with and I’ve been discovering some great blog posts through using it.
• Found out that in order to claim on the house insurance, there needs to have been a specific ‘event’ and not just wear and tear. I got in contact with our insurer to find out about the process of claiming for our recent roof leak, given that we’ll need re-roofing and redecorating to repair the damage. The very helpful representative told me that they use some specific weather databases to find out if there was a storm around the time that we think the problem started. If there was no storm, we can’t claim.
• Hand-washed the car with an actual bucket and sponge. We’ve had our current car for over five years and I’m not sure that I’ve ever washed it before. After numerous complaints on the dashboard that the cameras needed cleaning I thought it was about time I did it.
• Took advantage of the dry weather to finally vacuum up most of the fallen leaves in our back garden. I managed to fill up an entire bulk bag before running out of daylight. The next day we had a light dusting of snow, which hasn’t thawed yet, so the remaining vacuuming will have to wait.
• Enjoyed listening to Massive Attack’s Protection at the WB-40 Album Club. I don’t think I’d heard it since the 1990s. I found out that Plex on Sonos automatically searches across all libraries that you have access to, which is seemingly the only place that I use Plex where it does this. (I’d love this functionality to appear in PlexAmp.) I streamed the album from a friend and it sounded great.
• Got an impromptu invite to a friend’s New Year’s Eve party at their house a couple of streets away. Our children are now at the age where they want to spend NYE with their friends, but until they have fully locked-in plans it’s difficult for us to decide what we’re doing. Walking two minutes to a proper old-school house party was just what we needed. They are amazing hosts and we had a great time. I don’t drink very much, so I left around 1am as the party started to move into overdrive. Apparently it didn’t finish until 4am, which would be enough to give me a hangover without having touched a drop.
  

• Went back to the same friend’s house a couple of days later for our in-person Album Club. We listened to Lost Souls, the first album by Doves. They are a band with a fascinating history, who in 1993 as Sub Sub scored a hit with Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use). I first heard them as Doves on Come On Try Young a cover CD compilation that was given away with the NME in 2000. At some point I think I ripped a friend’s copy of Lost Souls into my iTunes library, but I don’t remember ever sitting down to listen to the whole thing. It was wonderful to do that this week.

• Went for a belated birthday dinner on New Year’s Day at Pluma in Amersham. The food was excellent, but it is one of those places where you miss out quite a lot through not eating meat.
• Went on the indoor bike trainer almost every day, as it is too cold to ride outside. I came across this video of cyclists coming off on black ice when the temperature was 5°C. This once happened to me on a mountain bike, so I’m happy not to risk it.

• Went to a friend’s 40th birthday party at a pub in Taplow. People had come from far and wide to be there, including Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. He and his wife always have such an interesting group of friends at their events and it was great to meet some more of them.
  

Media

Podcasts

• I’ve been trying to catch up with my podcast backlog over Christmas but so far have only made it to mid-December. Pocket Casts now tells me that I exited last year with 1,801 podcast episodes listened to. I’m not sure if that’s a thing to be proud of.
• Ethan Mollick and Molly Kinder, guests on a recent episode of Your Undivided Attention on the topic of AI and the Future of Work, posed some useful questions. What do agile software development practices, such as a two-week sprint, look like when a software developer is many times more productive due to having an AI coding assistant? What does a daily standup meeting look like? The tools may be steering us into a world which is not optimal or equitable for workers. Who really gains from the upside of AI? They note that AI benchmarks are weird in that they try to measure whether an AI is better than a human; wouldn’t it be better to benchmark how much better the AI can make a human?
• Sharp Tech tackled an interesting listener question whose family discussions around the Thanksgiving family dinner table had a big anti-technology slant to them. The listener wanted some advice as to how to push back when these topics come up, defending technology in a hopeful way. Technological shifts can be difficult for individuals, but the benefits to society — and the whole world — have been immense. Ben Thompson pointed to the world shown through the works of Charles Dickens and asked whether people would really rather return to that. He also said that “I like to point to the agricultural revolution. 98% of people used to work in agriculture and today 2% do.” I think the number is off from a global perspective, but the point is well made.
• Really enjoyed Manton Reece’s appearance on the Software Defined Interviews podcast. His micro.blog platform is directly responsible for making me think differently about my site, and its philosophy gave me the mental permission I needed to write and post more. This week he posted on his site that “The call to action is clear. Get a domain name and start writing. Short posts, long posts. It’s okay if you haven’t figured everything out yet. With time it’ll all come together.”
• Arthur Snell’s conversation with former MP and author Bob Seely on the Russia-Ukraine conflict is terrifying.
  

Bob Seely: So we need to understand how to develop hard power in the new era. Fundamentally, that means understanding drone warfare and the fundamental changes in doctrine that are being caused by drones, by mass of drones, by automation of drones, swarms linked by AI and artificial learning … we have to keep a much closer eye on our internet cables and energy supply cables, because I suspect the Russians have probably already planted devices on them to be able to blow them up and destroy them.

British and NATO generals who say, fundamentally, doctrine hasn’t really changed are talking nonsense. One or two of them do say that. Quite a few of them now don’t. And unless we learn pretty quickly, we are going to be in a world of pain.

Unless you have an answer to the problem, what happens on day one of a physical — a traditional war, for want of a better term — in, let’s say, the Baltic Republics, when you have at 6am in the morning, at D hour plus 30 seconds, you have 10,000 fibre-optic linked suicide drones come at your bases … unless you have a phenomenally good response to that, you are going to be in a world of pain. And right now, there is absolutely no response. Just to say we have 300 big sexy missiles that cost a million quid each and can do some damage, great. They may not survive Russian electronic warfare, and you will run out of them by the afternoon on the second day of the war.

• The conversation did float some good ideas about raising awareness amongst the public about where we are:
  

Arthur Snell: it feels to me as if society really has a very shallow grasp on the seriousness of what is facing us and the degree of change that’s needed. How do we tackle that?

Bob Seely: I think you need an informed population, which is what we don’t have at the moment. When the government says we need to prepare for war, but is not actually spending anything else on defence, it is very difficult to argue that the government believes its own message … I think what you need is to educate the population. And I would say there are two things immediately that one can do.

You need an annual statement of threat. So the British state needs to produce, maybe under the guise of a respected parliamentary committee, which will take evidence from MI5, MI6, GCHQ, other people within government, that you have a serious look of threats that are emanating from other countries. Whether those threats are military, whether they’re economic, whether they’re informational, you know, the whole gauntlet of threat in order to counter the total war or the forms of, you know, total integrated hybrid, call it what you will, warfare of our potential adversaries. So we need a respected part of our institutions and our establishment in the UK to actually produce something of worth that will educate and help inform people separate from the work being done by government.

I would secondarily also have a statement of economic dependency where, again, a respected committee, which is free of government influence, will produce a statement to understand the threats, the economic threats specifically, and specifically the over-dependence on any specific countries, i.e. China, in our supply chains.

Articles

• Veteran news reporter John Simpson has written a sober summary of 2025.
• The Polymarket website came to my attention through a couple of routes this week. It’s a website that allows you to bet on pretty much anything, including notable world events. 404 Media have a write-up of how an ‘unauthorised’ edit to the front line of the Russia-Ukraine conflict led to a payout. Dare Obesanjo pointed to someone turning USD 32k into USD 436k by betting on Maduro being overthrown in Venezuela. Polymarket exists because of course it does. However, it’s jarring and hideous to see people make bets about conflicts, and it does make you think that as soon as there is money at stake, there is an incentive to bring that thing about in order for the bet to pay out.
  

• Rob Skinner has a lovely reflective post on his year of long-distance cycling.
• Dominik Hofer writes about “A more social IndieWeb”. I do feel that the rise of Facebook and Twitter directly correlated with a reduction in how many people comment on blog posts.
• Dries Buytaert’s blog has turned 20 years old. I love this paragraph in his post, which relates to the conversation I had with Evan Schwartz about Scour earlier in the week:
  

Blogging starts conversations with people I have never met. Blog posts become invitations that never expire. They wait patiently for the right moment to be found. Someone reads an old post, reaches out, and suddenly we are talking. Even in person, conversations start more easily because people already have a sense of who I am or what I care about.

• Rachel Coldicutt makes a good point about the rise of “the acadamisation of AI” whereas in actual fact, at a basic level, it isn’t that complicated. “The idea that AI provides some kind of mystical, over-intellectualised sekrit answer to all the world’s problems is primarily a great way of extracting cash from people with too much money.”
• Simon Willison’s summary of 2025 in the world of large language models is a typically superb read.
  

