HelloStu - Posts

Behaviourism: Dogs, Carrots and Sticks

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 22:05:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: learningDesign, systemsThinking, behaviourism, motivation, publicService, ned, study

I was digging into Behaviourism as part of my studies earlier today. It’s the school of thought that treats learning as a change in observable behaviour, triggered by external stimuli. Think of it as the “physics” of learning—action and reaction. These are common concepts, but it was interesting to rip them apart in the classroom. It also gave me a great excuse to share some picture of my mate’s new puppy, Ned (I love him).

The big hitters in this space…

Pavlov & Classical Conditioning: This is about association. You pair a naturally occurring stimulus (food) with a neutral one (a bell). Eventually, the bell alone triggers the response. In the real world, this is how “branding” works—or how the ping of a Slack notification can trigger an immediate spike in cortisol. It’s also fundamental in most dog training. Thanks, Ned! 😘
Skinner & Operant Conditioning: This is about consequences. The classic “carrot and the stick.” If a behaviour is followed by a reward (reinforcement), it’s likely to happen again; if followed by a penalty, it’s more likely to stop. You see this everywhere in gamified learning (looking at you, Duolingo).

Of course, these rules aren’t as simple as they seem. Context and human complexity make all the difference.

Some Initial Thoughts

Carrots and sticks feel like simple tools to employ, but where there are consequences, there are almost always unintended consequences. This is especially true in group scenarios. A few things I’m chewing on:

The Motivation Killer: Constant positive reinforcement (gamification, badges, “praise” channels) might work in the short term, but it can kill intrinsic motivation. People start performing for the “gold star” recognition rather than the value of the work itself, which leads to some very odd behaviours.
The Shadow of Role-Modelling: Behaviourism touches on how we mirror what we see. This is the “hidden curriculum” of any team or classroom. It’s something I want to understand more in my follow-up reading—how we inadvertently “condition” our peers just by how we show up.
Beyond the Classroom: This stuff isn’t restricted to learning design. The way these mechanics show up in the DNA of organisations and teams is fascinating. We can probably all list experiences where a poorly designed “incentive” actually broke the culture it was trying to fix or just plainly disregarded the outcome - I think we see this play out in the implementation of gov policy all the time. Good intentions meet ill-thought out delivery (often because of time & budget constraints or just message decay as it works its way through the system).

We often mistake compliance for commitment. Behaviorism can give you the former, but if we want the latter we need to look beyond the simple physics of stimulus and response.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Shooting Slight Return

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:42:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: photography, portraits, band

I had the opportunity to take some pictures at the weekend for two friends, Darren and Tommy, who make up the britpop acoustic covers duo Slight Return. I’ve had the pleasure of playing a set or two with these boys (on the Cajon) so was more than happy to blow the cobwebs off of the camera and take some snaps when I was asked.

I packed fairly light for the shoot with just my OM-D, two speedlights and an umbrella - Robyn offered to assist and was very helpful in holding and pointing lights so I wasn’t faffing around too much with stands and modifiers. Considering I don’t get much practice shooting other people these days and it’s certainly been a while since I’ve done anything out on location, I think I got a couple of passable frames! The boys seemed happy with them which is the main thing and hopefully they have hit the early 90’s moody boys band photo cliché I was aiming for 😂. I’ve not shared all of the images - just enough to test the new galley widget I’ve built for post pages 😉📸

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Clean and rebuild

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:31:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: website, project, code, design, writing, sveltia, astro

So spring is finally here and I decided it was time to give this website another fresh coat of paint. What started out as an ambition to just paint the walls turned into knocking a few down and doing some slightly more involved renovations.

Motivation for change

University studies, plus spending more time on small personal projects lately, pulled me back toward wanting a space where I could write about, share, and showcase what I’m working on and learning. That’s still mostly for my own benefit rather than for an audience; it’s just useful to catalogue things and make connections over time. There wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong with the site as it was. I was getting a bit tired of the punk-eque-neo-brutalist aesthetic I’d built and wanted something calmer (am I getting old?). I’ve been interested in the idea of a digital garden for a while, and wanted something that felt more like that: easier to browse and rummage around in, and less card/image/magazine-like in layout and feel than what I had before.

I also wanted to remove some of the friction that had been getting in the way of me writing and publishing. I’ve implemented Sveltia CMS (still git-based) for easier, more accessible content editing, and written a few scripts (with the help of co-pilot) to take care of some of the manual work I was doing, like generating social image previews.

Along the way, I’ve also had the chance to simplify parts of the codebase, add some documentation, and clear away technical debt from earlier experiments. All very satisfying for a nerd like me 🤓. AI has been used and has been useful. We’ve also had some arguments along the way 🤖😡😂.

Summary of the changes completed

New layouts, styles and navigation
Introduced 3 categories to organise my writing - work, rest and play
Migrated all old posts and pages, tidying up tags a little along the way
Moved much of the page context out of Astro files and into Mdx files so the content can be updated alongside posts in the CMS (Content Management System)
Took the same approach moving menu items previously baked into astro pages or components into json files to allow these to be more easily updated via the CMS
Implemented a ‘Dark Mode’ feature for the lolz
Rationalised and improved many of the old components, especially those previously created in a hurry to play with and visualise data
A new home page component that allows a user to browse and navigate to posts by the images used within them.
Created a set of pre-build scripts that handle some of the more irritating quirks between Sveltia & Astro whilst also generating social preview images for automatic reference in open graph meta.
Lots of other subtle SEO and accessibility improvements
Revised/updated the about page content and introduced a now page

Things I’m considering next

For the moment I’ve removed commenting and social sharing. I probably should add these back in but it’s not a priority and not sure I want/need the extra page clutter.
I may try to repurpose the approach used for the home page Image Stream to create an in-post gallery component to make sharing photodumps a little easier (now implemented ✅).
Considering a recommended or related posts component.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Creating alignment within Communities of Practice

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: learningDesign, communities, digital, transformation, practice, study

So recently I started doing a thing! That thing being studying for a Master’s degree in Creative Teaching and Learning Design. At some point I should probably write some more words about why I’ve embarked on this journey given I’m not known for being a teacher- or a designer and my single A-level definitely suggests academia isn’t my jam…but that feels like a messy and personal story I’m not in the mood to write today.

What I can tell you is that I’ve been spending A LOT of time over the last 4-5 weeks with my head buried in a variety of learning design course materials, and it’s been a bit of a revelation. For the first time, I’m properly digging into what, why, when, where and how we learn. It’s fascinating and I’m really enjoying the challenge.

One of the topics interesting me over the last two weeks is Situated Learning Theory. It grabbed my attention because within the theory is this notion of Communities of Practice (CoPs). Working in the world of digital transformation in the public sector I immediately recognised the concept and it was interesting to delve into the research of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger who coined the term.

If you haven’t read them yet, my brilliant colleague Tash Willcocks who is TPXimpact’s Head of Learning Design (aka someone who REALLY KNOWS this shizz) wrote two cracking posts about Communities of Practice. She covered what they are and the bloody hard work it takes to make them actually work. Tash is as you would expect spot on - I agree whole-heatedly with her that learning isn’t just about absorbing info; it’s about “humaning” together.

As Etienne Wenger (one of the godfathers of CoP thinking) put it:

But as I sit here pretending to make sense of all the “Learning Design” related thoughts that have been thrown my way over the last month, I’ve started wondering: are there ways we can make our communities even more intentional without losing their soul and authenticity?

The “What” and the “So What?”

I’ve experienced and been part of many CoPs over the last 10 years of my career and my experience is that most CoPs are a bit… err …vibey?! We get together, we share some “unfinished work” (as Tash suggests), and we leave feeling a bit more connected. That’s great. Actually it can be bloody lovely and in itself useful. But what if we were more explicit about the learning outcomes we’re aiming for?

I know “outcomes” sounds a bit like corporate-speak, but stay with me. How could a community agree on a set of clear goals that would help us articulate and better communicate what we actually want to get from the community. Yes learning nerds I’m riffing on the well established theories in John Biggs’ Theory of Constructive Alignment.

In the classroom, Biggs argues that you should align your outcomes, your activities, and your assessment so they all point the same way. In a CoP, that might look like:

The Outcome: “We want to be able to map complex systems more confidently and consistently.”
The Activity: Instead of just a chat, we run a live, messy mapping session on a couple of real projects.
The ‘Assessment’: Not a test (god no! I hate tests. Everyone does- right?!), but a reflective peer-review of that map.

When the activity actually helps us reach the goal, the “hard work” Tash mentions feels a lot more rewarding. I’m not talking revolution here. I think CoPs are mostly great as they are. I love vibey! I’ve felt the benefits of many. I just wonder if some small tweaks could make the learning feel more intentional and rewarding.

A knock-on effect of this intentionality might be in making it easier to evidence to Senior Leaders the benefits and impact CoPs bring to an organisation, thus making holding the time and space for these crucial learning spaces easier. It’s not what John Hattie was talking about when he suggested “making learning visible” but I’m happy to build on his thoughts. If learning is visible it can be seen and valued, and not necessarily just from the perspective of the learner but by those who need to create the conditions in which learning can happen.

Emily Webber (another super smart CoP legend) has written and shared some really practical tips on the subject of measuring communities of practices. Note to self - I need to get hold of Emily’s book and read more.

One of the trickiest bits of a CoP is that we aren’t all at the same level. In Situated Learning, this is called Legitimate Peripheral Participation. It’s the journey from being the overwhelmed new person on the edge of a community (the novice) to a seasoned old hand, showing and telling us how things can be done in the centre (the expert).

One of the risks inherent in many CoPs is that these roles aren’t necessarily clearly defined or understood. I’m not sure clear definitions would be helpful but I do worry that being an expert in a particular area of practice does not necessarily make you a great facilitator, coach, mentor or collaborator. If we want our CoPs to thrive, we need to support these experts and help them learn the skills and behaviours that allow a community to flourish. Maybe we need more CoPs for CoPs. Too meta?

Could having explicit outcomes make a CoP more accountable and also potentially create some space to better and more transparently support the ‘experts’ that provide the vital scaffolding? I think so.

Not “accountable” in a ‘you didn’t hit your KPIs’ way, but in a ‘is this actually worth our time?’ way. When we know what we’re trying to learn, we can see the progress. We can celebrate when a novice moves toward the centre of the circle. We’ll be able to see the threads connecting our Wednesday afternoon chats to the actual quality of the work we produce and the impact we’re delivering.

So, what am I thinking?

I’m leaning towards a “Yes, and…” approach.

Yes to the messiness and the human connection.
And a bit more intentionality in how we design the learning journeys that we want to see happening within that mess.

If we co-design our goals, align our activities to them, and actually support our experts to lead the way, we move from just “having a community” to “practicing with purpose.”

What do you reckon? Are your CoPs more explicit about what they’re trying to achieve (if so, please let me know), or are you just enjoying the vibes?

Changing Plans

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Rest

Tagged: birthday, walking, plans, challenge, invite, friends

Okay, so I previously posted about challenging myself to a 46km walk at the end of August for my Birthday, and a few lovely folks showed an interest in tagging along. Thank you! I now need to let you all know that I’ve changed my mind and decided against it. Sorry!

I don’t often back down or quit from a challenge once I set my sights on it but this one just doesn’t appeal right now. At the moment I’m loving filling my weekends with short runs, tiny photo walks, sea swims and hanging out with my friends getting squiffy. Committing the next few weekends to long training walks on my own, resting aching muscles and nursing blisters is just not how I want to spend my August. So a new plan has been hatched.

Friends and internet stalkers are welcome to join for any of these activities. All are optional and I’m happy to fly solo if needed - but it is my birthday and you wouldn’t want to make me cry! right?

August 30th

08:50 - The great field parkrun. Everyone welcome - runners, walkers and cheer squad

10:30 - Morning coffee at Seventh Seal

13:00 - Walk around the coast path of Portland starting at the Cove Pub. Its about 16km (10 miles) and roughly takes 3.5 hours at a steady pace.

19:00 - Beers back in Dorchester. Location to be determined (slide into my DMs or whatsapp me on the day). Probably heading to Weybiza in search of music at some point.

23:59 - Briefly stop dancing to celebrate me turning another year older!

August 31st

00:01 - Continue dancing?

No regrets. Simples. ✌️

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Birthday stroll - 46 before 46

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Rest

Tagged: birthday, walking, challenge, invite, friends, outdoors

On August 31, 2025, I’ll turn the ripe old age of 46 years old (I know - I don’t look a day over 52!). To mark this occasion, I’ve decided to set myself a little challenge on Saturday, 30th to walk 46km (28.5 miles). I set myself similar challenges in 2012 and 2013, where I ran 26.2 miles with friends over a similar route.

