Old Fashioned weblogs are surprisingly rare nowadays. Even sites that are classed as blogs are very often just highly targeted to a specific audience with the long term goal to make money or to prove a point of some description.
When I started a blog, way back in 2004, it was genuinely a dear diary type of thing mainly about fencing but grew and changed with what I was doing and was a huge part of what I did in the IBM Lotusphere days.
Since then lots of people have trailed off and stopped writing, but I’ve still kept it up. And even though it’s had times when it was on hiatus, it still brings value to me and the reason for this slightly self indulgent post is to explain why.
I am not a content creator and like everybody I go to the internet as my first port of call for most things. but how do I feed what I have learnt in the real world back? this blog is that. So that things I learn I can share and maybe help someone else.
I keep control of my content. Social media has to a large extent been the downfall of the traditional blog, why go to this effort when there are massive platforms that will curate and promote your content for you. And most people I know have used a single social media platform as their main personal or professional promotional area. I think this is an incredibly short sighted and naïve path, As we’ve discovered with things like Twitter, they can go in a new direction and suddenly you’re left on a poisonous platform, also companies like LinkedIn are known for dumping old content that you have spent ages on as they try a new thing, I don’t want to loose that effort and history on someone else’s whim.
Background, as a person with a professional presence this is an easy place for people to find me. Clients or individuals who want to see what kind of person I am, and it can back up assertions I might make on my suitability.
A very old term for moving and assembling network parts together inside a corporation, 1.
Explanation:
Now this is a phrase I thought I’d never hear again but have recently heard multiple times. It is now used in a slightly derogatory fashion, to signify when the cloud part of a network is taking too long to complete, has been made overly complex, or seems to be letting down the dream of cloud networking.
Using it like this harkens back to the times when we could do this kind of stuff relatively easily. In context: “they’re only just Slinging Tin why is this taking weeks?” often used by people who have assembled entire complex networks consisting of all of the parts still being used in today’s networks and have done it within a few days.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
more commonly known in the real world as a phrase for weightlifting[↩]
I always love people’s podcast lists, as its a good way of getting new listens, so here are my recommended ones for 2024.
Current Active Podcasts:
When It hits the fan – One of the most amazing reveals on what is ACTUALLY going on in the world and media, every episode is full of “So THAT is why!!” , moments.
Last Week in AI – A solid, non-hysterical way of keeping up to date with the world of Artificial Intelligence
Politics Weekly UK / Politics Weekly America – A 2 for 1 here, while the Guardian is one of the most left-leaning of the UK newspapers, the coverage is well done, and I find the left newspapers are far more balanced and less ranty than the right-wing ones, and there are often right-wing guests to give balance.
The Valentyne Heresy – I know RPG podcasts are all the rage, but this one is a good one and not embarrassing to listen too.
Archived Podcasts, but worth listening to:
The Brand Plan – A podcast on marketing by an old flatmate, a surprisingly fascinating listen, and I await their second season.
The Magnus Archives – One of the greatest original content stories done in podcast form. If you have not listened, then please do, especially if you live in London, UK.
To Gargoyle: The act of going to someone’s desk when you want them to do something and simply refusing to move until they do it. 1
Explanation:
The corporate term “To Gargoyle” isn’t something that has been used an awful lot in the last couple of years due to the pandemic home working, but is now on the rise again due to companies starting to pull people back into the office; essentially, it is going to the desk of someone who you want to do something for you and simply refusing to move until they do. However two points differentiate between being a gargoyle and just being a pain in the arse:
1) You can’t just need something or want something immediately and then just go to someone’s desk and demand it, they will just tell you to get knotted, they’re busy, they’ve got important stuff to do, etc etc. you have to have a right to be there, you have to have raised the correct forms and requests and attempted to follow up on them, you have to have followed the rules of the system; and the reason you are standing there now is that you have been driven to it because another part of the company has not done its job.
2) You can’t actively stop someone from continuing to do their current work; if they are on a call you sit next to their desk and continue to work on your phone, near to them, but not actually intrusive. It has to be clear that you are going to just be there until they do their thing for you. but in a passive aggressive way.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
This is very different from the urban dictionary term “Gargoyling[↩]
Well, this has been a really odd work year. The first part of this year wasn’t massively productive from a value of delivery point of view, although good from a personnel management stand point, with new lessons on how to deal with high stress and how to minimise impact to your team caused by changes in other areas, but from a pure enjoyment point of view not one of the greatest, and I’ve been always one of the very, lucky people who have always enjoyed their work. Thankfully its an old lesson, to always value the joy in your work first so I decided that, going back to full time consulting, rather than a permanent role was where the fun was, I DID however, make a huge ton of good friends, and as a number of them left after me the network of good people I now know has grown.
The latter half of this year has been far more enjoyable. It’s been challenging, but fun. It has been filled with enthusiastic techs rather than political battles. It has been totally delivery orientated. It’s just been everything I’ve always loved In a job, and people that know me have noted that I am back to my old bounce, The new set of clients I have been working with have also squared the circle for me in improving my CV.
The next part is I have for my day to day work moved even further into the management role. Away from technical and that is simply down to discovering that it was the place I could do the most good. As a tech, there is a limit to what I can fix, but as a manager that represents the interest of delivery and technical people and tries to actually help them reach their goals, that’s a big thing and the sheer volume of good, if you can call it that, that such a view point can provide in a corporate environment is huge. It’s been very, very rewarding. And I’m going to be a little bit egotistical and say It’s actually made a few people’s lives and work better, and who could ask for more.
But if I look at the three basic areas that I normally review:
Management: I am still treating this as a growth thing, and something that I have noted with quite a few of my management colleagues at various different clients over the years. Managers do not treat their personal growth in the same way as techs and business people treat theirs. They think in terms of their growth, rising through an organisation, getting more powerful, but not in terms of their skill set, and I’m finding that that is a really wonderful thing to try for, can you be a better manager, not simply a more powerful manager, so that is where I’m going at the moment. its my main focus which means I’m not looking at getting any formal certifications as you would if this was a business or a technical position.
The old management certifications aren’t worth what they used to be and Agile while it is nearly the only game in town nowadays. It is being treated more as a religion than a faith. I’ll expand on this more on a separate blog post. To me Agile has been for the last 20 odd years merely the simplest way of getting a lot of deliveries done while keeping track of them. Now as always these things have grown into far more of a religion. There are people with silly titles. There’s people who do silly ceremonies that don’t actually bring you closer to your delivery and just chew up time and frustrate your team. I found that going a little bit old school on this and trying to just focus on things that help deliver is making my management style work much better. I’m getting good feedback from both the people I work with and the people I work for. one of this years challenges will be to try and better explain it as a process.
Technical: As always, I might do management as a role but what I am is a Tech, and I still fiddle with it constantly. The two technical areas I’m mainly working on both last year and the coming year is making sure that my Azure is as good as my AWS. and ensuring that I keep up to date on Salesforce. And while you might be expecting me to do AI, I am not learning it in the normal way. The large language model side. Everyone’s getting excited about that, but I like to dig under the covers, and particularly how vector databases are working and growing and how they work in terms of security are my big things that I have both been learning and am continuing to learn. thank fully I have a smaller client that has had me working on a challenging little problem on this very subject, and this is hitting all my geek buttons.
Business: My business knowledge is growing at the same pace as management. Because my new set of clients, even though they’re in the same field as my old ones, they are dealing with wildly different things. Unfortunately, I haven’t made as much progress as I wanted with my CII certification. That is still on my hard to do list and it’s getting more and more important this year.