Video

• It was lovely to watch the final episodes of Stranger Things together as a family. Doing stuff like this together is so rare these days. I didn’t read anyone else’s review of the ending but I personally loved it, and am not ashamed to say that I shed a tear.
• No Hard Feelings (2023) is a pretty poor film, like a large language model’s attempt at a romantic comedy. The ingredients were there, but it failed. The two main characters didn’t do anything of note together and yet we were expected to believe that they developed a caring relationship. A much better movie along the same lines is Can’t Buy Me Love (1987), which has always made me feel like I’m in an underground club of people who have seen it and love it.
• We finished the first season of Pluribus. The ending was…fine? There are so many directions that the show can go in. I’m sure we’ll tune into the next season when it comes along.
• We had a family trip to the cinema to see Marty Supreme (2025). The acting was great, but about halfway through I found myself getting annoyed at such a super unlikeable lead role. The eponymous Marty reminded me a little of Joe Lampton, the central character of John Braine’s ‘angry young man’ novel Room at the Top, but with much less depth of feeling.
• A few days later we watched Beautiful Boy (2018), turning this into Timothée Chalamet week. It’s a hard watch, but beautifully acted. I loved the soundtrack, but the music ended up being a bit of a distraction from the story.
• I restarted my project to re-watch all of Fred Astaire’s musical films, accompanied by the big book by John Mueller that dissects each of them. Shall We Dance (1937) suffers from an extraordinarily weak storyline, but the Gershwin soundtrack and some of the dance sequences are great. The end of They All Laughed is particularly spectacular. Next up is A Damsel in Distress (1937) which I’ve ordered on DVD.

• The BBC’s Christmas Hits: The Videos That Sleighed worked for a low-energy hour. It felt as though it was cheap to make, with interstitial title cards filled with information instead of a narrator. I had no idea that Elton John and Ed Sheeran had teamed up to create a Christmas song in 2021. It’s dreadful, which is probably why it passed me by.
  

Audio

• Andrew at Parlogram has a good video on Why We Don’t Listen To Our Box Sets. I’m definitely guilty of buying more than enjoying. My music purchasing has slowed down recently as I really need to listen more to what I’ve already bought. I do long for those days where I could spend a couple of hours in my room, listening to a CD a couple of times as I read every word of the inlay, with hardly a care in the world.
  

Books

• Started reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman, a book that my wife bought me for Christmas.
  

Next week: Wishing our eldest son bon voyage as he heads back to the US, and getting back to work.

As it always does, Christmas week came and went so quickly. We started it with everyone in the house under the weather in one form or another, recovering from either illness or injury. I was feeling a profound tiredness in my bones. I definitely need the next two weeks off work, living life in the slow lane in order to recharge my batteries.

We spent Christmas with my wife’s family in Ross-on-Wye. Usually we would stay at my wife’s parents’ house, but for a bunch of reasons we wanted to make life easier for everyone, so my wife found us a lovely apartment in the nearby village of Whitchurch that we rented for a couple of nights. It was perfect for us. There were only two bedrooms, but our boys took it in turns to stay either in the second bedroom or on the extremely comfy large sofa in the living room. The place was cosy, but only once we had turned on all of the electric radiators and fan heaters. It was a little shocking to see on the meter that we got through £20 of electricity in less than two days, considering we were only really there in the evenings.

Just outside the apartment is a lovely old clock tower, built in 1867 and refurbished in 2010. The information board told us that it originally cost £200, which according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator is £19,532 in today’s money. Given that the refurbishment cost £25,000, this sounds like it was a bargain.

Christmas itself was lovely, and it was great to be able to be with everyone but know that we weren’t imposing on them. We got to see all of our nephews and their families, and had some delicious Christmas food. It was a good time.

As well as going away for Christmas, this was a week in which I:

• Set my alarm early on Monday in order to get on my indoor bike trainer before a roofer was due to come and take a look at our house. It turned out that I didn’t need to be up so early as he ended up cancelling on us. After a couple of attempts at rearranging, we told him not to bother. Given that it is likely to be an expensive repair, engaging a roofer who can’t keep an appointment doesn’t feel like a good idea.
• Joined our neighbours for an annual Christmas sing-song in the street. Two of our neighbours organise it every year, bringing lyric sheets, hot chocolate, and mulled wine. I love that they do this.
  

• Had one of the worst meals of my life at The Potting Shed in Whitchurch. We booked the restaurant for dinner on Christmas Eve as it was a short walk from where we were staying. It had so much promise — a quirky barn conversion with a fireplace and lots of festive decorations. But the food was terrible. My wife and I had mushroom stroganoff, but the congealed nature of the rice pointed to it having come from a microwaveable pouch. The starters weren’t much better. The boys ordered steaks; our eldest sent his back as it was slightly underdone, but it came back with the consistency of a burger. We all decided to skip dessert as we knew it wouldn’t be any better. I get the feeling that this is the type of food that you used to find all over the UK, because the restaurants are serving people who don’t have a lot of choice if they want to eat out. Handing over £160 for what we had was painful.
• Got stuck driving up the High Street in Ross-on-Wye as the horses gathered for the Boxing Day hunt.
  

• Started watching the PDC World Darts Championship. Tuning in has started to become a bit of a Christmas tradition. I love the game; it has similar qualities to snooker in that players can start to overplay or overthink what they are doing, but it is much faster paced. Missing a few darts can be heavily punished if your opponent is on form.
• Reset an old iPad Air 2 so that we can set it up with Zwift for my youngest son to use on the indoor bike trainer.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Troy Hunt’s weekly update from the start of December has an excellent, balanced view on Australia’s new law banning under-16s from using specific social media platforms.
  

Articles

• Simon Willison has been cooking with Claude. I’m such an inexperienced cook that I think adding technology to the mix would just lead to disaster, but it’s interesting to read about his experiment.
• The Guardian has a great feature on “46 photos that tell the story of the century so far”. An incredible set of photographs.
  

Video

• Continued with Pluribus on Apple TV. We’re not done yet, but I’ve seen blog posts that react to the season finale in different ways, so I’m not sure how we’ll feel about it when we finish.
• Inspired by a friend who was doing the same, re-watched Coming to America (1988) with the family. My youngest seems to enjoy the same humour as me and stayed the course, but the others drifted away.
• Tried rewatching Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) courtesy of a friend’s Plex library. (It doesn’t seem to be available on any streaming services at the moment.) We gave up and turned it off as none of us were enjoying it. It’s a film of its time that hasn’t aged well. The whole Guy Ritchie ‘style’ seems so dated now.
  

Books

• Started reading Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov. I fancied some fiction for the holidays. This was thrown up at random by an Obsidian query that looks at my whole reading backlog. I originally bought the DRM-free ebook over a decade ago but hadn’t read it.
• I couldn’t resist a £10 copy of Photography: The Whole Story from our local independent bookshop. I’m not sure how long it will take me to read it, but I’ve made a start. It’s already fascinating.
  

Next week: Turning 49.

My last working week of the year. This period always has a strange feeling about it. The trains are slightly emptier, and the office is quiet. The cogs of the office are turning and everything is going through the motions, but the soul has dissipated, ready to return next year. As we approached the end of the week, more people started to drift away. My brain and body seemed to know that a rest was around the corner, as by Friday afternoon I felt exhausted. I’m ready to finish the year.

I wasn’t in the office as much as I originally planned, as a lot of the week was spent at hospital appointments with my wife. We went there on Tuesday with only a vague idea of what the specialists would say and do. After more examinations, they booked her in for surgery on Wednesday afternoon. I hastily rearranged my work diary so that I could take her there and bring her home. Unfortunately, she had to have yet another vitrectomy — her third — and laser surgery to repair her retina further, which then resulted in needing to live with a new gas bubble in the eye, eye drops every two hours and being told not to exercise or drive for a while. Our son drove her to a post-op check-up on Thursday, and we have another next week to make sure things are progressing well. We’re both crossing our fingers that there won’t be any complications from this point onwards.