I’m nowhere close to being marathon fit these days but I like the idea of setting myself a physical goal and turning a day that could easily see me alone and consumed with grumpiness about my advancing years into something that forces me to hang out with cool people and leaves me with that grin that creeps across my face when I’m reminded of what this stubborn old git can still accomplish when I put my mind to it!

I’ve drawn out the approximate route on google maps and that can be found here.

Details will be confirmed nearer the time, but the rough plan in my head is to start over near the Cove Inn on Portland between 7 and 8am. My best guess is that with some breaks for refreshments, and 1200m of climb along the route, this will take me approx 11-12 hours to complete. That should see me limping back into Dorchester and be ready for some beers, food and partying between 7 and 8pm - hopefully celebrating reaching my 46th year at midnight if I haven’t passed out or been taken to hospital first 🎉.

I could and will do this alone if needed - but I reckon it’d be much more fun to have some company along the way, and maybe you are also looking for a challenge? So this is an open invite to friends, acquaintances, colleagues and even the odd random stranger to join me on part or all of this little adventure. It doesn’t matter if you want to join me for 1km or all 46km I’ll be happy to have you join in.

If you are interested (even if it is just to help me celebrate at the pub afterwards), please complete this form and mark the 30th August in your diaries.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - Size matters

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 15:30:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, life, product, scaling, events, reflection

I’m back to do some writing after taking a break. Did you miss me? 😂

Things have felt positive this week. I returned from leave on Monday with a few things to catch up on but I didn’t find any blazing fires to put out.

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot this week has been organising and optimising for work/things of different sizes/shapes. Partly, this has been down to some client work with an MHCLG team, but some conversations about internal TPX processes have also reinforced this train of thought.

I’m thinking about problems that happen when scaling (programmes, services, organisations, etc). Things will work fine initially, but the cracks soon appear if you need to start to process a greater diversity of ‘thing’ aswell as increase the volume/throughput. It can become far from optimal to blindly apply the same workflow/rules to everything (due to the increased diversity - one size doesn’t fit all), but equally processing everything in a unique/bespoke way isn’t viable at the increased scale. Solutions often involve filtering, grouping/categorisation, and then right-sizing different versions of the original process to handle these new categories. I’m mulling over whether I can develop different strategies that could more consistently be used to avoid or better anticipate (and intervene) when I spot similar issues. Abstract but if you have thoughts let me know.

Product for the people

On Thursday, I attended my first Product for the people event. The cold early morning start and slow trains to and from Bristol did nothing to take the edge off a really good day. Things kicked off with fantastic talks from Beth Brown and Andy Dudfield. The rest of the day was unconference-style, which worked well, and I took something away from all the sessions I attended.

I often feel very anxious and uneasy at events like this, but the vibes at this were good and chilled. It also helped that there were 4 or 5 people I’d met before and a few others I follow virtually. My super smart colleague Harriet also attended, and I got a nice hug from the man, the myth, the legend (Jukesie) upon arrival. Thanks to him, Debbie, Steve and Ben for their hard work in making it happen.

Life

I’m doing ok.

Currently enjoying:

Running much more consistently. I’ve joined one of my local running clubs, and they are a friendly, supportive, and often sociable bunch of people.
Bread. After listening to the audiobook of Ultra-processed People by Chris van Tulleken, I decided I’d get back into baking again. A tasty and therapeutic pursuit indeed.
Photography. I’m celebrating feeling creative again. I went through a spell where I had the urge, but the outputs/ideas were often dark, and I wanted to avoid that. That’s changing and I really enjoyed shooting this little set of self-portraits the other week and a few people have mentioned how much they liked them.

Not enjoying:

Dating. FUCK THOSE APPS. SRSLY?! Yeah, I’m undateable…I’m ok with it 😐.

Hopefully back soon. Have a great weekend. x o x

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - Swipe right

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 10:20:00 GMT

Posted in: Rest

Tagged: weeknote, life, travel, car, dating, reflection

More excuses

Yeah, so my weeknotes now land once a fortnight 🤷‍♂️. I’m sorry and not sorry. I’ve found writing much easier on my non-working Fridays. It just happened that last week, I was away in Cornwall on Friday, which meant choosing to get outside and explore or sit inside and write. I think I made the right choice 😀.

Work

Things have felt busy. There is a lot of activity across my two client projects, and one team has had a few team members on leave. This was planned, and we’d set realistic sprint goals based on our capacity. Despite this, I’ve found myself leaning into both DM activities and Service Design so that we can keep up the momentum (and maybe I’m just impatient 😬).

One project has completed some excellent user testing sessions in the last couple of weeks. These early sessions have confirmed that we’re on the right track but also given rise to some interesting new ideas and risks that we’ll need to consider. To most readers of these notes, testing early low-fidelity service/product prototypes with users will be second nature. However, this step is still rare or skipped in many public service organisations and exposing client teams to this way of working is a part of this job I’ve always enjoyed.

Outside of projects, I still have a few future work opportunities I’m trying to shape or land. One is new and exciting. It came to us/me because we had done some excellent work for the client in the past and had built a good ongoing relationship. I’m keeping my fingers crossed we might be able to do more outstanding work with them soon 😀.

Cornwall

As alluded to in my opening excuses, I spent a couple of days in St Ives over the bank holiday weekend. It was a needed change of scene for my daughter and me and an excellent opportunity to take the new EV for a longer drive. In the end, we stayed for three days, and those were spent walking, eating, swimming, mooching, and resting. Lovely stuff.

There were some lowlights, including a little anxiety/panic attack one morning. It was nothing significant; it was just frustrating as I hoped I was past these. The new EV (which performed admirably throughout the trip) picked up a small door dent from some inconsiderate numpty in the car park. Grrrr.

It was a good trip, though. The highlights were the views and one evening spent ‘out-out’ with Robyn. Many cocktails were consumed, and much silly fun was had.

Dating - peaking into the abyss

Fuelled by both curiosity and my ongoing fear of loneliness, I signed up to 2 online dating apps/services this week. I vaguely knew what to expect as I have friends who’ve shared horror stories with me before and explained some of the basics. Knowing and experiencing first hand though are different beasts.

The main things that have crossed my mind so far;

Judging people—we all do it; it’s normal. But this forced, engineered, algorithmically enhanced version of judging people (and being judged) based soley on a few pictures and some basic prompts feels so horribly cold and grim. It’s really icky.
Hats off to the designers and developers of these platforms and services. Slick experiences are cleverly engineered to keep us all hooked and paying through the nose to be seen or make connections. It’s evil but also a masterful demonstration of product skill across various disciplines.
After what feels like hours of swiping and scrolling, only four women out of hundreds registered within a 50-mile radius of me DON’T PADDLEBOARD. WTAF. I knew it was popular, but SRSLY?
I currently have next to zero confidence that I’ll ever make a match with someone, let alone progress to a date IRL. I’ll continue the experiment for a while longer (I paid a 3-month subscription). Mostly I’m doing this as a source of funny anecdotes to share with friends about how much of a hopeless case I am. FML 🤦‍♂️

Other things in my head

Robyn goes back to Bournemouth at the weekend. I’ll finally be proper solo and home alone from Monday. It’s going to be odd 😐
It’s my Birthday tomorrow. 45 years old. Meh 🎂
I lost a couple more pounds (weight - not just dating app subs) 📉🎉
I have done some running, but a few knee niggles going on 🏃🏻‍♂️🏃🏻‍♂️
Meditation fail ❌ - Can do better!
A couple of sea swims but not been to the pool 🏊🏻‍♂️
Next to no reading (not even other weeknotes) - Must do better!
Audiobook currently Scary Monsters and Super Creeps by Dom Joly

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - Update and Grow

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 10:20:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, life, growth, health, car, reflection

Excuses

I didn’t manage a weeknote last week and this week also feels like a struggle. The biggest blocker I’m facing is that I don’t have much to say about work right now. Work isn’t bad or boring - it’s just…work! Currently the life changes that I’m wrestling with mean that when I sit down to reflect on the week and what I’m learning, these are the things that consume me. I’m confident this will all pass and become more manageable, and then it might be easier to pick out, reflect, and share meaningful progress at work and connect some dots professionally.

Until then, I intend to…

Continue the writing habit and practice
Accept that my weeknote output will be biased towards life-life and not work-life
Share my posts in fewer places (because they’ll be more personal and less relevant to others)
Try to feel less guilt and anxiety about all of the above.

Update

The last couple of weeks have been a grind. It’s been about a month (maybe longer) since my wife moved out. In the first few weeks, I intentionally kept myself busy doing jobs and making the house feel like my place. The busy-busy-ness has subsided in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve had some days as my new day-to-day reality kicks in where I feel pretty miserable. Increasingly, I grapple with the future I was working towards becoming unwritten.

The last two years have been rough anyway, and I think some depression setting in as a 24-year-old relationship comes to an end is to be expected. I don’t want people reading this to worry about me. There have been good days, and I have plenty of good friends, support and tools in my arsenal for working through depression, but I also don’t want to hide from it and keep it hidden from these entries like a dirty little secret. We all have struggles, and I will be open about some of mine.

This week, I tried really hard to make it a better week. I knew I was back to work for a normal working week (four days) with plenty of work to fill it. I wanted to double down on my health and fitness as I know this helps me in lots of ways. I also had the delivery of the new EV scheduled for Wednesday, which I was really looking forward to. I was mostly successful, and the week has been ok, but other events conspired to take the shine away (below).

On a parallel track, I awoke on Monday with a sore throat and what felt like an ear infection. Tuesday - my ear, nose and throat all felt blocked up, and I was popping lots of pain meds. Things were much the same on Wednesday, but worryingly, the bug was moving south to my lungs (I have asthma and chest infections always hit me hard). Thursday, I woke up and struggled to breathe when climbing the stairs. I admitted defeat and called in sick. By some miracle, I got an appointment at the GP surgery at lunchtime. The doctor gave me a good check-over, laughed hysterically at my pitiful peak-flow test results and sent me home with a cocktail of antibiotics and steroids and suggested rest. I’m hoping the drugs kick in quickly - I really would like to enjoy the new car more than a trip to the pharmacy :(

Grow

So, despite all the moaning, depression and sickness above, here are some things I could be celebrating.

I have a car again - freedom, escape, convenience and in climate-friendly package
I am still smoke-free and starting to feel better for it
Have continued to swim a couple of times a week. I managed one sea swim before the sick hit me!
I’ve done some running and have plans to do more
I have been meditating - almost daily use of headspace this week, struggling to focus most days, but I’m making the time for it
Weight - down a couple of pounds!
I have played my electric guitar at least once. I’d forgotten the joy of my electric vs my acoustic guitar - what I lack in skill can be more easily hidden by distortion
I have used my camera and speedlights to create a new profile photo for around the interwebs. The shot above is a silly out-take
I have been listening to Natives - Race and Class in Ruins of Empire (Akala) and learning lots
I have read many smart things written by intelligent people who share in my network. Thank you all.

That is all I have for now. x

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - Bullet Train

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 20:20:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, life, update, productivity, reflection

The long weekend in bullets

Had a nice catchup chat with Mathew on Friday. He was in France - Ooh la laa!
As one person moves out of the home, one moves back in. Robyn is staying for August and has successfully secured some remote work for herself. Interestingly, she is helping out a digital product company.
My turn to wear the Run Director vest at the great field parkrun. The nearby Weymouth event was cancelled, so our attendance was higher. 387 finishers. Everybody left happy, and the results processing was a breeze! Win.
My Mum decided to throw a charity concert for her Birthday (nutter!), so we went along and supported her. I love my Mum.
I may have eaten some fried chicken. I love fried chicken. It doesn’t love me.
Sunday involved more work sorting things around the house and a big food shop.
Monday was a day of leave - I went to the pool for a swim and cycled to Weymouth to see the sea. I cheated and got the train home.

The short working week in bullets

I helped create some needed space to ensure wider strategy and roadmap conversations are happening outside our regular sprint rituals for one of our cyber projects and with a slightly smaller group. This was needed to avoid these topics constantly cropping up and distracting the team, who need (and want) to focus on more immediate problems.
I really enjoyed contributing to some ideation and ‘could-be’ journey mapping sessions. Working on this with Leo and Liberty in person towards the end of the week was even better. As expected, these emerging outputs are helping with some of my earlier alignment concerns.
Another team I’m supporting did their first show-and-tell. They packed a lot in and received thoughtful feedback and challenging questions from attendees—a great start.
Some colleagues described me this week as a ‘secret weapon’. I’ll take that as a compliment, but I am left pondering what sort of weapon I’d like to be - sharp precision blade or big-ass bazooka! (maybe just a water pistol?)
I had a lovely catchup with Hutch. We shared some observations about some internal work and moaned about online tools like two proper old geezers. Please, More Sharpies and Post-its.
I had a very quick 121 with Emma. Probably too quick in hindsight. Will need to find more time.
There has been a lot of async juggling of other minor things via Slack. This has made me want to find time for another Slack channel cull and tidy up next week; finding the signal in the noise is messy and time-consuming.
Leaving drinks for Zung, Iain, and Jukesie was lots of fun. Although Matt didn’t make it :0(

MOOAR bullets

I started today in London with a hangover, but this was quickly cured by having a lovely breakfast in the Hackney sunshine with Emily, followed by more sunshine, coffee and hugs with Dom.
I’ve managed to avoid smoking for six out of seven days. Next week, I plan on lacing up my running shoes more often.
There has been some progress on the EV front, but it’s slow. I’m not sure I’ll get anything delivered this month, which makes me sad. The sun is out, and I want to go places and do things.
I gave some feedback to Alex, who created JamComments. This has already resulted in the deployment of new features I suggested and updated docs. Thanks, Alex.
I want to start meditating again, and I’m writing this down to help me turn my desire into action.
I have been enjoying Alchemy - The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity on Audible.
I re-watched a bunch of the newer Planet of the Apes movies because I was tired, and the algorithm suggested it.
I watched more of the Kardashians with Robyn and some of the new season of The Rookie— gravy for the brain.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - Some Assembly Required

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 10:20:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, life, office, change, home

I’ll keep this one brief. Changes on the domestic front continue to move at pace and have consumed most of my energy outside of working days. Writing this is a struggle through the fog of jobs to be done and things to process.

Work

The new project has started well, but there have been a few instances this week where the team has yet to feel entirely aligned on where we’re heading and how we get there. It’s early days (1st sprint), and I’m confident this will improve as the first set of artefacts help us build a common language and make prioritisation easier. I’m looking forward to a retro next week to gauge how the rest of the team feels and how we might collectively address anything holding us back or causing friction.

I got called into several discussions about internal projects. A lot of work is being done across the organisation to improve various aspects of the client and employee experience—so much so that it can feel hard to keep up with it all. Increasingly, I’ve felt a little frustrated at the lack of transparency, join-up, and opportunities for collaboration across all of these things, so it was good that at least one of these discussions was about a piece of work that might help resolve some of that frustration.

Next week, some new client project work is on the horizon (but I have yet to learn much about it). I also continue to manage conversations about a few small bits of future work. I have leave booked over the next few weeks to give myself four-day weekends and three-day working weeks. I must be careful juggling my time, changing context, and not taking on too much in these short weeks.

Home

There is a lot of change. My wife has keys to her new place and will move things incrementally over the next few days. Things are being put into boxes, and things at home here feel increasingly messy and hollow—both in the physical environment and in my brain. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking through and starting to make minor changes to the house, so it might work better for me when I begin to occupy it solo (This has also been a nice distraction from getting stuck in all the feelings).

This week, I concentrated on the office space. When we moved in, I intended the space for work and play. Over time, I’ve found that I don’t use the room outside of work hours, which has helped me enforce boundaries and compartmentalise between work and home.

Now that I have more space and time for myself, I plan on moving my hobby-related stuff (guitars, music equipment, and photography equipment) out of the office and into other areas of the house where they’ll be more accessible. So this week, I took down the big table that consumed most of the office floor space, replaced it with a much smaller IKEA desk and started to sort things ready to move them.

Other things

Fitness: A little bit of running and some swimming. I need to do more of both.

TV and film: I’m fidgety, and little has grabbed my attention. We did watch Chef this week for about the 100th time.

Audiobooks: Listening to Dom Jolly - The Conspiracy Tourist and Gary Stevenson - The Trading Games

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - Main Character Energy

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 15:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, life, running, website, reflection

The Weekend

The post-election sleepiness followed me into the weekend. I remember volunteering at parkrun, but everything else is a blur. I did spend a fair bit of time tinkering with this website. I had an idea prompted by this post to roll my own static commenting system for the blog.

I planned to create a simple form that would trigger a cloud function in Firebase (where I host this static site) to append comments into a JSON file in my GitHub repo, build a component to render these comments as HTML on the page and then trigger the GitHub action that rebuilds the site. Simples!!

It’s not so simple when you have my hacky coding skills. After faffing about for several hours, I decided I would be happier handing the job over to a 3rd party service for the moment. I tried a couple of different solutions and ultimately decided to try JamComments.

It’s a lightweight solution, respects people’s privacy, and adds comments to pages at build time to help maintain performance and security. It lacks some configuration options, but I’ve got it close to functioning as I envisaged using CSS to hide some faff. I seldom get blog comments, but it’s nice to give people the option! Give it a try, and let me know if it sucks.

I also played with the site’s RSS output and got distracted by webmentions for a bit.

This mindless geekery might feel pointless, but I learnt some new tricks, and it was a great distraction from the life stuff I wanted to ignore.

Monday

I woke up feeling lousy, so I logged into the virtual work world, spent some time planning things for the week ahead, and then booked the afternoon off as leave to prioritise some self-care. I went to the pool for a swim and went into town to hang out and have coffee at my favourite spot.

The weather was pretty miserable, but in the evening, I plucked up the courage to join my local running club for their easy, inclusive Monday run. I’m not usually a social runner, but pending life changes[1] have me thinking about new ways of increasing my social circle closer to home. Neither the running nor the social interaction came easily to me, but I’m proud of myself for giving it a go. Only five of their number had braved the weather, and they were all fitter than me. Although very awkward at first, things felt better as the session progressed, and I was grateful for the efforts these strangers put into making me feel welcome.

Tuesday

On my morning walk, I listened to stompcast, a regular feature in my Podcast feed. I enjoyed the recent few episodes, which included an interview with Fats Timbo. She has a book coming out called Main Character Energy. Something about this phrase struck a chord in me, and I’ve been mulling over how I might channel some more Main Character Energy in my own life.

The rest of the day was spent in kick-off sessions for a new Local Digital cyber project. By the end of the day, the team felt better aligned on the goals, got to know each other better, and had documented and committed to a plan for the first sprint. It was a pretty good day.

In the evening, we went to keep our Daughter company, who is staying nearby, dog-sitting for family.

Wednesday

I managed another run early doors. It was an interval-style session that got my blood pumping and endorphins flowing.

Work involved a little bit of everything: client project work, internal project chats, sales stuff, and team time. Team time involved some interesting conversations and food for thought. A few knotty problems are currently being unpicked, but I’m struggling to understand how I best use my skills and experience to help… and, at times, whether that’s even appropriate. I’m trying a few things and I’ll continue to reflect on the results.

The pending life changes[1] became very real very quickly late on Wednesday afternoon, putting me into a bit of a funk. The funk cleared a little by ending the day with a sea swim and a portion of fish and chips at Weymouth Harbour. The views were accompanied by an exciting soundscape of cheers and moaning from the surrounding pubs where the football was being shown. I’ve been led to believe England had a good result and ‘it’s coming home!’. I have no clue what this all means, but I’m happy that others are happy.

Before I slept, I watched Living on Neflix. I found it to be a beautiful film. Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood are fabulous, and it’s just a lovely story about life, death, people and public service.

Thursday

I got up early to catch a train to London. A few of us had the pleasure of spending a whole day collaborating with the sharp minds at Local Digital. It was great to spend a day in person with people I’ve built virtual relationships with over the past few months. I also met new people, learned new things, and enjoyed our very own Jukesie talk about working in the open. I went to the pub before getting the train home. Both the cider and company were good and needed.

The train ride home was busy, and the internet connection was sketchy AF. This has meant I’ve had to push a couple of tasks that I couldn’t finish into next week, but that’s ok.

Friday (today)

This morning, I took over Robyn’s dog-sitting duties as she needed to attend a hospital appointment. I’ve taken three crazy hounds for a walk and have been drafting this post with them curled snugly around my feet.

We waved goodbye to our family car this afternoon and returned it to the dealership. I’ll rely on my feet, bicycle, public transport and taxis for a little while until I get something sorted on the EV front. I hope we get more summer weather soon, and I don’t go too crazy without instant ‘on-a-whim’ access to countryside drives and beach trips.

Daughter Robyn received a nice high mark (equivalent to a 1st) for her most recent university work. A research proposal titled ‘Siloed Services - Is service design the most effective solution for fragmented data in our healthcare systems?’. She’s one very smart and lovely human. It is a proud parent moment, and it is nice that her passions continue to follow both sides of the family business 😂. Although she’s tried hard to line up design work for her summer break, she has had little luck. If, by chance, anybody reading this has any leads for paid design or transformation experience over the summer, let me know. She’s amazing (Yes, I’m biased!)

[1] Pending Life Changes

It’s been on the cards for a couple of months, but after 24 years together, 20 of them married, my wife Chloe and I are separating. We’re parting on good terms and as good friends, but it’s a massive change to process and full of complex emotions. Chloe will likely move out of the house in the next few weeks.

Over the next few months, I need to establish new routines and start thinking about what I now want from life. It feels overwhelming and often quite depressing. Still, I’m forcing myself to see that this could include exploring opportunities I wouldn’t have otherwise been open to or had previously ruled out.

Calling back to my earlier musing, I’ve got to figure out how I shape myself as the main character in my story rather than focus on being an excellent supporting cast member of somebody else’s. I may just be kidding myself, but for now… one day at a time.

Noteworthy posts

This month note from James Higgott is a good read and this is an excellent example of how to publish a public service roadmap

Stef W’s post on Planning Reform is a great read. He’s very smart and also just a lovely bloke!

Another smart post from yet another smart TPX colleague - What to expect (when you’re graduating) from Alex Deschamps-Sonsino. I only properly met Alex a few weeks back, primarily cos’ she admired my taste in t-shirts! Proof I might not have the smarts but I’ve got the looks 🤣 - FASHION DARLING!!

Onward ✊ x o x

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - Tired Bunny

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 17:40:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, life, election, tired, reflection

Writing is a struggle today (yes, more than usual!). I am very, very, very tired. I stayed up and watched election coverage until about 3:30am and then woke up at 6:30am for more of the same. Three hours of sleep is not enough. I’m not thinking clearly, and my fatigue is presenting as grumpiness. I will keep this short.

The bad and the ugly

I attended a new internal meeting that baffled and frankly annoyed me. That’s fine; feedback will help us refine it, but it landed at a time in my week when my patience was already low.
I failed to manage my diary sensibly on at least two days this week. There was too much context-switching and no time for breaks or lunch. I’m smarter than this.
Meh, other life stuff. For a future post.

The good

I made good progress on getting everything in place so we can start one of our new client projects well next week. The time spent onboarding the team was good. They grasped things quickly, asked great questions, and brought good vibes. I love good vibes!
I made a little more progress on a small internal project and a future project opportunity. Honestly, both have frustrated me for different reasons this week, but progress is progress. I need to recognise and celebrate that.
I concluded my research on the electric vehicle front, picking something I would like and can afford. The first batch of paperwork has been completed, and now it’s in the hands of Octopus to see if it’s available in a sensible timeframe. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
I’ve run twice this week. Both runs were short and slow, but I enjoyed them, which is essential. I also enjoyed a nice 11km trail walk last weekend in the sunshine.
I finished and enjoyed the new season of The Bear. I also enjoyed the super cheesy and nostalgic new Beverly Hills Cop film on Netflix.
Despite distrusting 80% of our politicians, I’m happy with the election results. Specifically, it’ll be the first time the constituency I live in (and the neighbouring ones where I grew up) won’t be represented by a conservative MP in approximately a million years. This pleases me.

Noteworthy posts

For the love of libraries by Jukesie

A framework for (digital) strategy by Dave Briggs

A plea for the lost practice of information architecture by Vicki Teinaki

Martin Wright shared this page about his sticker designs with the aforementioned Jukesie. I enjoyed making stickers back in the FG days, and this post made me want to make more.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - The Uber

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 12:50:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, life, car, people, team

Last weekend

The weekend is mostly now a blurry memory. I marshalled at parkrun. I caught up for a much-needed pint and chatted about the deep life stuff with my good friend Paul. The rest of it was life admin connected to pending life changes. This was draining but necessary.

The work

2 days out of 4 working days were spent in London. I’m starting to slowly feel more comfortable commuting again and being in the big city.