This was a week in which I:

• Visited our shared meeting floor in our office now that the building contractor has finished and the space is back in our control. The work to install and configure our audio-visual equipment is going very well and the rooms are looking great. We did some basic testing of our large boardroom space with multiple Logitech Sight cameras ahead of drilling holes in the table to accommodate them.
• Met with our firm’s external auditors and gave them an overview of our part of the organisation.
• Had a call with our internal audit team about their plans for 2026, highlighting the audits that we will need to participate in.
• Met with the project team for our document management initiative to brainstorm the data dashboards that we need to create as part of the project. It was another great session, creating shared agreement around a whiteboard.
• Made some more updates to our bill of materials for a new office in a country where we recently set up business, adding a column for the next action so that we can clearly see what we can get on with now and what needs to wait until we’ve signed a lease.
• Validated the costs for a service agreement between our organisation and a sister company.
• Agreed what snacks we will continue to provide staff with for free once the company cafe reopens in January. Hopefully we are striking a good balance that will be appreciated by our staff.
• Made my final updates to my team’s year-end written appraisals and had the appraisal meetings with each of them. It’s good to have this all done before the year is out. Managing people and helping them with their careers is a part of my job that I really love.
• Had my monthly meeting with my executive partner from our technology advisory vendor.
• Ran our final all-team meeting of the year as an online PowerPoint Karaoke session. It was the first time for all of us. Seven people had signed up to take part ahead of the meeting and they did a brilliant job. Each one had to present a 10-slide deck within a six-minute time limit, having never seen the deck before. I love how people see things in random slides that I hadn’t noticed, weaving them into a narrative across their talk. We had a lot of fun. I think it would be even better in person, with some in-room laughter as people present.
• Had a lovely impromptu and reflective year-end catch-up with my boss. We’ve been working together on and off for 15 years now. The end of the year inevitably makes me think about where I am and what’s next work-wise. I need to think more about this going into next year.
• Enjoyed the final M365 Change Community Round Up meeting for the year. This meeting doesn’t yet attract a large audience, but it should. The next one is on 22 January; if you’re responsible for Microsoft 365 tools in your organisation, it’s worth joining for a look at what’s coming down the pipe — and as an added bonus, not all of it is Copilot-related.
• Searched for roofers to come and have a look at the leak we discovered last week. One roofer that was recommended to us by a neighbour came round and gave a quick assessment of the job, sending us an estimate later that day. Another roofer that we found through Checkatrade came over on the same day that we contacted them. After a quick look, he used a drone to explore what could be going on. I was amazed when he showed me that one of our roof tiles had slipped, leaving what looked like a 10–20cm gap. We could peer in and see that the felt also had some holes in it. From street level, it was impossible to see that the tile had moved. He then had his colleague scramble up a ladder and across our roof, making a ‘ladder’ on the roof itself by shifting some tiles up, so that he could put the slipped tile back in place as a temporary measure. I was so grateful, and couldn’t quite believe that they would do this there and then. As we are on a hill and have a three-storey house, the roof is so high. Even the guy that went up there remarked on how high he was and took some panoramic photos of the view across the valley. We’ll need to get the roof fixed properly, but hopefully this will stop more water from coming in over the next few weeks.
• Had a wonderful evening, meeting with a couple of old friends from school, one of whom I probably hadn’t seen in 20 years. She was one of my closest friends for a very long time. But then life happened — getting married, moving house, having children — and I’ve never been a great one for planning and instigating get-togethers. You know you are good friends with someone when you see them again, even after such a vast amount of time, and you immediately pick up from where you left off. It was a late night as I dropped everyone home after the pub closed before heading back myself, but it was totally worth being tired the next day.
• Spent Sunday at my mum and dad’s house for a fabulous Christmas family gathering. It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since we were enjoying an incredible Christmas all together in Mexico. My parents made an excellent Christmas dinner and we topped off the evening with some YouTube-powered karaoke.
• Enjoyed a relatively sedate weekly cycling club ride. It was good to be out of the fancy dress this week.
  

Media

Articles

• Writing my team’s annual reviews made me think about what I’ve heard Ben Thompson say on various podcasts: focus on doing more of what you’re good at — not necessarily what you enjoy — and find other people to do the things that you aren’t as great at. Steve Kamb wrote this up as The Glass Cannon Strategy.
• Paul Sinclair, the man behind the excellent Super Deluxe Edition website, has been profiled in the Financial Times. The website is a must-read if you buy physical music, particularly classic albums from the 1960s to the 1990s, as it profiles upcoming reissues, and highlights where there are bargains to be had. In recent years, he has been issuing limited pressings of albums on Blu-ray discs that include Dolby Atmos versions. I don’t have the equipment to play these, but I wish I did as the feedback about them has been universally positive.
• An amazing story about how Amazon detected that an employee wasn’t who they said they were through observing a longer-than-usual lag from their keyboard input. It turned out that the IT developer was based in North Korea. This is very impressive cybersecurity detection work.
  

Video

• Finished watching the remastered Beatles Anthology on Disney+. It’s a long documentary, but it still feels like a whistlestop tour that barely scratches the surface of their story. I remember being so excited to watch it when it came out in 1995, and then later my wife bought me the DVD box set as a gift. It’s weird to think that at the time we were 25 years on from the break-up of the band, and we’re now 30 years away from when the Anthology first came out. Given that the Get Back series that covered just a few weeks in the lives of The Beatles was nearly eight hours long, covering their whole career in 11 hours still feels like I’ve been short-changed. Give me the mega director’s cut anytime.
• Continued watching Pluribus on Apple TV. It’s really drawn us in. We have no idea how the series will end.
  

Audio

• Still have tracks from Gang of Four’s Entertainment! buzzing in my brain.

Next week: Christmas.

Last weekend’s start of a cold turned into a full-blown one on Monday. I went into the office as usual but felt as though I was wandering around with a hangover. Everyone was telling me to go home, but it never felt quite bad enough. That night and the next day were the worst, getting through tissues like a chain smoker gets through cigarettes as my eyes watered and drooped. I even got woken up in the middle of the night by a runny nose, something that I can’t recall ever happening before. On Wednesday I felt that I had turned the corner and was well enough to go in again, although my first hot drink of the day was a concoction of hot lemon and paracetamol. The cold never got too bad and I’m now largely over it, but it is still lingering.

This was a week in which I:

• Created the technology and real estate/facilities ‘bill of materials’ for our new office in North Africa. We are still deciding on the exact location, but we’re ready to go when we do. I reviewed the list with our CTO and Head of Infrastructure and Operations, adding more detail and getting aligned on the technology that we plan to implement.
• Finished the small project of replacing two separate taps with a mixer and making good on the paintwork in our multifaith room.
• Had the weekly meeting with our audio-visual design vendor, discussing our project to install technology in our shared meeting room spaces. There are a few minor issues, but things are on track and the space is starting to look great.
• Attended the monthly steering committee meeting for our sister company’s office refurbishment, which includes the shared spaces in our office.
• Met with our catering vendor to discuss options for providing staff with free snacks from next year once our shared café re-opens.
• Had a couple of meetings with the project team for our document management initiative for a walkthrough of the plan.
• Wrote up the majority of the appraisals for my team. It’ll be good to close out the annual reviews before the year ends.
• Met up with the Disability subgroup from our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team to discuss what should go into our strategic plan for the next few years. I joined the broader group the next day for a workshop, which was good but made slightly more difficult by me being the only remote participant. 9am in Johannesburg is 7am in London, and on a day that I need to be physically in the office it is difficult to take part right at the start of a session at that time. The discussions were great and I’m looking forward to working with the team again next year.
• Held my final staff meeting with my team for this year. We took some time to reflect on what we’d done and what we hope 2026 can be.
• Caught up with our colleague in our technology team who is based in our Beijing office.
• Spent some time at the weekend writing up the ‘wins’ from the past few weeks. I had lots of notes sitting in Outlook but hadn’t managed to find the time to tidy them up and post them to our long Teams thread.
• Took Friday off to get my wife to the hospital — more on that later — and to pick our eldest son up from the airport to welcome him home. I hadn’t seen him in person since mid-August when he left to go to college in Texas. We got to the airport early and spent ages looking out for him at the two entrance doors to the arrivals hall. He was hungry after his flight from Houston so we went for a late lunch at Nando’s on the way home. Within hours, it felt as though he had never been away.
• Added him as a temporary driver to our car insurance. £190 for three weeks feels simultaneously like very little, but also a lot. It’ll be handy for him to be able to drive himself places over the next few weeks.
• Went to our work Christmas party at Eight members club near Moorgate. Bizarrely, we had a Wild West theme, so colleagues were all dressed up in cowboy boots and hats, with the occasional inflatable horse. I went with the intention of cleaning up this town.
  

• Met up with a bunch of old school friends that I hadn’t seen in years. We went to the intriguingly named Roux at Skindles as a couple of our friends knew the singer who was performing that night. It was a strange place, located in a cul-de-sac at the end of a residential street, with lots of old people dressed up for a posh Friday night out. We had a great laugh; at one point we got onto the small dance floor. It was lovely to catch up.
• Caught up with old colleagues and friends at the pub, including some faces that I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Meeting up with them always feels like a glimpse into my future. Many of them were in the first team I worked in when I started back in 1999. Back then, I was a spritely, single graduate in my early 20s whereas many of them were married and had young children. Now a few of them have retired, and in a couple of cases they are grandparents. It all goes so quickly.
• Spent a lovely Saturday afternoon with friends, having a long lunch and playing party games involving balls of wool and various hats.
• Found a massive damp and mould patch in our makeshift cupboard in the eaves of our loft conversion. My wife has been saying for a couple of weeks that the cupboard smelt a bit damp, but we couldn’t see any signs. I was taken aback by how bad it looks, as it seems to have appeared very quickly. We’ve also noticed another patch close by in the hallway. I can’t see any obvious missing tiles, but I’ve got in contact with some roofers to investigate.
• Took my wife for what we thought was a final check-up of her second detached retina. Unfortunately — or fortunately? — they spotted that there was a small part of her retina that still needed some work. The thought that she would have to go in for another operation on her eye was absolutely gutting. We find out next week what they plan to do.
• Had a disappointing coffee and sad croissant at The Grocer at 15 in Amersham. We went there to kill some time between the hospital and the airport, but it didn’t feel like a treat.
• Enjoyed this year’s Berkhamsted Cycling Club Mince Pie Ride. Last year’s Christmas pudding outfit made it a bit difficult to manoeuvre on the bike and also acted as a parachute, so I figured it was time for a new outfit. A Christmas tree dress made sense as it meant I would be able to sit down on the bike unencumbered. It worked well. The start of the ride felt brutally cold, with my fingers screaming at me as we went up our first hill. But it was a beautiful, clear day. The sun was a menace as it reflected off the road. We passed through a village that had a timidly-placed ‘Road Closed’ sign, ignoring it as we continued on our planned route. As we turned the next corner, the riders in front of me braked sharply. It was hard to see due to the sun glare, and I could just make out the fact that the road was super muddy. The reason for their deceleration, and the reason that the road was closed, was that someone had fly tipped AN ENTIRE HOUSE in the road, stuffed with lagging, plaster and other rubbish. It was absolutely shocking.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Great episode of The Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK podcast where John Harris speaks to Yinka Bankole about how Nigel Farage treated him while at Dulwich College. Bankole was nine and Farage was much older. I’m not sure whether the allegations will stick or will make any dent in his popularity, but they should. Keir Starmer and the current government are deeply unpopular, but I do think that broadly they are good people. The Reform Party is filled with the worst of us.
• Pocket Casts has shown me that my podcast addiction has only got worse this year:
  

Articles

• Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image. You can’t trust any photo you see anymore.
• Java applets will no longer be a thing from March 2026. The applet I built for my undergraduate final year project hasn’t worked in a modern web browser for a very long time.
• I’ve been exploring what it means to ‘have a theory of change’ and came across Aaron Swartz’s very useful blog post which explains it well.
• John Gruber shows that the report about Marco Rubio getting the US State Department to revert to using the Times New Roman font over Calibri, effectively suggesting that he thought the latter typeface was too ‘woke’, wasn’t quite right.
  

Video

• Finished season one of Platonic. It was a lovely show, with a lot of laughs.
• Watched A House of Dynamite (2025) with the rest of my family. It started well, but soon became taxing. Idris Elba was completely unconvincing as the President, dealing with the biggest crisis he may ever face in his lifetime, and yet talking about something he heard on a podcast.
• Started to watch Wake Up Dead Man (2025), the latest Knives Out movie, but gave up after 10 minutes. The boys were looking at my wife and me and asking “What the heck are we watching?”
  

Audio

• I have a new album obsession. And that album is Entertainment! by Gang of Four.

Books

• Nearly, but not quite, done with Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy.
  

Next week: Another reunion, more hospital visits, and my last week of work for the year.

The past couple of weeks have given us properly grotty weather. Wind and rain with a few days of freezing temperatures thrown in. This was another busy week where I’ve been feeling that the year has caught up with me. I’m ready for a rest.

This was a week in which I:

• Went down to the construction floor in our office for an induction, so that I can go down there and visit when I need to. I’ve been given a hard hat, gloves, a gilet and a pair of steel-capped boots that feel about seven sizes too large.
• Had our weekly meeting with our audio-visual design vendor. We have a few more small issues to deal with, but nothing that is pushing the project off track.
• Met with colleagues to discuss our approach to digital content sharing in our shared meeting room spaces. By default, we don’t provide connections for people to plug into. Using a random USB-C or HDMI cable isn’t good practice as you don’t really know what’s on the other end, or what the equipment in the room will do. It’s better that an attendee joins the meeting from another device and shares content from there, giving them control over what’s shown and minimising the risk of everyone else in the room or on the call seeing pop-up notifications and content they didn’t want to share. Despite all of this, we know we’ll need to keep a couple of cables squirrelled away somewhere that our support staff can grab if they need to.
• Had the weekly meeting with our sister company on the progress of the construction works.
• Met with three of my colleagues from our Technology management team to review a core part of our infrastructure and discuss where we should take it in the future. It felt good to get in a room together for a small workshop like this as we hadn’t done it in a while. We’re going to need a few more of these sessions over the coming weeks.
• Reviewed the latest materials for our document management project and gave feedback to the team.
• Attended an ExCo meeting at the last minute in place of my boss, and surprisingly found myself with quite a bit to add to the conversation.
• Received a presentation from another technology team within our division of the company on their journey with AI so far.
• Gave a Learning Hour presentation on my visit to this year’s Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Barcelona.
• Picked up a tin of spare paint for our Prayer and Reflection Room from the construction company working in the building. There’s a bit of touching up required following some additional works we’ve done in that room, so it’s great to have the original paint to make it good.
• Had a useful career-focused meeting with my boss, an external consultant, and colleagues from both our People & Culture and Learning & Development teams. I’ll get a report in a week or so and have some specific things to follow up with.
• Attended the latest South African Politics and Macroeconomics webinar hosted by our company. The material is always pitched at exactly the right level and I invariably come away much better educated about what’s going on.
• Joined the latest Teams Fireside Chat, this time with Ilya Bukshteyn, Corporate Vice President of Teams Calling, Devices and Premium Experiences at Microsoft. I gave some feedback on the Facilitator agent, which I’ve found to be incredibly noisy and annoying in every Teams meeting where someone has added it. The agent seems to be quite central to where Microsoft are taking the Teams meeting experience. I honestly don’t need to be babysat through a meeting, it just needs to be chaired well. If we’re having a good discussion, I don’t want to tune out of that to read through all of the content that the agent has added to the chat. Chairing a meeting is a skill to be learned and practised; Facilitator will get in the way of people doing that.
• Watched an internal webinar on understanding disability in the workplace, organised by our Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum. The interaction from the attendees was excellent.
• Joined a Digital Showcase meeting where colleagues discussed their approach to coordinating AI-related initiatives across our division of the company.
• Had a wonderful night out with my friends from the WB-40 podcast Signal group for our now traditional year-end dinner. We had drinks at The Three Kings in Clerkenwell followed by dinner at Camino in Farringdon. The conversation is always splendid and I got to meet some new people as Lisa Riemers brought along her Intranet friends for a geeky mashup. (Her year-end post about what she did in 2025 is lovely.)

• Went out for dinner with friends in Berkhamsted. It was lovely to catch up with everyone who could make it, and we missed those that couldn’t. I’ve never been that impressed by The Fat Buddha; the food is super expensive for what it is, and not particularly tasty.
• Bought our Christmas tree, for the first time without the boys coming with us to get it. We went for one that was less bushy than usual, which seems a lot taller now we’ve got it home.

• Put up our outdoor Christmas lights, ready for the street’s synchronised Sunday afternoon switch-on.
• Went out with my youngest son, his friends and another of the dads, for a short training ride as they prep for a cycling holiday at Easter. My son had never used clipless pedals on a bike before and took to using them really well. I hope the weather clears up so that they can get out a bit more over the next couple of months.

• Started to get a cold over the weekend, keeping me from exercising on Sunday for the first time in a while. I’m hoping it’s just a minor thing and goes away as quickly as it showed up.
• Was so happy to see Lando Norris secure the F1 driver’s world championship title. It’s always good to see someone reach this peak for the first time. I’m already looking forward to the new season in three months’ time.

Media

Articles

• Ending my Spotify subscription has long been on my to-do list. The only thing stopping me is that one of my family members relies on our family plan for their music. Brian Merchant has put together an article on why quitting Spotify is a good thing, and why Qobuz is probably the best streaming platform to move to.
• HBO have made a complete mess of ‘remastering’ Mad Men.

Video

• Continued enjoying Platonic. It borders on ridiculous but stays funny and surprising enough to keep us watching.
• Watched a few more episodes of The Beatles Anthology. I’d forgotten how much I love those early songs from the very early part of their career.
• Finished watching the first part of Stranger Things season 5. This is one that all three of us at home have watched as a family. I’m looking forward to all four of us watching the final episodes together over Christmas when our eldest son is back.

Web

• The Washing Machine Project are bringing mechanical washing machines to the 50% of the global population that hand washes clothes. This burden is largely on the shoulders of women and girls. Their flat-packable machine saves up to 50% of the water and 75% of the time compared to hand washing. (Via Naomi Smith on the Quiet Riot podcast.)
• I do wonder whether the time we will save in the future by using AI will be more than used up by the time we will spend verifying and validating sources.