Two of the three bits of future work are now signed off, and my effort has shifted to securing the right team. I look forward to setting up delivery and moving on to the first of these projects next week. I’m happier when I’m leaning into projects and surrounded by a team. The 3rd is still nudging ahead slowly, but now it looks likely not to be a thing until late summer - that’s ok. I’d rather we do the work when it’s ready to be worked on than rush and compromise our ability to deliver value.

On Wednesday, I met up with my fellow team members IRL. There isn’t a bad apple in the barrel - everybody is hardworking, smart, talented and caring. Sickening! We spent time together chewing over meaty problems, being human, breaking out post-it notes and thinking through ways to support the broader community of project leads (and ourselves). Many good discussions were had, and plans are starting to come together about how we, as a team and a community of practice, can work in the open more, get advice/support/challenge, and share knowledge more easily across our growing internal & external networks. I’m hopeful that if we lead these things well, we also have an opportunity to reduce the amount of time spent feeding the accountability and reporting machine that, in places, has become burdensome. Things were documented, we took away actions, and I enjoyed getting to know folks better. A good day!

Simon drew the included portrait of me. I think it’s flattering (look at the itty bitty waist 😂)

Trains home from London were broken (yes, again!). I got as far as Southampton, where I joined a random party of 5 in an Uber to Bournemouth. Chloe then kindly drove to Bournemouth to pick me up for the final leg home.

Uber

The Uber trip was a fun little glimpse into the lives of total strangers and how humans interact in these odd situations. The conversation was lively; topics included work, travel, and views on the future of the NHS. My fellow travellers included one who works in marketing for a university, another who works in HR but is moving into architecture, a guy who works with international students and a doctor’s secretary who was travelling to Bournemouth for her holiday.

My attention was split between the conversation and how I’d explain my job if anybody asked me. Luckily, nobody did. Everyone seemed to enjoy the ride apart from the Uber driver - the largely silent 6th subject in this forced impromptu social experiment. I’d keep quiet if I was busy busting my chops to pay my bills and put food on the table by driving a cab for some idiot who over-analyses the ride as an interesting social experiment to distract himself from the oppressive heat, the connected climate crisis and continued depressing breakdown of our national transport infrastructure 😬🫣. Five stars were given. I got home.

Life

Family - My Daughter Robyn turned 22 this week! Clucking bell, it’s made me feel old. At least one evening was spent reminiscing and looking back through old photos and family videos to curate the now-traditional annual Instagram birthday stories. I’m not embarrassed to admit that reviewing these photos and listening to music on the train to London on Tuesday morning might have given me a slightly misty-eyed moment.
Exercise - Hmm, there is nothing to write here. Next week, mmK?
Cars - I’ve been looking at options to replace our current car (for many reasons that are not worth writing about). Toying with using employee perk of Octopus EV leasing scheme. I have a call booked next week to discuss some options. 🚗
TV - I re-watched seasons 1 & 2 of The Bear this week and am ready to dive into S3 this weekend. I unexpectedly smashed through and enjoyed Bodkin on Netflix. It’s a good, fun story about stories and storytelling.
Audiobooks - Mostly chewing through A world without work.

Noteworthy links

I’ve read and enjoyed many things, but this week, I’ve been awful at noting or bookmarking the good ones, and I do not have the energy to look through my browser history. Soz!

So I don’t leave you totally without things to click on, here is a link to my favourite album of 2024 (so far!). Have a great week internet travellers ✊

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - Chimp

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 19:13:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, sick, reflection, solstice, monkeys

Work

The work week was cut short by a two-day migraine, which followed a weekend of feeling pretty low for various reasons. I only work a four-day week when well, so there isn’t much to report from the remaining days. Highlights that stuck out;

Given the limited time, I made significant progress on getting closer to landing the few bits of new work I nodded at last week. Two statements of work are now drafted with one client, and a draft proposal is taking shape for another. A lot of the heavy lifting has been done by my super-smart colleagues Julie and Jaskiran 🧠, but I know I’ve played a helpful and needed role across both pieces.
I attended a client meeting that included interesting discussions about trialling weeknotes as a form of programme governance. Some good chat was had, and I found it interesting to see the range of reactions and interpretations of the ideas presented. I look forward to seeing how this progresses.
We had our regular divisional ‘all hands’ meeting on Thursday. Jen kicked it off by sharing some wisdom, adeptly navigating some quite challenging/sensitive content and creating a short pause for folks to reflect. It felt wholesome and cheerful, and I think maybe I needed that moment, so I feel grateful 🙏
I had a few interactions with colleagues in my team this week that have made me feel more grounded and reminded me I’m in great company. I look forward to spending more time with some of them IRL next week. Equally, at times, I do look around and feel like the odd one out…like they are all great, and I suck. I’m hoping that little imposter anxiety voice in my head can shut the f^%k up; cos, frankly, I have other more important things to be anxious about right now 😂

Life

Despite my sleep cycle being all over the place, my exercise routine mostly paused, and the migraine, I’ve still found moments of calm and ways to exercise mindfulness. I’ve felt supported by friends, family and colleagues.
I finally finished Lost. Possibly the worst ending of a show EVER! I’m glad it’s done.
I’ve re-watched too many episodes of Enterprise to be healthy in one week. I’ve just started re-watching The Bear in anticipation of the new season. This was prompted by one of the posts listed below.
Today, my Daughter Robyn (who will be 22 next Tuesday 🤯) and I visited the Dorset Ape Rescue Centre as a belated Father’s Day activity. I find monkeys fascinating, and normally, I come away with a memory card full of photos. Today was different, and the joy came from spending time with Robyn just being. I took about 20 photos, and the one above is the only one worth sharing.

Noteworthy links

Enjoy every Sandwich by fellow TPX’er Chris Holding. I don’t know Chris well, but this popped up on Linked.in, and I really enjoyed this post and the reminder about the new season of The Bear.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again - shared via Jukesie. This blogger has now been added to my RSS feed of favourite blogs. There is some excellent, well-reasoned and entertaining reading on this site.

You can outsource risk, but you can’t outsource reputation - Wise words from Terence Eden on the back of recent cyber events.

Who’s doing interesting work right now? A great question shared by Mathew that made me think that I’d struggle to answer this right now. I should probably look harder.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

TGF Visitors Map

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 19:25:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: dataviz, maps, parkrun, data, visualization, community

I said I was going to play with some data, and I didn’t want to disappoint, so yesterday I made a little map that charts where our visitors to The Great Field parkrun come from.

The Great Field parkrun is now over two years old. This map has been drawn using data from our first 135 events—it doesn’t include data from our Junior parkrun. Over these 135 events, we’ve been joined by approximately 6391 unique runners and volunteers. It’s only an approximate number because each week, we’ll have a small handful of participants who have either not registered or not remembered their parkrun barcode. In each athlete or volunteer’s online profile is an option to set a ‘home parkrun’.

On this map, each orange circle represents the home parkrun location for every unique athlete or volunteer participating in the Great Field parkrun. The number in each circle represents the total number of unique athletes and volunteers from each location who have visited us.

The blue circle is the location of the Great Field parkrun; we have 1183 people who call this home! (myself included)

There were about 7 or 8 records whose home run no longer is an active event, which meant I couldn’t quickly establish their Lat/Long from the published parkrun datasets so they’ve also been removed.

The rest of the number comprises 5137 parkrunners representing 535 different UK locations. Unsuprisingly a good number of those ahtletes are visitors from other parkruns nearby (Weymouth, Yeovil, Bridport, Upton park, Poole etc) but you can see from the map that there are plenty from further afield! in fact we’ve also had 71 folks who come from other parkrun global territories — 45 of those from Australia! 🦘🇦🇺

This data isn’t going to be 100% accurate. Many people won’t have updated their ‘home parkrun’ since they initially registered, and ultimately, people can choose to lie if they want. Still, given that we speak to our visitors in real life at every event, I’m pretty sure most inaccuracies are small. Seeing just how many people have visited our little community-powered event and where they’ve come from has been both fun and mind-boggling! Making the map was also a nice fun little exercise. I’m sure I’ll return soon with more TGF parkrun related data nerdery.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - Buffet

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 10:25:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, social, training, website, reflection

This week has been a real self-service buffet. I found the variety enjoyable, but the random assortment of cold pizza, carrot sticks, mini samosas, and party rings filling my plate didn’t quite satisfy my need for a more substantial meal!

Some of the work

We finished the tender response I mentioned last week. The team did a great job on it and I keep my fingers crossed that they are rewarded by getting through to the next stage. I also had positive news on two other potential bits of work I’ve helped shape. Both are very different and will need a little more effort to land, but it’s nice to know they are progressing after a little bit of a lull.

I spent all day Wednesday at a leadership and line management training course. It was well facilitated, and spending the day in person with TPX colleagues, old and new, was excellent. I didn’t learn many new things, but given the years I’ve spent managing and coaching people, I guess that was to be expected. It did serve as an excellent refresher and a moment for reflection. It also reminded me of some tools I could polish, sharpen, and use more regularly to be effective. I really feel I should pursue some more formal coaching training. I’ve started to explore this before, but life has gotten in the way. I need to give this more focus and attention. If you have thoughts or experiences you could share on this, please get in touch.

I’ve started to lean back into a small piece of internal work that I started a little while back and then had to put down while I was busy with client work. It has progressed well without me, but I can see it stalling a little, and I’m hopeful some renewed energy from me can help push it closer to the finish line, where it can start delivering some value.

Being social

The training course meant an overnight stay in London. The lovely Robbie Bates made the trip to Aldgate, and we hung out, caught up and ate pizza. It feels good to get back into more social habits….but OMG, it’s so tiring! It could just be my age?!

Making things

I built and added a new post navigation component to this site last weekend, so visitors can now page backwards and forward through blog posts - a slight but hopefully helpful improvement to the user experience. I also employed chatGPT to read and write improved post summaries for all of my old posts.

I stumbled across and started playing around with ApexCharts.js. It’s an excellent little charting library and felt more intuitive than others I’ve used before. This led me to update the few older posts where I’ve used charts and updated these components to use Apex. Revisiting this parkrun post was quite enjoyable—and it reminded me I should create a new parkrun data post soon.

Other stuff

Picked up my Guitar for the first time in months and had a play.
Not enough running this week. I’m trying not to waste energy or create bad vibes by judging myself too harshly
Audiobooks - finished Vulture Capitalism (Grace Blakeley) and now moved onto Growth - a reckoning (Daniel Susskind).
I’m slowly progressing through the backlog of Lost episodes - Halfway through the last season. I’m still largely clueless about what is happening, but I’m enjoying the ride more.

Noteworthy links

I enjoyed this post about Monkey Tennis from Steph Gray

Some great portraits in this post about a photo competition via Positive News

A nice reminder via Neil Williams of a quote I’ve enjoyed before

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Weeknote - London calling

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, london, website, fitness, travel

It’s been an odd week. I’ve continued to wrestle with some depressing and complicated personal life stuff that I won’t share. I write this as a reminder that despite the thoughts and feelings surrounding this ‘stuff’, I have continued to put one foot in front of the other and move forward. I’m pretty happy with what I’ve achieved this week at work and in terms of self-care.

Last weekend

Last weekend was a relatively chilled mix of family and domestic activities. I vaguely recall a trip to Portland Bill to watch the waves break on the rocks, mowing the lawn, and a trip to the recycling centre. I was also the Run Director at the Great Field parkrun. Everything went well; the sun came out, there were no incidents, there was a great gang of volunteers, and we had a massive turnout of 300 people starting and finishing.

The work week (sorry it’s long!)

On Monday, I needed to finish writing and refining some final project outputs, but I struggled for a few hours to find the focus I needed. A pep talk from my Daughter, a hug, and a walk to grab a coffee helped me reset at lunchtime, and I made much better progress in the afternoon. I’ve been a bit rubbish about regular walking breaks recently, but this was a good reminder that I need them when working from home.

Outside of the project wrap-up, I’ve been trying to help Kate in our growth team with a tender response. I never actually feel helpful on these things, as writing isn’t my strongest suit. Still, luckily, there are some super intelligent colleagues involved in the response team who seemingly have this power. I’m hoping I’ve added value in facilitating, helping shape/challenge the delivery approach and figuring out the team and commercials. The response is already coming together, and I look forward to reviewing how things sit next week with fresher eyes.

I had my first one-to-one with Emma this week. As part of her new Director of Client Partnerships role, she has taken on the unenviable job of being my line manager. It was a good chat where I felt the warmth of good pastoral care and the buzz of energetically exchanging ideas. Some of these relate to my objectives, which all need refinement over the coming weeks. I must have said at least one smart thing during our chat because Emma thanked me for providing a ‘Hallelujah moment’ in her week. I’m not sure I remember what it was, but I was happy we’d both taken something away from our first session.