Books

• Continued with Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. I have noticed myself trying to be more in the moment, looking at the things around me. I haven’t ditched the podcasts coming at me through my headphones yet though.

Next week: A Christmas party, two reunions with old friends, and our eldest son returns.

Another packed week, brimming with meetings.

This was a week in which I:

• Joined various meetings about our sister company’s office refurbishment project, ahead of the start of the audio-visual installation work in our shared spaces. The teams are working around each other and are on a deadline to get everything up and running before Christmas. We reviewed a couple of last-minute minor changes and snags with our audio-visual design vendor and agreed how we would manage them.
• Discussed ideas for the metrics that we should report in the quarterly management packs for our components once the shared meeting spaces are up and running.
• Had a great meeting where our project manager and I got around a whiteboard to map out one of our key security initiatives. There’s something about the process of starting with an empty canvas and filling it with pictures and words that feel like a shared understanding among the people that created it.
• Assisted with the work to decide on a long-term location in a city where we have just opened an office, outlining the time it would take from making a decision to fitting out and equipping each of the shortlisted spaces.
• Met with a colleague from Internal Audit as part of their kick-off work for an audit taking place over the next few months.
• Took part in our development team’s review of the items on their backlog.
• Stepped in for my boss at one of our legal entity governance committees.
• Met with our sister company for a financial review of the service agreement between our two organisations, and to agree the shape of the budget for 2026.
• Had the quarterly review of the performance of these same services.
• Learned that from the start of next year, feminine hygiene products will be available for free in the ladies’ toilets in our office. I’ve been asking about this for years, as it has always baffled me why this wasn’t the case.
• Caught up with colleagues to discuss a project that they conceived but that is now being run by another team.
• Met one-to-one with our two latest new joiners to the team, learning a bit more about their backgrounds and lives outside of work.
• Put together a slide on key achievements of the team this year for my boss to keep handy in an end-of-year review meeting.
• Met with the Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum.
• Dialled into the end-of-year celebration for our broader Technology department, hosted in South Africa. There is always so much singing and dancing at these events. It looked impressive on the other end of a Teams meeting, so it must have been amazing to see and hear it live.
• Enjoyed the Microsoft 365 Change Community Round Up meeting, organised by Empowering.Cloud. At the session, Tom Arbuthnot, Darrell Webster and Daniel Glenn go through significant updates to the Microsoft 365 platform. Generally, the Empowering.Cloud events are excellent and are well worth signing up for if you work in this space.
• Wished good luck to a colleague and friend who will be out of the office for a few weeks to recover from surgery. She’s already missed, and we’re looking forward to having her back with us.
• Ran our fortnightly management team meeting in her absence.
• Took a colleague through the basics of using the YNAB app and following their process. My wife and I have been using it for nearly 15 years. Although the annual cost of about £80 feels like a lot, I’ve saved that money many times over through knowing exactly where I am financially at all times.
• Reported a bug to the team behind the Ulysses text editor. Selecting text caused the window to rapidly scroll up or down, with no fine-grained control. The issue was confirmed and fixed with an app update later in the week. An impressive turnaround.
• Helped our youngest son with preparation for a cycle touring holiday that he and his friends want to do next year. He’s not a cyclist, so the first step was buying a helmet, and the second step was finding a bike. The cycling club WhatsApp group came to our rescue, with two people wanting to sell their retired steeds for very good prices. After inspecting and picking one up, we spent a bunch of time over the weekend buying and fitting pedals and shoe cleats, as well as de-gunking previously tubeless tyres and installing a set of inner tubes.
• Went out for dinner in Berkhamsted with some lovely friends who we hadn’t seen in a long time. It was great to catch up.
• Had two Album Club nights, one online and the other in person. Usually I take a photo at the latter and post it to my blog, but I couldn’t face doing it with that album cover. Albertine Sarges’ Girl Missing was fantastic.
• Updated the About page on this website for the first time in a few years. I also added both a Now page and a statement about my use of AI.
• Opted to skip the Saturday morning ride with the cycling club and jumped on the indoor trainer instead. The weather has been pretty bad over the past few weeks and I’m not one for heading out when it’s raining. On Sunday I went for a run with my wife which ended with a coffee and pastry; these are the best kind of runs.
• Had my popcorn out to watch the F1 Qatar Grand Prix. Next weekend’s finale has all the ingredients of a very memorable afternoon.
  

Media

Articles

• Jamil Zaki suggests that Every Team Needs a Super-Facilitator in the Harvard Business Review.
• Will Larson says that “Good engineering management” is a fad. (via Simon Willison). He talks about management paradigms of the past 25 years, why things changed, and the core skills that persist across time. I need to come back and explore his site as it looks like there is gold there.
• I really like the work that HOPE not hate are doing to investigate Reform UK and hold them to account. Their fortnightly Reform Watch newsletter is excellent, with links to posts such as a profile of Kevin Byrne, Reform’s small business champion.
• The Press Gazette has a report about how ChatGPT gave an answer with paywalled content and then said it couldn’t have done it. I love this paragraph that neatly says why LLMs are bad at telling you how they work and what they’ve done:
  

Guardian head of editorial innovation and AI Chris Moran said: “Given the probabilistic nature of LLMs, asking them to explain themselves simply isn’t a thing. Anything from the moment you asked it to explain itself is simply not the truth – it’s a kind of ersatz apology or explanation constructed one token at a time in reaction to the previous context.”

• In stark contrast, I winced when I heard Michael Morton from MoffettNathanson say this on his Stratechery interview with Ben Thompson:
  

Michael Morton: So in conversational commerce, why it’s better and why it’s so fun to research this evolving subject is go ask the models. So I sat down, I asked ChatGPT, I asked Gemini, I asked all the different models, “Hey, when I ask you what’s the best running shoe, what do you do?”, and they’ll tell you, “We go read all the expert websites”. That’s what Mike did, they go look at the product build materials, they go read reviews like on Amazon and Zappos, that’s a whole other fight that’s going on. And so Google is looking at this more formulaic. Who’s bidding? What’s the conversion rate? Where’s the information? The models look at all the knowledge behind that.

• He reiterates this again later in the interview. Thompson does push back, albeit gently:
  

Michael Morton: Again, why I like searching this subject so much, and thinking about it is, ask the models. So, we ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and all the different models, “For an e-commerce query, what do you weight in your decision-making process?”, and from most important to least important. And the top three, number one is price, number two is trustworthiness, and number three is speed. Price, speed, trustworthiness, you start to see where this is going and then I asked them, “Okay, of these weightings, who does the best job at delivering?”, every single model, Amazon is number one, Walmart is number two and you go down the list, Target, Best Buy, eBay-

Ben Thompson: They could be making stuff up, though.

Michael Morton: They could, they could.

• Benedict Evans released his latest slide deck, called AI eats the world. The content is so informative, even without hearing Evans deliver the presentation.
  

Video

• Finished watching The Beast In Me on Netflix, an excellent thriller. We loved this.
• Started watching the 2025 remastered Beatles Anthology on Disney+. I’m really looking forward to Elliot Roberts’ review of this version. Apparently some of the episodes are shorter than the original 1995 release, and there have been lots of ‘enhancements’ through the use of AI.
  

Web

• Microsoft hosted a ‘European Digital Commitment Day’ in Vienna, Austria. It was interesting to see this pop into my inbox given the narrative about digital sovereignty at the recent Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. I assume this is a response to the growing number of companies that must be looking at their core technology dependence on a major US company such as Microsoft.
• I loved looking through Alice Bartlett’s collection of photos from her 10 years of working at the Financial Times. I’m not sure what she’s doing next, but I suspect she’ll be great at it.
  

Books

• Trying to make time to continue to read Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. I smiled when I read this — being at home as a child on a weekday at an unusual time absolutely felt strange and unfamiliar:
  

Next week: Out with the WB-40 gang for our seasonal meetup, and dinner with old friends.

A regular week, back in the office after last week’s trip to Barcelona. Things have suddenly turned very cold here in the UK. It’s feeling dark and wintry.

This was a week in which I:

• Had the weekly call with our audio-visual design company and agreed the design change to swap the digital signal processor for a different model.
• Met for a short debrief of the ‘Microsoft Copilot Week’ we held a couple of weeks ago.
• Joined our Copilot working group meeting. We had a brilliant demonstration from one of our colleagues in the front office on how she is using the tools. For years, in our Technology team, we have discussed the concept of people becoming ‘citizen developers’. We saw this as largely positive, as long as it is visible to us; we want to avoid the age-old situation of someone turning up at Technology’s doorstep with a critical Microsoft Access database that is now running some core part of the firm, but the person responsible for it has left. It seems that the motivation to experiment with Copilot is enough to get many people interested in going further. We talked about when it would be appropriate for someone outside of the Technology team to reach for Copilot Studio. I’m not sure where the boundaries lie or what needs to be in place to make sure that this work is done in a safe way, but we’ll need to think about it.
• Met with colleagues to discuss real-time audio translation in Teams meetings using Microsoft Copilot Interpreter, and the process we would need to follow to get it reviewed and approved for use within the organisation.
• Took part in our development team’s retrospective and sprint planning meeting.
• Spent time with our project manager to review the backlog of items on our Kanban board.
• Joined the kickoff meeting for an internal audit that is focused on our front office colleagues, but touches our technology space.
• Met with colleagues in our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team to agree the message and content for an upcoming ‘fireside chat’ on disability rights.
• Had my monthly call with my executive partner at our technology research consultancy vendor. It was good to catch up after last week’s conference.
• Met with our contract staff supplier to discuss their planned system replacement and its potential impact on us.
• Sat in on a briefing from the Economist Intelligence Unit where they shared a global and regional outlook, with particular focus on Africa.
• Had a conversation about how we manage people data throughout our organisation, and took an action to follow up with the core team that owns the technology.
• Joined the third ‘open house’ meeting of the Society of Hopeful Technologists. There are so many wonderful people involved with this initiative, doing excellent work to build on the meetings and discussions that we’ve had so far. Meeting interesting folk in the breakout room during one of these discussions is a joy.
• Had my first ever GitHub pull request accepted. My code is now part of the Feedbin connector for Tapestry.
• With some help from ChatGPT, managed to find a solution for publishing to this website and getting the posts picked up by micro.blog without having to disable and re-enable Cloudflare every time.
• Delighted in having our stairs carpet replaced. Our last carpet had 20 years of service and it was in a bit of a sorry state, with the bottom step becoming threadbare. It’s amazing how soft and bouncy the stairs are now. We’re still squealing with delight every time we use them.
• Met a couple of friends for a lovely dinner at Zaza in Berkhamsted, who we met through our children’s running club. We both now have one of our boys at university in the USA, so it was interesting to compare notes on how they are getting on.
• Had a follow-up with the gastroenterologist after my colonoscopy a few weeks ago. He found absolutely nothing wrong, so now wants to do a couple more tests in the next few weeks.
• Went to a great talk hosted by the Internet Archive about Cory Doctorow’s new book, Enshittification. He spoke for half an hour or so and then the excellent hosts did a great job of fielding questions from the chat. Internet Archive have some excellent events lined up which are worth checking out.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Caught up with this good 404 Media interview with Joshua Aaron, creator of the ICEBlock app. There is no justification for removing this app from the iOS App Store.
• It was fascinating to hear Troy Hunt talk about the challenges of sending large bursts of email on his weekly update. The nature of his data breach notification service at Have I Been Pwned means that when he loads a large breach, he suddenly has to send out lots of notification emails to subscribers. These can get throttled or marked as spam by the recipient mail servers, so he’s had to implement an outbound mail queue for popular domains to try and solve the problem.
  

Articles

• One day my journey between London Euston and Berkhamsted won’t be like travelling through a series of Faraday cages. I’m honestly not sure if that’s a good thing or not. Sometimes being disconnected is a feature, and forces you to do disconnected things.
• Heather Burns writes about how we should be concerned about Christian Nationalist rhetoric appearing at a public inquiry.
• Michael Tsai talks about ‘needy software’, and how it’s now impractical to live with auto updates turned off. It’s more about the development team’s needs than those of the end users. I think about that every week when Microsoft Office demands an update that forces all of my documents to close and reopen, with no noticeable feature changes when it happens.
  

Video

• BBC Archive posted another fascinating video from their technology archives, this time from 1979. Will Computers Revolutionise Education?
  

• I found myself going down a YouTube rabbit hole of watching people react to hearing Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights for the first time. Finnish vocal coach Anna Vaskelainen’s reaction is a joy, and I also loved Elizabeth Zharoff’s too.
• Bumbling about YouTube looking at these videos led me to Hue and Cry’s live cover version of Bush’s The Man With The Child In His Eyes from 1989. Superb.
  

• Finished watching Girlbands Forever on iPlayer. I didn’t follow the girl bands through the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although I recognised the big hits, most of the content and the personalities were new to me. Like its male counterpart, it’s an excellent slice of pop culture history.
  

Books

• Still reading Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. I’ve loved discovering Pilvi Takala’s performance art, particularly The Trainee, where she starts doing weird things in the office at work and seeing what the impact is on the social cohesion of everyone around her. Sitting there “doing thought work” is the new staring out the window.
  

Next week: Two Album Clubs, and the start of the deployment phase for one of our key projects.

Most of this week was spent in Barcelona at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. It’s the third time I’ve been¹, and I now feel I know exactly how to get the most out of my time there.

A few weeks before the event I scroll through the full schedule of the literally hundreds of sessions on offer at the conference, adding anything that looks remotely interesting to my agenda. This sometimes results in having five different things to go to at the same time, but on each day of the conference I will download the slides of each session in order to decide which one would be most valuable to attend. The ones that I missed are available in the Gartner Conference Navigator app and on their website for a little while after the event if there is anything I really want to catch up with.

As one of the largest financial services companies in Africa, our firm was well-represented with attendees from very different parts of the organisation. On Monday a few of us went out for dinner; it was great to catch up with old friends and make new ones.

I spent a lot of time at the Xpo, talking to various vendors about their products and thinking about whether they solved any problems that we have. By far the most interesting was the Island web browser. The product looks excellent and the staff were excellent at explaining and demonstrating its capabilities. I also had fun with the Chrome Enterprise team, showing them this Skeleton Claw sketch as we discussed what their offering was all about.

On Tuesday night we went out for dinner organised by Gartner with other delegates from financial services organisations in the UK. I got chatting to someone from a brokerage firm in London. Our conversation turned to cycling. Although neither of us could remember meeting, it turned out that we are members of the same cycling club, riding in the same speed group, and I already follow him on Strava. It was one of those moments where I wondered ‘what are the chances?’ But then, after thinking about it a bit more, I figured that for two people working in finance in London, living in a nice suburban town, they are probably quite high.

Our conversation at dinner turned to the topic of Chocolate Bath Olivers, which a fellow guest declared to be the pinnacle of biscuits. This is serious stuff. My scouring of the web has shown that these are almost mythical, with small production runs and nothing in stock anywhere. I’ve made a mental note and will continue to try and get my hands on some.

The conference is always a gastronomic treat and this time was no exception. As well as the seemingly endless stream of snacks and drinks, on Wednesday night I revisited Blu, a vegan restaurant that served me a black pizza a couple of years ago. This time the waiter recommended the veggie burger, which may be the best I have ever had in my life. I took one bite and then stopped to take a photo as I wanted to remember it.

The food intake was offset by morning runs. I managed to get out for a run along the coastline on three of the four mornings that I was there. The weather was perfect, not too hot or too cold, and I took in some beautiful sunrises.

Here’s a summary of the sessions I attended:

Keynote: Walking the Golden Path to Value with Rob O’Donohue and Gabriela Vogel

• I first encountered Rob O’Donohue at the 2023 Symposium. He gave a fascinating presentation on neurodiversity, but unfortunately it was scheduled late on Thursday afternoon, when most delegates had already left the conference. We’ve subsequently had him come and present to our whole team on the same topic. It was great to see that he’d been asked to give the opening keynote, which must be a career highlight for any Gartner analyst.
• I always have mixed feelings about the keynote. It’s a presentation that tries to resonate with 6,500 conference delegates from different countries and industries, each with different roles. The presentation is impeccable, but the content is often quite bland and generic. This one was about a ‘Golden Path’, which is the middle ground between AI skepticism and AI hype.
• They spoke about ‘AI Readiness’ and ‘Human Readiness’ on an X/Y axis as a ‘Gartner Positioning System’, and mapping your AI initiatives to it to see how ready you are for them.
• Enshittification got a mention, so it has clearly broken through into wider consciousness.
• The presentation seemed to assume that AI has massive value just waiting to be unlocked, but throughout the week there still seemed to be a dearth of actual case studies and use cases that were presented.
• Anthropomorphism was off the charts in the slide deck, with ghostly human-like figures made of networks of glowing dots representing AI.
• “People are discovering [with AI] what they can do, not being trained on what they should do.”
• 71% of CIOs surveyed by Gartner say that their people are not ready for AI.
• There are lots of hidden costs with AI, and companies can accidentally end up implementing projects that have negative value.
• It was interesting to see OVH, Atos and Hetzner mentioned as EMEA-based companies looking to rival the big infrastructure platforms. Data sovereignty — and, in this presentation, AI sovereignty — was a theme throughout the week. There are EMEA AI startups, but the presenters said that they are not enterprise-ready yet.
• It was interesting to hear about a Gartner study that looked at job loss data for the first six months of this year. Only 1% of those job losses were directly attributed to AI. They warned the audience about making redundancies, as Gartner still think there will not be enough skilled staff to do the work. ”Reskilling and upskilling are not perks, they are survival.” You can’t let your security and critical thinking skills atrophy; who will be happy when there’s nobody left in the organisation who knows how to code?
• I liked the term ‘behavioural byproducts’ to describe some of the effects of deploying AI tools in an organisation. It’s important to understand what people will do, and are doing, with the tools and what it means for the company.
• Resourcefulness without experience has limits and risks.
• They floated the concept of training ‘an AI’ on someone’s data — their emails, meeting recordings, code reviews etc. — where they have been with the company a while and are near to retirement. This would allow them to ‘live on’ within the organisation beyond their leaving date. It’s a fascinating idea which leads to questions of compensation and what you’re actually signing when you agree an employment contract. It completely horrifies me.
  