Thursday, I planned to spend a day at the London office. I haven’t done this for nearly six months. The last time I was there, I received a very distressing phone call, which was then the catalyst for my long period of absence in the new year and some of the complicated personal stuff I mentioned in opening this post (I hate being this cryptic by the way but you don’t need the ugly details). It’s fair to say I had some anxiety about making the trip and being back in a place that now holds some entirely mixed memories. In this period of withdrawal from the office, though, I’ve missed collaborating and hanging out with colleagues in real life, the change of scenery, and most of all, the support and joy of seeing my London-based friends. My plan was a quick in-and-out day with no overnight stay to dip my toes in the big city water, face any fears, and try to reset with positive experiences.

The day was, for the most part, a success. I was a little overwhelmed at various points in the day, but nothing quite tipped me into a meltdown. I had some nice micro catchups with some colleagues I haven’t seen or spoken to in ages. If anything, people’s kindness overwhelmed me more than my reaction to the space and the recollection of memories I was fearing. The couple of people in the office who were more aware of my circumstances checked in on me but also gave me the space I needed when I needed it. I may have even managed to get some work done!

I met my good friend Sally for a late lunch. She was her usual kind, clever self with lots of advice, ideas and reassurance for me. She bought me a cheese straw and a coffee! Before I headed home, I grabbed a pint with our new starter, Ben U. Ben isn’t new to me - we worked together back in the FG days, and our paths have crossed a few times over the intervening years. We share many common interests, so catching up and hanging out was a lovely end to the London portion of the day.

Those who endured my Instagram stories yesterday will be surprised I have yet to mention THE F**CKING TRAINS. Well, it’s best not to dwell, but my travel yesterday should have consisted of two 2hr 47min direct train journeys—one out and one back. The outward journey to London took five and a half hours across three trains. The return journey was three trains and took six hours—not the same trains or routes. It was quite an adventure. So yeah, nearly 12 hours on trains for what resulted in about 4 hours in the office. Was it worth it? Yeah, probably! I have no regrets. Next week, I’ll be back for an overnight stay and a training course. Let’s hope the trains work.

Other things

I’ve managed a few short and slow runs this week—nothing amazing, but hopefully, the start of something better.
I refactored my old fire incident choropleth map, which now works on the newly migrated blog. I’m interested in playing with more data visualisation stuff, so it felt good to fix the old before starting the new.
I’ve also noted that the rebuilt blog still has a pretty low carbon footprint. This pleases me as I’m still passionate about how this should be an important metric for all internet technology.
I made homemade tacos for tea on Monday. They were delicious, and I used a plant-based minced beef alternative that wasn’t awful.
I am still trying to watch Lost - I have a love-and-hate relationship with it, but I think it’s growing on me. I also watched Atlas on Netflix, finished A Promised Land (Barak Obama) in audiobook format, swerved on Less (Patrick Grant) and started Vulture Capitalism (Grace Blakeley)

Noteworthy Links

Project vs Product Funding - Jennifer Pahlka

Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does - Anil Dash (via Mathew)

Building trust in client/agency relationships - Neil Perkin

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Blogging about not blogging

Fri, 31 May 2024 18:25:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: blogging, writing, dataviz, process, reflection

This post was inspired by Jukesie’s post - Introducing bloggers about blogging

I’ve kind of blogged for many years, but it’s always in fits and starts, and the writing habit seldom sticks for long. I don’t think I could call myself a proper blogger.

The few periods where I’ve successfully hit any cadence or habit over time have usually coincided with a photographic project. My longest streak was my 365days project where I shared a self-portrait and blog post every day for a year on Flickr. I also had a long-running series of #seenonmyrun posts back in the early days of my running obsession. Those were all shared on a Tumblr-esque platform I can’t recall the name of. At some point, they were all migrated onto one of the many WordPress sites I’ve had in the past, all long since retired. Although these endeavours are a form of blogging the photograph is the star of the show and not the written word.

I find writing hard. I’ve increasingly become convinced I have some form of dyslexia and that’s partly the reason I’ve been experimenting with audio-notes. I mostly take solace in the fact that I haven’t ever totally given up. Most of the content I’ve created still exists in one form or another even if not published online. Going back through it all forms a fascinating historical record of my life, thoughts and experiences. I find that those records can be really valuable, especially if your memory is as awful as mine! Writing has also become a handy tool for making sense of and organising my thoughts and feelings. For these reasons and despite my repeated failures to hit a consistent rhythm, I’m unlikely to give up trying anytime soon.

I thought it’d be fun to spend a few minutes reflecting on my writing process and what takes me the most time in the hope that it might help me unblock the reasons I’m not blogging more frequently. The less-than-scientific results of this exercise are visualised below.

A pie chart wasn’t really needed was it? no…but I did enjoy making it!

I spend a lot of time ‘Worrying too much about other people and their reactions’. This includes much self-doubt and overthinking the value of anything I might write or share. I’m certain I’ve never had an original thought. This isn’t a surprise, and I know I’m not alone. I’ve had this conversation with lots of people on numerous occasions. In fact, Mathew Wilson and I discussed it just the other week.

I love Jukesie’s advice here…

This particularly resonates because that IS my approach to dancing - It’s why disco is one of my nicknames. So applying this same technique to writing feels both plausible and an opportunity for fun. This was also a consideration in the redesign of my website that I wrote about yesterday. I want my blog to be about me and for me primarily. I’d benefit from spending far less time getting hung up on whether what I post is ‘good enough’. If anybody else reads them and finds them helpful, that’s just a bonus.

Time spent correcting mistakes is my next biggest hurdle to overcome. I was using grammarly for a time, which was useful, but I also found it quite annoying, popping up in all sorts of places across my Mac. I may revisit the app and spend some time fine-tuning the settings. If anybody has any suggestions for alternatives, though, please let me know.

Anyway - I’ve managed to blog about not blogging. Which means I am actually blogging and not, not blogging…or something like that? 🤯 I’m going to dance over and smash the publish button now - 'cos hopefully nobody is reading this nonsense anyway 😜

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Building Things

Thu, 30 May 2024 16:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: astro, gatsby, webdev, design, code, tech, build

So over the bank holiday weekend I decided to redesign and rebuild this website. The motivation for this largely just came from a desire to create something - I wanted to build a thing!

Many of my projects at work over the last 12-18 months have been at the service, organisation and strategy end of the spectrum. I’m cool with that and I have plenty of experience to bring but a little bit of me has missed being closer to product work and the joy that I get from making digital things.

The old version of the site was also starting to feel a bit stale, bland and dull. Given I don’t post often and when I do it tends to be about my personal life and hobbies, it felt like there was an opportunity to make my personal site look and feel a bit more…err…personal!

So this is the brand new hellostu.xyz. Yes - visual design skills are not my superpower 😂. Not everyone will enjoy the busy aesthetic and wild colours and that’s fine! I’ve purposefully leant into a quirkier, hand-built kind of vibe. It’s not quite the Wild West of the early GeoCities days but I wanted the site to embody some of that early web creativity before our corporate overlords made everything whitespace and widgets.

The rebuild was a great opportunity to play with some new technology - I’m by no means a developer but I find the process of trying to turn the ideas in my head into real things through the medium of code extremely satisfying. Learning, trying, failing fast, problem solving and fixing things in rapid repeating cycles over a couple of days can be oddly exhilarating for a nerd like me!

The site is still built using a static site generator. The performance, security and hosting cost benefits (i.e. zero cost) that come from this approach just far outweigh the bells and whistles of the alternatives for me. I have switched platforms though and have migrated from Gatsby to Astro.

Gatsby served me well, but moving things over to Astro gave me an excuse for a clean slate and to learn something new. I’ve actually been really impressed. The learning curve felt much flatter with Astro, it’s still extremely flexible but feels more nimble. The fact both platforms support writing and storing content in Markdown files has meant content migration has been a fairly simple process with only tweaks required here and there.

One of the advantages of Astro that I’m keen to explore is that you can mix and match components from React, Preact, Svelte, Vue and SolidJS on a single page. It’s very unlikely I will need to do that but having the ability to experiment with a bunch of different frameworks so flexibly without having to worry about breaking the more fundamental site components is compelling.

So what’s next? I guess giving the website some attention might encourage me to post and share content on a more frequent basis but given my life has been a little complicated over recent months I’m not going to make promises I can’t keep. It’s been fun though - Let’s build more things…just not in Sharepoint pls 🙏

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Zen Friday

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Rest

Tagged: podcast, update, life, friends, fitness, audio, reflection

A random update recorded whilst hiking around Maiden Castle. I briefly cover work, friends, fitness and 100 parkruns!

Useful links include:

Cathing up with friends and dining out!
Trips around Dorset and red squirrels
Some chatter about Future Councils events
100th TGF parkrun fun and data
Jurassic Coast Challenge training, fitness improvements and fundraising

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Rambling man

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: podcast, audio, reflections, challenge, walk, personal

My first foray into posting audio notes to my blog here. I’d previously been posting voice memos to a little project called Memo From Me, but I’ve decided that has run its course. This is the next iteration. Hopefully, I’ll have it listed on your favourite podcast app soon, and I’ll add in some subscription links.

In this note, I give some of the context and then start talking about my decision to take on 58km (36 miles) as part of The Jurassic Coast Ultra Challenge in May next year. I’ve decided to do this to challenge myself mentally and physically in addition to raising some money for mind - the mental health charity. You can support me by donating here at my fundraising page.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

16 - Fever dream

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, olympus, self, snot, flu, strobist, bogroll

Last week I was struck by a flu bug that meant I spent pretty much the whole week in bed coughing up a lung or blowing snot out of my nose. It wasn’t pleasant. I’ve been back to work this week but still not totally shaken it.

The idea of this shot originally was to go for a curse of the mummy vibe with me totally covered in toilet paper (cos why not?). It didn’t work. The result has actually ended up being some kind of cyberpunk meets Lawrence of Arabia-type mashup! It will suffice for now. I lit this using a single snooted speedlight just to the left of the camera.

I’ve not got the patience for writing more words right now but wanted to make sure I got back into the habit of shooting and posting an image. If this isn’t enough to satisfy your STU-FIX then I posted an episode about Robyn reaching the 21 years milestone on memofrom.me late last week that may help.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

15 - Geometry

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, olympus, self, organisation, podcast, gardening, work, growth

Yet another late post. I did skip a week whilst I was away camping in Devon. I’m glad I did. It was nice to give myself a break from routine on all fronts! This shot was taken using my new camera. I upgraded from an Olympus EM5 mkII to an Olympus EM1 mkIII. It’s a similar system with upgraded bells, whistles, and a much-improved sensor. So far, I’m enjoying the upgrade, and given it’s been on the market for some time, I picked it up for a price that hasn’t made me weep! The two prints flanking me in the frame are also a new addition to the living room wall and inspired the title.

What I’m thinking about

Lots of good conversations about client work this week, coupled with some recent experiences at TPX (that continues to grow), have left me musing on the tension that often arises between organisational structures (hierarchy, teams, reporting lines, cost centres etc.) and how we organise people around work, problems, projects, goals etc.

The two things are often tightly tethered in organisations. When they are, you often see impenetrable siloes form, communication becomes burdensome & inefficient, processes become bloated, trust is low and responding to change or exploiting opportunities is slow.

Structures are important, but I often observe more effort being poured into the boxes and wires, the structural side of the equation, rather than putting that energy into nurturing the culture, ways of working, support, and governance that allow teams and individuals to transcend and navigate these large structures with greater agility, collaborate well across these artificial boundaries and ultimately become high-performing.

Structural change is often synonymous with cost-saving measures and creating efficiencies. It’s time-consuming and often painful for all parties - yet some large organisations seem to have made it a hobby!

I can’t help but think there must be better ways to focus that energy on nurturing healthier and more productive ways of organising that allow us to increase our effectiveness without constantly shuffling the deck chairs! I’m no HR guru, but surely we must have other ways to reduce (or increase) headcount without renaming and rehoming large pieces of an organisation every 12-18 months.

I’m blathering, but these things are in my head this evening. I have plenty of experience creating high-performing teams. I’m just not sure there is enough best practice on building (and maintaining) large high-performing organisations yet. Is it just a size/complexity thing? How might we do more to increase the seperation between our working methods and our organisation structures to change/improve one without breaking the other?