Develop Your Digital Sovereignty Strategy to Survive in a Global Market Full of Uncertainties with René Büst

• A really interesting look at geopolitical risks and what some organisations are doing about digital sovereignty. Given the move towards fascism in the US, people are now asking more questions about the risks of where their infrastructure and data is hosted, and who is managing it. As the presenter said, the trigger for looking at this in 2025 is geopolitical tensions and economic warfare. If you’re Denmark, and another country has publicly expressed a desire to annex part of your territory, you might not want to host all of your digital assets with a company located in that hostile regime.
• Getting on a sanctions list can suddenly take away your ability to use cloud services, potentially ruining your business.
• There are no guarantees that data will stay where you think it is.
• “Convenience is your enemy.” Nobody will protect your digital sovereignty. You must do it.
• Don’t confuse security or compliance with sovereignty — they are not the same things.
• Saying “no” and going your own way can be powerful in the long term. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Finland offered its old analogue telephone exchange system to Estonia for free. Estonia declined the offer and built its own digital system. It has a very strong technology culture.
• There were lots of more recent examples, with government entities all across Europe moving from Windows to Linux, from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, and Nextcloud.
• It got me wondering about what the UK government is doing in this space. The main things I’ve seen in the technology space with recent UK governments have focused on them wanting to get in on the AI action through cosying up to the existing, mainly US-based, companies. I really hope there’s a better strategy than this.
• Actions:
  
  1. Define your sovereignty requirements
  2. Specify and mitigate your sovereignty risks
  3. Identify areas for immediate action
  4. Decrease your dependencies
  5. Re(-design) for portability and focus on open standards
     

Lunch presentation with Jo Malone on Leading with Creativity

• Jo Malone is an extraordinary individual, growing up in a council house, having severe dyslexia, and leaving school at 13 to look after her mother, who had a stroke. She went on to become one of the world’s leading perfumers, founding multiple businesses. Her story of her battle with cancer, and how the pioneering treatment robbed her of her sense of smell for a long period of time, was amazing.
• My main issue with ‘celebrity’ sessions like these is that they don’t seem to fit into the theme of the conference very well. They feel like a bolt-on, without much to take away and ponder. There is something about seeing a famous name that I am sure lots of delegates enjoy, but they are not for me.
  

The CIO Cybersecurity Playbook for 2026 with Paul Proctor

• This was a dense presentation, with lots of material in the slides to review after the session.
• CISOs have their top priority as ‘don’t get hacked’, followed by everything else. CIOs have a top priority of ‘IT service delivery’, followed by everything else — including not getting hacked.
• The session covered the cybersecurity operating model, including whether the CIO is a cybersecurity lead or cybersecurity peer, and common areas of conflict between CIOs and CISOs.
• Gartner have a ‘Cybersecurity Business Value Benchmark’, which covers lots of the operational metrics that it would be useful to see when looking at cybersecurity performance and risks.
• Cyber risk should be positioned as a business decision and not a cybersecurity one, balancing the value of protection against the needs of running the business. It’s a choice about what we spend and the corresponding reduction in risk, but we don’t tend to treat it like one.
• A protection-level agreement can be made that balances cost versus performance, for example how often patching takes place. However, even if you had an infinite amount of money you wouldn’t necessarily patch everything within zero days as this doesn’t make sense.
• Gartner have a new tool for assessing third-party cybersecurity risk that looks useful.
  

Your Culture Is Shaped by the Worst Behaviours You Tolerate with Mary Mesaglio

• I picked this session primarily because of the speaker. Mary Mesaglio delivered a great presentation on How AI is Changing Human Behavior and What To Do About It at the CIO Leadership Forum in March, so I was really looking forward to hearing from her again.
• On reflection, the title of this one felt a bit clickbaity.
• It focused on three points: inspiration (new behaviours we should start seeing), inhibition (old behaviours we should stop seeing) and preservation (behaviours we should protect). I’ve always known this as ‘start, stop, continue’.
• In addition, she added two dimensions across these three points — big, department-wide messages and small, day-to-day ones. Leaders tend to overuse the big change messages and underuse the smaller signals.
• Some of the suggested example messages were uncomfortable, such as “You are not allowed to ask for approval”. I get the intent in that in this case the employee is meant to make decisions themselves with the delegated power to do so, but this isn’t the same thing as saying “you are not allowed”.
• Mesaglio highlighted the concept of ‘AI shame’ in the workplace, where people may feel that they have missed the window and are afraid to speak up. It’s part of the leader’s job to make this okay and to help equip them with the skills for the future.
  

AI in Action — Value, Governance and Leadership Insights with Margrethe Vestager, interviewed by Nader Henein

• This was an interview rather than a keynote speech to start the day at the conference.
• I’m not sure ‘AI in Action’ was required in the title, as this really wasn’t what the session was about.
• It was interesting to hear from a politician that had been involved in so much European litigation and legislation in relation to the big technology firms.
• She told us that she keeps a statue of a raised middle finger in her office. It was given to her by a Danish trade union when she was deputy prime minister and pushing through welfare cuts. She keeps it to remind her that her decisions will always upset some people.
  

Maximise Value of AI in Banking with Sophia Palmstedt

• I found this session too broad and hand-wavy, with suggestions such as “Don’t bolt AI onto broken banking processes. Instead, use AI to reinvent the process itself.”
  

Keynote: Supercommunicators with Charles Duhigg

• This was an excellent keynote by a superb presenter, based around his book Supercommunicators. I love sessions like this, as they give you a lot to think about and are immediately practical.
• He spoke about three types of conversations: practical, social and emotional. I immediately made the link to hearing Merlin Mann say “Do you want to be helped, heard or hugged?” on The Talk Show podcast. Duhigg went on to say exactly that, so now I’m not sure who came up with it. Either way, the advice is very good. When someone is telling you about a problem, or how they feel, it’s useful to check in on what they need. This is called the ‘matching principle’.
• He suggests asking deeper questions than ones that just elicit facts. If someone says “I’m a doctor”, don’t ask “Oh, what hospital do you work at?” Instead, ask something like “Oh, what made you decide to go to medical school?”
• Questions like these feel good to us as we are asking someone to be vulnerable.
• Vulnerability is a neural cascade that happens when I tell you something that you might judge me for.
• Duhigg gave an example of Dr Behfar Ehdaie, urologic surgeon and prostate cancer specialist, who for some patients was recommending active surveillance instead of an immediate operation. In many cases, surgery carries more risk than keeping an eye on the cancer. However, most people still opted for surgery. He found that he had to talk to the patients on an emotional level, asking “What does this cancer diagnosis mean to you?” Only then could he move on to a practical conversation about what the patient may want to do. Since he started taking this different approach, the number of patients that have opted for active surveillance has gone up by 70%.
• Duhigg asked us to talk to the person sitting next to us — in my case, a stranger — and ask the question “When was the last time you cried in front of another person?” Duhigg’s experience is that people don’t like the idea of doing this, but having done it they generally have a very positive experience and connection with the person they are talking to. He asked us to ponder what an equivalent question might be for us in the workplace.
• This question is number 30 out of 36 in the ‘fast friends procedure’. This is a set of 36 questions which have been shown to create intimate connections between people.
• Proving we are listening shows that we want to connect. To do this, remember the ‘loop for understanding’:
  
  1. Ask (preferably deep) questions
  2. Summarise what you heard
  3. Ask if you got it right
• Step three is important: if you acknowledge that I was listening to you, you are 20% more likely to listen to me.
  

Keynote: Never Give Up with Bear Grylls

• I was deeply sceptical about attending this keynote that started day three of the conference. I’ve never been convinced by Grylls, and his involvement in baptising Russell Brand in the River Thames less than a year after a Channel 4 documentary covered allegations of sexual assault against Brand was too much for me.
• A keynote is the only thing going on at the conference first thing in the morning, so I wandered into one of the overspill rooms to watch this one. The presentation was as trite as I thought it would be. Never give up!
  