Other things

ALL THE TRAINS this week. Bristol (cold), London (muggy), Newcastle (also cold). I look forward to returning to Dorset tomorrow (it’s always sunny and warm in Dorset).
memofrom.me/ has a couple of new posts. One memo I recorded for mental health awareness month was a struggle (but also cathartic).
Following ‘No Mow May’, I started to tackle the back garden/jungle at the weekend. I’ll soon be running out of excuses not to start that patio extension project!

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

14 - Head above water

Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, swimming, self, podcast, health

This week I’m posting late and from my bed. I had some planned surgery at the hospital yesterday. Everything went well, but I’m feeling a bit groggy today and numb with painkillers. I’ve taken the day to recover but currently can’t sleep, so I’m trying blogging instead!

Although I’m posting late, the photo was taken on schedule and before the clock expired on the week. It’s an iPhone portrait taken whilst swimming at Burton Bradstock. Most of my weekend was spent catching up on jobs around the house, volunteering at parkrun(s) and generally taking it easy. The weather was so beautiful that Chloe and I made a late decision to squeeze in a swim and mini beach BBQ on Sunday evening. I’m glad we prioritised it, as it became one of the week’s highlights.

Work

I’ve felt a bit lost at work for a couple of weeks. A combination of change, the scale of the thing now, and an absence of work that challenges or excites me have left me a little unsure of where I’m currently adding value. I guess it’s probably normal or healthy to have some of these slightly slacker periods to recalibrate. Still, it’s also these moments where imposter anxiety can creep in and wreak havoc with my confidence. Good conversations, other changes, and new client work continue to evolve at some pace, so I doubt I’ll feel lost for long. I have noticed that the new part-time regime + multiple bank holidays have played a valuable role in helping me manage any anxiety I may have around work - that’s progress and makes me feel more confident in my decision to make this change.

Memo from me

Another thing I did over the weekend was start recording a new podcast. I had this idea that would allow me to get back to podcasting but do it in a way that consumed less of my time. I spent part of my long weekend testing my theories and the format, buying new audio equipment and setting up the platform. Things are just about finished and ready to share with the world!

Check out Memo from me and let me know what you think?

Make sure you listen to the first and second memos. The first one explains more of the concept and inspiration for the show.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify so you don’t miss future memos.

Follow along with the Twitter and instagram accounts I’ve set up for the show.

Looking forward to

The arrival of a new camera body and lens 😱
Sleep (sometime real soon, please) 🤞
Camping in Devon this weekend ⛺️
Bastille gig in 39 days

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

13 - Healing wounds

Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, tattoos, space, healing, reflection

“A fresh tattoo is considered an open wound. Like all wounds, it will scab over as part of a natural healing response.”

This week I return to my self-portrait project with this shot showing my newly inked and slightly scabby tattoos. No fancy flashy lighting. I’ve just used my office window on a sunny afternoon.

All of my tattoos hold some personal significance for me, and many visualise or represent part of my life story. This new astronaut addition doesn’t break from that pattern. It represents my passion and interest in space, technology and science fiction. It also works as a metaphor for this period of my life where I’m consciously drifting into an unknown space and starting to explore new avenues of purpose and satisfaction in my life. It’s also a useful reminder in my worklife that a properly funded government agency with more than a sprinkle of bold ambition really can reach the stars!

All of my recent tattoos have been a collaboration with Luke Hawker, who totally nailed this astronaut and did a great job adding the Polaroid frame to my old lizard. I can’t wait for it all to be fully healed and to start designing the next piece with him.

It’s been a few weeks since I posted to this project, partly as I hit a creative block and partly as my attention was elsewhere. It’s nice to fianlly be back posting an image, and I’m hopeful I can build back some momentum.

Elsewhere

I’m now a member of the part-time workforce! With all the bank holiday weekends in May, I’ve felt very absent from work. This has been lovely, but I’m almost looking forward to some more ‘normal’ 4-day weeks to help me gauge and settle into a new balance.

Regular running is just about continuing, but it’s not been my number one priority. I have been staying active though. I’ve been taking a minimum of a 30-60 min brisk walk daily. With some additional exercise around these walks, I’m probably more consistently active than I have been in quite some time.

I’ve got to go into hospital for a day next week for a small piece of surgery, nothing major, mostly just embarrassing, but I’m writing it here just in case they accidentally lop off an arm or remove a vital organ, and this blog either ceases to exist or changes topic dramatically.

Hopefully I’ll return soon!

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

12 - These hands

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, strobist, mono, process

I’m pleased with this photograph. I like the black and white tones, the shadows and the detail captured. I changed some camera settings this weekend, making setting focus and checking the shot’s framing easier. A small win, but making my workflow more efficient reduces the draw on my time. The black background is also a new addition. I’ve had an old set of background stands in the garage for some time, so it’s nice to have some new fabric to hang and use finally.

Making plans

In a previous post, I mentioned going part-time and dropping a day of work each week to explore other uses for my time. This is increasingly likely, but I haven’t finalised a date for the change in the diary yet. Last weekend I started drawing up a list of all the materials and tools I might need to extend our garden patio to give us more space for furniture and potted plants. I have no experience in laying patio slabs. Still, the youtube videos make it look like a suitable enough task for beginners, and having this extra day a week is a sufficient excuse for me not to pay someone else to do the job for me.

In addition to planning for my increased work-life balance, we’ve also been putting some time into making plans for the summer. We’ve booked a few days to Vienna for Chloe’s 40th birthday celebrations in August. Chloe is a big fan of Gustav Klimt, so seeing The Kiss at the Belvedere is a real treat. I’ve found a parkrun for us to complete nearby 😂. Anything else we do will be a bonus.

We’ve also agreed on some other dates during the Summer when we plan on camping in the UK. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with camping, but I want to try and approach these trips differently. We won’t be accompanied by children or dogs anymore, which sets a different tone, lessens the work involved and hopefully makes it more enjoyable. For the first trip, we’ll stay local and head into Devon; after that, we have Whitby and some English forests on our shortlist.

So summer plans are already taking shape. Landscaping, Vienna, UK Camping - Not to mention a Bastille concert, my own birthday weekend surprise, and what I hope will be lots of swimming trips along the Dorset coast. Let’s cross our fingers that we have good weather. Oh! and I’m only one month away from my new tattoo. Exciting!

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

11 - Panda

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, mask, portrait

Sometimes you have to abandon interesting locations, complex lighting and creative composition. Some days you need to put on a panda mask and take a snap at your kitchen table. Yesterday was that day…and I LOVE IT! 😂😍

I’m not sure why this is so appealing to me. Maybe it’s just because it’s so beautifully odd. My brain immediately starts to create incredible, absurd backstories to accompany the scene.

I’m not in the mood to share what’s in my head today. There is no particular reason; I’m just tired and don’t want to spend any longer staring at a laptop. A bank holiday weekend fast approaches; hopefully, that will bring more time for reflection and energy for sharing.

I’m also sadly lacking in audiobook recommendations this week. On a musical theme, I’ve been revisiting the fantastic music of Massive Attack. I’ve also just clocked a report they commissioned on the subject of ‘super low-carbon live music’ on their website! That could be an interesting read for a panda like me or a human like you.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

10 - They come for me

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, strobist, sci-fi, reflection

I am seemingly starring in my own science fiction b-movie this week. It’s an idea that emerged while I was playing with a set of barn doors and some coloured gels on my flash. I’m not sure if the world were to be invaded by body-snatching aliens, I’d be that high up on their priority list?! You can never be sure, though. I’ll head to the shops for a new tinfoil hat tomorrow, just in case.

The second half of life

I’ve been reflecting recently on what I want, need and am working towards. The current, truthful answer is ‘not much!’. Without really noticing, success has snuck up on me. Most of the goals I previously worked so hard for have been accomplished. I’m married, have successfully raised a child, cleared most of our debts, ventured onto the property ladder, ran marathons, landed a pretty good job doing meaningful work, had some pleasant holidays, made good friends, etc. etc. Life isn’t perfect, but it is pretty good. I wouldn’t have even dreamt of many things I’ve accomplished now in my late teens…so what do I focus on next?

I’ve been recently introduced to some of Carl Jung’s thinking on the two halves of life. I’m 43, so it would be accurate to describe myself as entering the second half. He’s quoted as saying.

Going inward and letting go sounds scary, but something in this resonates, and this second half might be a good time to explore new things. Some of this exploration might need to focus inward. I’m unsure what this might involve (I’m unlikely to go the candles and chanting route), but I want to keep my mind open and try different things.

One of the things I’m currently considering to get me started is reducing my working hours. I think we can just about afford for me to drop a day each week. This would give me more time to rest, indulge in my creative hobbies, and invest time in this further exploration of self. I’ve started checking my financial assumptions and if my employer is happy to support this. The whole idea is starting to feel quite exciting, so I’ll tell you what happens.

Random recommendations

I’m very late to the party, but this week I enjoyed watching The Responder on BBC iPlayer. It’s a bit tense in places, but a good storyline and strong performances make it a great watch. I’ve also been relistening to two of my favourite audiobooks, Utopia for Realists and Humankind, both written by Rutger Bregman. I highly recommend them both if you need a healthy dose of optimism.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

9 - Hillfort

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, running, creativity, self, outdoors

I’m very late posting this shot. It was shot last Sunday. I opted for a simple snap on the iPhone while out for a trail run, as I had a jam-packed weekend and no time for anything grander. This is not only the second iPhone shot of the project so far, but it’s also the second time an age iron hill fort has been the location. I love running around these places. They are just stunning.

I was going to accompany this picture with some thoughts from the week preceding its capture, but as I’ve now caught up with myself by posting so late, I’ll save those for a new post, hopefully landing tomorrow. See you soon 😘

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

8 - Sasquatch

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, experiment, lighting

I took this shot on Saturday and nearly didn’t post it. I’m not pleased with it. It was taken while playing with a new lighting setup. I just ordered a second flash unit so I wanted to play with different configurations using two flashes off-camera and using shoot-through umbrellas to soften the light. The lighting is good. During the same shoot I got some fun pictures of Chloe which I shared here on Instagram. The same lighting setup doesn’t work quite so nicely here as it doesn’t account for the shadows created by my spectacles.

The main reason I don’t like this image is not technical, it’s artistic. It just doesn’t say anything about me or my mood and it lacks creativity. Even if I was aiming this to be a fun/comic shot the silly pout-like expression isn’t quite executed well enough. The title has also been chosen without reason.

Other Thoughts

Last week my return to work was far more difficult than I had expected or hoped. All of the interactions I had with the work/clients/colleagues were largely positive and had good outcomes. A colleague even went to the trouble of writing some very gushing feedback about me in an internal slack channel (It was enough to make me blush even if I don’t truly accept it). How I felt from moment to moment did not reflect these successes though.

Many days last week felt like working through a series of frustrations. I was trapped in circular patterns of thought and increasing levels of anxiety. Thursday morning in London started with what I’d describe as a panic attack on the tube that left me feeling pretty uneasy. I’ve wasted energy doubting my abilities and judgement and at times have been overwhelmed by these bouts of anxiety. For the most part, I’ve been able to manage and coach my way through these moments but it’s definitely a disconcerting trend and extremely tiring.

Some of this malaise is a hangover from events that took place at the end of last year and I need to continue to work through that. I’ve also noted that the week before I went on holiday and since I’ve returned I largely let any self-care habits I had put in place slide. I’ve been prioritising work over my own needs, I’ve been smoking & drinking, eating junk and I also let my renewed running habits slide. It bugs me that good habits are so hard to create and so easily lost.

This week I’ll be prioritising these healthier habits (yes…again!) to see if I it helps declutter the mind a little. I’ve also got some homework from my therapist to explore. This weekend acted as a bit of a reset and yesterday I coaxed myself into a 9.5-mile slow run. I have a few large blisters to show for it today but hopefully, I can still get out a couple more times this week for some short easy runs and get my training plan back on track.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

7 - Revolve

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, movement, dorset

This week I’m back in the more familiar surroundings of Dorset. Not that you can tell but this shot was taken at the top of Hambledon Hill. Chloe and I went for a short 5-mile hike around this and another nearby hill fort (Hod Hill). I thought it’d be nice to get a shot with the beautiful countryside behind me. Chloe stepped into the role of portable light stand and pointed the flash in my general direction (just off to the right of the frame). I set up a remote shutter using my phone and added a 5-second countdown to try and time some jumping photos. This and one other shot reasonably captured me at the right point in the jump, many others just froze me in mid-squat or awkward landing 😂.