How Best-In-Class Organizations Defend AI Risks with Marissa Schmidt

• This was effectively a presentation on a process to determine and mitigate risks in general, with a sprinkling of AI in there too. That isn’t to say it was bad, but there wasn’t much new to me here. You could reuse most of the content and apply it to other technologies too.
  

Leadership Greatest Hits — 2025 Edition: A Playlist of Actions for CIOs to Lead Better with Rob O’Donohue

• A second helping of Rob O’Donohue after the opening keynote. He is an excellent presenter, and this was a jam-packed presentation.
• The presentation used the concept of ‘Gartner’s Leadership Compass’, which shows that a leader needs to look up (at senior management and the board), down (at the people that work for them), across (the organisation), out (beyond their company) and within (at themselves). Each one of these was tackled in turn.
• He presented a smorgasbord of tactics, along with pointers to additional ones in the appendix that he didn’t have the time to go through in the time available.
• I wasn’t sure about the advice to be more aggressive in vendor negotiations, playing games such as turning up late and leaving early from meetings.
• Since 2007, the number of CIO job descriptions mentioning a requirement for social skills has increased by nearly 30%. Over this same period, the number of CIO job descriptions mentioning strength in managing financial and material resources has reduced by almost 40%. Social skills matter.
• There was a callback to Charles Duhigg’s keynote from the previous day with ‘the understanding loop’. When repeating what someone said back to them in your own words, ask “Did I get that right?”
• O’Donohue suggested putting together a ‘failure résumé’ in order to normalise failure for your people. Be honest and authentic. Don’t overthink it or dwell on negativity.
• You don’t need to be on an aeroplane to put your phone in airplane mode, getting rid of unwanted notifications for a while.
  

From Disruption to Direction: CIO Strategies for Leading the Workforce Through Major Change with Matt Hancocks

• That’s Matt Hancocks, not Matt Hancock, Google search engine.
• He was a good, clear presenter but I found myself sceptical of the content.
• Hancocks took us through three case studies of organisations that have navigated major change.
• The first was the Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific, part of the US Navy. They were trying to reignite employee engagement and came up with something called ‘The Ghostcutter Chronicles’, a fictional, serialised short story experience. They used staff interaction with this series as a way to crowdsource ideas. I have to admit that I got a bit lost with this example as it seemed overly complex and convoluted.
• The second example was of AAA Banking, who wanted to move from a legacy branch platform with brick-and-mortar locations to a 100% digital platform with only one physical branch. This would involve both a staff reduction and movement of staff to new locations. The way the company tackled this — and I stared in disbelief at the slides — was through the invention of a weird fuzzy character called ‘Spot’ who would be “the voice of change”, sending bi-weekly emails to employees where he answered questions, shared updates and addressed issues. ‘He’ had an inbox to receive anonymous questions and concerns, and included a ‘banking “dad joke” in every communication’. If I was going through a potential layoff, my feeling is that this would just generate anger and frustration, thinking that the leadership of the organisation was completely tone-deaf. I mean, just look at him:
  

• The third example was of an airline that took a more conventional approach to layoffs as they moved their systems to the cloud. They had a weekly all-hands meeting along with smaller, focused monthly ‘connect’ sessions with 10–15 people in the organisation, as well as general upskilling training for everyone. This all sounded sensible, but wasn’t revolutionary.
  

Keynote: Re-Wiring For The Future with Dr Michelle Dickinson

• Dr Michelle Dickinson is a nanotechnologist and materials engineer who has worked with Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Richard Branson.
• She moved to New Zealand and created Australasia’s biggest nanotechnology lab.
• Dickinson was a good presenter and an incredible individual, but I didn’t find much to take away from the keynote that stayed with me afterwards.
  

The CIO Role: Navigate Evolving CIO Leadership Accountabilities with Daniel Sanchez Reina

• This was a really interesting presentation that examined the various technology-related roles that you find in organisations — the Chief Information Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief AI Officer, Chief Digital Marketing Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, and the Chief Digital and Information Officer, for example — and looks at how to manage the messiness caused by overlapping roles.
• “Technology leadership is distributed and ambiguous. Even in a team sport, you need clear responsibilities.”
• You need to work with other people. Leadership is about harmony, not about how loud you can be.
• He presented the concept of the ‘Technology Leadership Accountabilities Grid’, with Run/Grow/Transform on the Y-axis and Internal (back office and core operations)/External (front office and products/services) on the X-axis. You can use this to talk about where the boundaries and accountability lie between different roles.
• Things get much blurrier when more than one person is involved. Examples:
  
  • If the CDO needs infrastructure, how will that work?
  • Who looks after cybersecurity?
• These need to be written down and agreed.
• Complexity explodes with each additional technology executive. Especially when they have no budget or headcount, but responsibility for outcomes.
• Team members will need the map to see exactly where their responsibilities are.
• Tech accountability is not and will not be the same in all organisations. Value will only be achieved through the constant renegotiation of responsibilities with other tech domains.
• 65% of technology leaders want to do more transformational, client-facing things. To do this you must be good enough at your current scope and also be able to exploit your sources of influence.
  

What You Need to Know About China’s AI Innovations with Tong Zhang

• A lot of this content was familiar to me, probably as a long-time listener to Stratechery, Sharp China and Sharp Tech.
• It was interesting to see that consumer usage of Generative AI went from 8% in June 2024 — over 18 months after ChatGPT was released — to 43% in May 2025. This was attributed to the release of Deepseek.
• WPS is a product similar to Microsoft Office in China; it has over 600 million Office AI users.
• The presentation had lots of narrative about ‘open source’ models (but I am not sure if these should be more accurately referred to as ‘open weight’?)
  

Aside from attending the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, this was a week in which I:

• Had to manage a couple of calls and keep up with a few email threads at work throughout the week.
• Met with the company who are building our new boardroom table to give them feedback on the latest detailed design and answer their questions. The sales rep booked a meeting in my diary for Friday afternoon using the link in my email signature. This creates a diary entry with a Teams dial-in, so I was caught off guard when our office reception called me to say that I had a visitor. Everyone who was joining the meeting was working from home. We managed to quickly book a room and get him into our office so that we could all get onto the call together.
• Had the weekly meeting with our sister company about their office refurbishment project, as well as the work being done by the landlord.
• Met with our audio-visual design consultants to work through an issue related to the digital signal processor that was part of the original design. We’ve found an incompatibility between some of the components, so need to implement something slightly more complex than we had hoped.
• Made progress with my team’s annual appraisals.
• Took part in the second Society for Hopeful Technologists online event, leading one of the breakout groups through an exercise skilfully organised by some of the members of the group.
• Submitted my first-ever pull request on GitHub. I’ve recently been using the Tapestry app on my phone, iPad and Mac to have a single merged view of social media posts from Bluesky, Mastodon and micro.blog. Manfred Lizner-Scherf created a plugin that reads posts from Feedbin and incorporates them into the timeline. Unfortunately this didn’t work for me as it kept producing errors. Using a combination of the Tapestry Loom app on my Mac and ChatGPT, I managed to debug it. After testing the small fix, I submitted it back to the developer. I was a hands-on geek once, and this gave me a small taste of what life might have been like if I’d stuck with coding.
  

Media

Video

• Watched Human In The Loop (2024) on the recommendation of someone in the Society of Hopeful Technologists Signal group. It’s a short film that makes important points about the hidden world of the low-wage people involved in training AI systems, but some of the other elements of the story felt a bit distracting. I’d love to see a full deep-dive documentary on this topic.
• Gave up watching Being Eddie on Netflix after getting about halfway through. Eddie Murphy was a childhood favourite of mine, but this documentary is so incredibly boring. Given his significant involvement in the project, I guess it was always going to be.
• Also gave up watching All Her Fault on NOW TV after an episode and a half. The storyline is silly and the acting is super-hammy. I really struggle with watching something that is meant to be realistic but requires a massive suspension of disbelief.
  

Audio

• Took a trip to Deco Audio to browse their second-hand CDs, picking up four new ones for my collection.
• Cantilever looks interesting. It’s similar to how MUBI used to work for films, making a feature out of scarcity, with a new title being added and one dropping off each day.
  

Web

• Got this site added to powRSS. There are lots of tools now available for discovering blogs and blog content. I like the feature of this one where you can get sent to a random post from any time in the past on any of the blogs in the database.
  

Books

• Have been enjoying Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. It’s super well-written and rewards longer reading sessions.
  

Next week: Back in the office, and a couple more online meetups.

1. See my previous write-ups from 2023 and 2024. ↩