When editing shots the jump looked fun, the landscape in the background just felt flat and grey (mostly due to the weather). The overall composition just felt off. So I’ve decided to just embrace the fun element and added some silly photoshop manipulation of the landscape to make it a bit more interesting. You can decide if I’m falling through a portal of time & space or powering myself across the Dorset countryside using some kind of sonic flatulence.

Elsewhere

Although back from Egypt I’m still on leave until tomorrow so most of my time has been spent chilling. On Thursday we took a trip to Marwell Zoo to break up the drive home from Gatwick. Friday was a bit more pedestrian with household chores, a haircut and a therapy appointment. The weekend has been all about walking, running and catching up with family. I feel quite well-rested and ready for work. How long this lasts……we’ll see!

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

6 - Hurghada

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, travel, egypt, beach

So a shot from my iPhone this week with no fancy flash work. I did splash out on an exotic location though! For the next few days, I’m in Hurghada, Egypt on the shore of the Red Sea for a little mini break. I’m nearly two full days in and have another two full days left, returning home late Wednesday. I used a little pocket Gorillapod to hold the iPhone, attached it to a large ashtray thingy and set a 10-second timer before dashing behind the surfboard. I picked my moment as the sun was going down so that I didn’t have 50 other tourists crowding the scene. It does the job and keeps me on track to get 52 of these self-portraits in roughly a year.

I made the last-minute decision to leave the fancy Olympus camera at home as I was getting close to the point of packing more gadgets than clothes which I feared would give me some unwanted attention going through airport security. This turned out to be the right call as the gadgets I did have were enough to get some questions from a man with a large automatic weapon on arrival! I fear any more gear would have earnt me more intense interrogation techniques 😂😬.

I’m definitely enjoying the warm sunshine even if it doesn’t love me (I have a very sunburnt back despite the factor 4 million suncream I’ve bathed myself in at almost hourly intervals). The hotel is nice, the food good and the cocktails abundant. I miss having people to talk with but I’m beginning to adapt and I’ve been relaxing by listening to music, reading a book and watching the odd film either by the pool, on the beach or up in my room. I took a short walk out of the hotel today and took a few snaps which I shared on Instagram. Tomorrow I have a boat trip planned with some snorkelling but other than that I intend to keep putting my feet up and within strolling distance of the bar. Lazy but required.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

5 - Ablution

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, strobist, routine

This evolved into a very different image from what I originally had in mind when I started shooting it but I’m pleased with how it’s turned out. I generally hate any photographs of me from this angle, but the combination of the texture and movement created by the water and the symmetrical composition makes it something I can live with sharing. When I stare at this image long enough my brain starts to imagine the outline of another person from the negative space between me(s) which is kinda cool.

The setup was fairly simple in terms of camera and lighting. The only two tricky parts were trying to get some shots I was happy with before my lens fogged up and trying to keep my iPhone as dry as possible (which was in the shower with me and being used as a remote shutter).

Three things on my mind

Running - I haven’t run this week at all. I feel like a bit of a failure. I’m trying not to waste energy being annoyed with myself but I do need to rectify this tomorrow by getting out and covering some miles. I must stay on top of this.
Therapy - I have a session booked in with a therapist on Tuesday. I’m hopeful it’ll be more useful than my previous experiences but I’m apprehensive. If anybody has any wise words or advice for a first session then please let me know.
Travel - I’ll be travelling to Egypt on Friday for a mini-break by myself. I’ve started to pack and get organised but mostly my focus is on the huge amount of work I’m trying to squeeze into the 4 days I have left at work before I head off. Roll on Friday!

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

4 - Stepping into the light

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, light, stairs

A little bit more effort in this week’s photograph. To follow up on my intention of using this project to refresh and improve my photography skills, I purchased some new gear this week to increase my creative options. The two significant purchases that made this shot possible were a cheap flash unit and a remote trigger.

Using a flash off-camera opens up a world of possibilities but it’s not something I’ve done for several years. In the past, I had quite a collection of flash photography equipment but I let most of it go when I traded in my DSLR for my current micro-four-thirds setup.

At the moment I don’t have a shoot-through umbrella to soften the light so I decided to embrace the constraint and create a little bit of drama by placing the flash unit up on the landing above me and casting some harsh shadows through the bannister and across the wall and carpet.

I quite enjoyed shooting this. The flash unit I bought was cheaper than I remember them being. This may be because I’ve not purchased big brand names but they seem to work well and have more features than I’ll likely need. I can see myself getting another and playing with some more complex setups later down the line. Let me know what you think of this effort in the comments section.

Elsewhere

Work had some notable moments this week but nothing that’s easy to share or that I want to write about - I’m sure I won some, lost some and ended the week on a draw. No real complaints.

Running life has continued strong. I’ve managed about 21 miles this week across 5 runs. Today I ran 8.6 miles which made me feel like a proper runner! My legs feel like I ran 16 miles and I’m a little worried the next few days I’ll be hobbling about like a very old man.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

3 - Skip intro

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, portrait, reflection

I almost copped out and posted yet another running selfie today! All of the snaps on my phone were pretty lame though and I’m trying not to be lazy with this project. Instead, I reached for my Olympus DSLR and tried to create something a little more interesting. I didn’t have any clear idea, vision or concept in mind so I shot off 6-8 frames of me holding an LED desk lamp over my head in a dark room and then tweaked things a little in Adobe Lightroom. The shot won’t win any prizes but there is something honest and appealing to me about the closeup framing showing my pitted, wrinkled skin, my giant nose and my unkempt facial fuzz. I’m not a model, I’m just a guy, getting older by the day - this is me.

Weekly roundup

Work felt hard this week. Not necessarily in a bad way - I feel like many aspects of the week were pretty positive and I made lots of progress across many things. I finished it tired though and a little burnt out. I often fall into the trap of caring a little too much, which means I can lose perspective, lean in, and obsess over silly details. Next week I need to make sure I do a better job managing my diary and carving out enough time for breaks and balance.
I’ve booked a holiday by myself towards the end of the month. I need this break but I’ve never travelled alone before (other than for work). I’m excited and anxious in equal measure. I could write lots more about this topic but now is not the time. I’ll probably write more closer to departure or maybe even write whilst I’m away.
I caught up with two friends this week. One I hadn’t seen in over 12 months. Catching up on all of what life has thrown us recently was a little overwhelming but also cathartic. I need to put more effort and energy into some of my friendships.
Good chilled weekend vibes. Friday night started with a haircut and bants with Thom at Seventh Seal. Saturday morning involved being Run Director at parkrun - nobody died and 226 folks crossed the line. Chloe and I took a trip to Bridport to rebook a tattoo appointment I had to postpone in November - I’ve been waiting for this one for a while so I’m pleased to have a new date in May and have an ending planned. Today I completed a lovely trail run up along the Dorset ridgeway to Hardy’s monument and then headed to a pub for a lazy Sunday roast.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

2 - Running around

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, running, creativity, self, project

This is the second in my series of self-portraits (read about more about the project here). As I suggested in the first post some of the project would likley be snaps taken on my iphone - and this one falls into that category. I’ve only recently switched to an iphone and actually I’m quite happy with the quality of this shot. The photo was taken by setting a 10 second timer and propping up the phone precariously on the top of a fence post with suport from a small rock I found nearby. I’m annoyed I’ve got a bit of a grumpy expression on my face and my hair is all squiffy. This was partly caused by the exhaustion of the preceeding run kicking in and partly by me trying to figure out the camera settings required to get something passable quickly before I returned home to warm up again. Out of 5 or 6 frames this is about the only one where I got the focus right so we’ll all have to put up with my silly grumpy face. I guess it adds some interest if nothing else. Tell me what you think in the comments below.

I’ve managed 4 runs this week and today was the longest where I racked up 10km up and over several nearby hills. As you can see from the photo above I’ve not exactly got the physique of an olympic athlete but thankfully you don’t have to be great at something to enjoy it and I’m really enjoying my return to regular running.

My secret weapon at the moment is my Nike Running Club training plan and the guided audio runs that come with it. I was sceptical when my good friend Emily recommended them but actually having Coach Bennett keep me virtual company whilst out on a run is fab. He does a great job of reminding me about some of the running wisdom I may have forgotten over the last few years and he often makes me smile.

I scheduled a training plan that would help me be ready for a local trail half-marathon in a few months time. If I’m honest with myself I wasn’t overly confident of success when I started at the end of last year. I’ve had lots of failed start and stop attempts to get back into running over the last few years and other than the odd painful few km’s here and there nothing has stuck.

This time around I’m already really pleased with the progress I’ve made. I’m back out running several times a week and have been back in the habit long enough I can really feel my fitness improving and things becoming easier and more enjoyable. When I was previously in good running condition (probably 7-8 years ago) I found running was as beneficial to my mental health as it was my phyisical health with long runs often feeling like a form of meditation - I’m excited about starting to feel the benefit of these things again.

Elsewhere

It’s been a busy week at work juggling lots of projects with one in particular that I’ve felt the need to lean into a little more and help the team out by dusting off my data analysis and cleaning skills. This was enjoyable but tiring and I’m sure a few other important tasks I should have been closer too have suffered as a result. I spent a couple of days in London which I’d also describe as enjoyable but tiring. My first trip to the city this year and it lovely to spend my evenings catching up with good friends but I left the city concious I have several more I still haven’t seen in a long while. Hopefully i’ll have plenty of reasons for another visit soon.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

1 - Seeking inspiration and comfort

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: 52weeks, photography, creativity, self, project, reflection

I’m committing to capture and publish a self-portrait with a short accompanying post here on my blog each week. Some weeks I might aim for an abstract creative masterpiece - adorned with filters, photoshop magic and flying unicorns. Sometimes it might just be a photo of my feet snapped on my iphone. Most weeks will fall somewhere in between (just like this first specimen). The only real rule is some part of me has to be in the frame.

I’d like to get a collection of images that spans 52 weeks before I consider this personal challenge complete. It’d be nice if these are all consecutive weeks but I’m prepared to cut myself some slack if I end up with a few gaps. To make accounting simpler and consistent weeks will run Mon-Sun.

Why?

Making things and being creative is something I enjoy. I don’t profess to be a master of photography but I completed a similar project about 10 years ago and it really helped me improve. My skills have started to become rusty and I’d like to refresh them. I also quite enjoy the process of trying to come up with fresh ideas of how to capture what is actually a pretty dull subject (me!)
The last half of 2022 was pretty brutal for me personally and it’s taken its toll on my mental health. I hope holding myself to account for documenting the year that’s starting to unfold will help me regularly reflect and make sure I’m keeping my mental health in check, actively seeking out time for happiness and sticking to some of the self-care rituals I’ve put in place.
Why not?

I’m always open to feedback and comments so please share your thoughts below.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Bye-bye flickr

Sun, 15 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: photography, tech, social-media, creative-platforms, memories, reflections

This weekend I finally found the time to backup all my flickr images and delete my account. The reason for doing so was purely practical - It’s been a long time since I actively posted images to flickr. I no longer interact with any groups and am no longer part of any art projects on the platform. Given I had nearly 3000 older images stored on Flickr, recent account changes that have come into effect would soon have soon left me paying for the service or I’d of risk losing my older images and private photos becoming public. The process of backing up all the images and browsing through the albums did stir more than a few memories.

I think I joined flickr in about 2006. Robyn was born in 2002, digital photography wasn’t as mature as it is now but it was to a level where it was becoming more common and accessible to document those special family moments with more regularity. The tech was still crap by today’s standards, not many phones could take photos and those that could were appalling. Digital compact camera’s were also pretty lame. I’d always been interested in photography and I think somewhere around 2005/2006 I invested in a Fujifilm s7000 zoom bridge camera. It offered a lot more control that a compact but it didn’t quite come with the flexibility, power or expense of a full SLR setup.

Initially I just joined flickr to store photos online to make them easier to share them with family and friends. A few months later I started following a few other users and gradually became more fixated learning how other people captured great photos. There was (and maybe still is) a totally endless supply of groups on flickr that covered every style, subject, technology, process and project imaginable.

Over the following years I bought and collected all sorts of cameras, lenses, lights and gradually became a proper photo nerd and an ok photographer. I learnt a lot on flickr, met some extremely talented people, made some amazing online friends who became real life friends, completed some pretty bonkers projects, setup a photography business, hosted a photography podcast and even had a picture spotted on the platform and then published in a book by Martin Parr. The time is right for me to leave flickr but I’ll always remember it fondly.

These days its rare for me to reach for my SLR or put film in one of my 35mm cameras but I still take several photos a day on my smartphone and most weeks I’ll also now grab some goPro footage. The only place I really curate and share photos now is on Instagram. I used to love Instagram but it’s journey to be a weird combination of facebook & TikTok seem to be picking up pace and that’s not appealing to me.

I may have to carve out some space on this site to curate some images I’m fond of or to document projects. I think I might be finally beyond the gratification that comes with notifications of likes & comments and mostly I just fancy a simple place to point people at the things I’ve made. Whilst I mull all of this over I’ve added some images pulled from the my old flickr archive below for your suprise and delight dear reader.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Choropleth Experiments

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: dataviz, maps, tech, code, experiments, visualization

So I think I’ve now mentioned several times in my weeknotes that I’ve been bitten by the data visualisation bug during my recent course with the ODI. I’ve also mentioned that I found using Public Tableau for one of my assignments fairly frustrating so wanted to play with some other tools and methods. The interactive choropleth map below is one of my first experiments in doing just that.

It’s a pretty throw-away experiment and I put my hands up to having done no analysis of the data. The reason for keeping it themed to fire incidents for the moment was purely based on knowing it was relatively simple to get hold of data that would be ready to work with. It’s showing the total number of incidents attended by Fire Authorities in England between Apr and Sep 2018. Data was sourced from gov.uk (FIRE0102).

I’ve used a combination of leaflet js and mapbox for the presentation and interactivity. This tutorial on the leaflet site was super helpful in getting me started.

I was keen to be able to use some of the geometry from the ONS geography portal in my experiment as they have quite a few different geojson sets for things I’m interested in (boundaries of local authorities as an example). I did at one point go down the rabbit hole of directly using their API for the geometry and although I did get it working it meant using an additional leaflet plugin and some other complications which weren’t really necessary whilst I’m not visualising live or changing data. I took a step back and decided to keep it simple for the moment.

One thing I liked about leaflet was that it gave some nice easy ways to turn off all the crazy map features. The 1st draft of this the map allowed zooming and panning and zoomed in on selection etc etc. All fine and dandy but a pretty crappy experience on a mobile device where you want people to be able to scroll a page with their thumb not pan a map to another continent. In the context of using a map to visualise this kind of data it was massive interaction overkill and totally pointless. Good to know I can play with those things for other uses though.

I need to play with the styling and layout options some more. It’s a pretty big flaw to have the key sat within the map window - as again on mobile it totally obscures London and most of the South East 😂…but I’m also keen to crack on and explore some other formats of visualisation. Maybe something for the weekend!

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

TGF parkrun data dive

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: dataviz, parkrun, data, tech, experiments, analysis

Anyone who follows me on twitter will have possibly noticed that parkrun has become a bit of an obsession for me lately. There are a few reasons for this which I’m sure I’ll write about another day. The short story though is that I’m currently loving it and in my spare time I volunteer as part of the core event team for The Great Field parkrun which is conveniently just a few minutes walk from my front door in Poundbury, Dorset.

This weekend I decided it’d be an interesting exercise to pull together some of our event data to see what I could learn from the numbers about our little community event. For context I’m no crack data scientist or analyst but thought it’d be an interesting challenge for me to blow the cobwebs off my limited skills and share some of what I found out. Like all my little hobby projects I’ve tried to document the process. If the ‘how I did this’ bit doesn’t interest you feel free to skip down to the insights. 🌳❤️

Method

Glancing through the the stats on the parkrun website confirmed by suspicions that the data volume for just my local event wouldn’t be sizeable enough (yet) to mean that I’d need anything too complex in terms of tools to understand the data. Just getting all of the results into a single spreadsheet would be the simplest and most accessible way for me (and anybody else who might be interested) to start to doing basic analysis.

The parkrun tech fairies and event teams do an amazing job of making sure results from every event across the globe are published in table form on the parkrun website every week and I started by just copying and pasting these into google sheets. It soon became a chore to try and tidy up and clean the HTML elements to get things in the right place and it certainly didn’t feel something I’d want to repeat very often.

Some basic research around available parkrun APIs were a bit hit and miss. Plans for anything official look like they had been shelved a while back (which is sad but also understandable). The nerdier elements of the parkrun community (there are lots of us) have seemingly tried to fill these gaps over time by creating many things in this space but many were outdated or poorly documented. Some seem promising but look like they’d add more complexity than I wanted to tackle right now.

I decided a suitable compromise might be to use my web browser to save local copies of the 20 event results pages into a folder and then create a script to make the process of extracting the data and adding it to a single friendly file of comma separated values (csv) a little less tedious. Moving forward I will keep looking into other approaches/tools as there are limits baked into the results pages that I’d like to overcome (like knowing more about volunteers on the day, and knowing an athletes ‘home’ parkrun).

Given I am not a developer and that I’ve never done this before the process of creating the script involved more than a little bit of trial and error, lots of googling and some swearing but what I’ve written works! 🎉 The resulting script means I can now easily append my dataset with new results every week with a couple of clicks. I could likely automate this part of the process but that’s an experiment for another day. The script I created along with a short README file is available on github if you also enjoy hacking things together, have node running on your computer and want to achieve something similar. For any readers who can write code properly, please be kind - I was born before the internet!

In terms of creating the couple of interactive graphs included on this page I’ve used a react library called react-chartjs-2 to present the data as chart components embedded into this mdx formatted post on my Gatsby blog. Screenshots of graphs from the spreadsheet would have also been fine…but far less satisfying for my inner geek.

Insights <a id=“insights”></a>

Over our 20 events we’ve had people run, jog or walk our 5km course 5355 times. Added together our participants have covered an incredible 26,675km! Which is not far from 67% of the distance around planet earth (if you follow the equator). Given our attendance average is about 266 runners (1,330km per week) we should complete our first collaborative trip around the earth by the time we hit our 30th event! 🚀 🌎

Those 5355 finishers actually equate to approximately 1852 individual athletes crossing the line at our event on The Great Field. I say ‘approximately’ as within the result set we have 288 unknowns. This is likely made up of people who’ve forgotten to bring a barcode, maybe never registered or could be the result of an error caused during timekeeping, token sorting etc. Another known group missing from these numbers is those lucky small people safely wrapped up in running buggies being pushed around our course by adults far fitter than me (the TGF parkrun next generation maybe?! 🖖).

Participation

To put this number of participants in perspective - 1852 people would fill just over 14 London buses to capacity (with 80 people seated and 50 people standing on each bus). This analysis also doesn’t include our 4-legged friends 🐩 or TGF Next Generation™ so I suggest we round up to at least 15 buses if we decide to take everybody out for a picnic!

A stat that suprised me a little was that out of those 1852 folks, 1021 (55.13%) have taken part at our event only once. Giving it more thought I’ve concluded that being a new event has meant we’ve had lots of support & interest and attendees from other established local parkruns plus quite a few tourists from further afield. This trend itself is a positive one that I’m sure will only continue with rave reviews like this one. Those 288 unknowns in themselves could balance this number out a bit more also.

Getting the word out to people who’ve never heard of parkrun or haven’t heard we now have an event in Dorchester will likely take a little more time, patience and work from the events team and parkrun community. It’s a metric I’m keenly interested in tracking closely - I really hope our little parkrun provides an opportunity to build and strengthen our local community whilst also promoting improved physical and mental health outcomes. The more regular attendees we have, the bigger the potential impact (because people don’t often return to events they don’t get value from). This is another reason why I’m keen to tinker some more with the stats and find easier ways to guage how many athletes list us as their ‘home’ event.

I won’t share names in this post but I can tell you we’ve had 4 individuals who’ve crossed the line at all 20 events at The Great Field. According to their parkrun profiles two of those four were brand new to parkrun at our first event and have so far (in terms of parkrun attendance) only ever run with us, which is a most impressive streak indeed! ♥️

Attendance has only dipped below the 200 participants mark for one event. This happened to be New Year’s day so I think we can safely say this is likely caused by a combination of people recovering from the night before or heading out to the Broadstone quarter marathon, which is a popular place to start the new year if you’re a runner in Dorset.

Rather than simply list out the number of athletes by parkrun age categories I thought I’d turn to the dark side (marketing 😈) and roughly show how our attendees break down by generational groups. Doing this also helps compensate for an interesting quirk in the stats. When I totalled up the number of athletes against the athletic age/gender categories used by parkrun - I was out by a total of 32! I scratched my head for a while before noticing that 32 attendees in the last 20 events have had a birthday which means they’ve been listed in more than one age category. Many happy returns birthday people!! 🎂

This data won’t be totally accurate as I don’t have people’s actual birthdays and the generational groups won’t perfectly align to the boundaries of parkrun age categories but it more than hints at the general shape of age groups attending our event. Clearly my fellow Generation X’ers are as keen on parkrun as I am with them representing 37.2% of our athletes. We have 86 young athletes in our Generation Alpha group. It’ll be interesting to see if this continues to grow as part of family groups attending on a regular basis or whether it’s a bit of a blip caused by event number 15 where young people from Dorchester Middle School joined us to raise money and awareness around young people suffering from Mental Health Issues. You can clearly see the impact of this on our overall attendance for event 15 in the line chart above

Performance

Even when I was much fitter than I am now and training often, I never successfully managed to run 5km under 20 minutes (my closest effort falling short by 6 seconds) so I have a huge amount of respect for the people flying around the course that quickly. The graph below shows the fastest finish time at each event for both Men and Women. You can see our current course record of 16:21 was set at our 3rd event. It’s subtle but it does oddly look like our first finishers times might start trending slower - maybe our marshalls are just providing too much on-course entertainment for these speedsters to concentrate 🧐😂.

It’s absolutely great to see our fastest woman cross the line quicker than our fastest man on the 8th January. We are trying really hard to encourage as many women and girls to take part in parkrun as possible so hopefully this might become a trend in our results more often.

parkrun really isn’t just about the fast few though. The average finish time across all participants is currently 29:06. This correlates to the chart below where if we break down our finishers into 5 minute finishing windows the majority of people cross the line between 25-30 mins, followed by the 30-35 minute grouping.

For a future experiment I’d be keen to compare this picture to that of other events to see how typical these stats are across the wider parkrun event community. I’m very interested in that white space to the right of the bars on the chart! There is a real opportunity to be promoting our event to people in the community who might not have the confidence to participate or be put off by the number of people finishing ahead of 35 mins. Like all parkruns we have tailwalkers (not runners) at our event who make sure nobody ever comes last at parkrun. We’ve also become the graduation run setting for a couple of couch to 5km groups that are run locally which is fantastic. Posts like this one from Conkers parkrun though make me think there might be even more we can do to encourage people to be be part of our communuity, share the fun, get active and increase our impact!

Conclusions and future experiments

I found looking through our event data an interesting little weekend diverson. It certainly got me learning a few new tricks (which is mostly why I tinker like this). I’m present at most of our events and that experience is way better than trawling through the numbers but equally I’m usually focussed on a specific task whilst I’m there. This made me step back and look at things from a different perspective. Some of these stats like the times of fastest finishers aren’t things I would normally pay much attention to. Looking at this data along with things like the spread of times for individual athletes over multiple events was fascinating. Getting a better understanding of the split between first-timers and repeat visitors certainly challenged my assumptions around our attendance.

I’m definitely going to continue to try and get some meaningful data around our voluteers. Volunteering is such an important part of the event for me as an inidividual but also for the health and sustainability of our event. I feel it’s important we understand more about how our volunteers take part and if there are any patterns we can learn from. Much of this we already do through other methods (like talking to each other) but I’d still like to play around with the data to complete the picture.

I’m also keen to experiment looking at event data from other events - both in terms of understanding how successful events grow over time but also just in terms of similarities and differences. Maybe I could start looking for our parkrun event twin?!! If you found this intersting let me know and I’ll keep sharing what I find.

Icon credits: London Bus by ATOM, Dog by Loka Mariella both found at NounProject.com

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Week6 - Range

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, reflection, multi-hyphenate, team, balance

I took the role of ‘master of ceremonies’ at a recent full FG team meeting and started by sharing some key messages from the management team. One of these went along the lines of ‘Hey February is shaping up to be pretty dang BUSY! let’s have each others backs, look after yourselves, think ahead/anticipate, communicate…’ etc etc. This week I’m finishing with my own words echoing around in my brain. Just like buses - tasks, challenges and opportunities can arrive all at once and sometimes without much warning. It’s been great to see the whole team rise to the challenge.

I’ve definitely felt things step up a gear. The mental load of constantly re-prioritising, communicating and navigating complexity across multiple contexts has felt a little tiring. As much as it’s felt tough my workload has involved an interesting mix of contributing to work in the here and now but also laying groundwork and putting plans in place that will have longer term impact and benefit. In the few moments where I’ve paused there is a lot of great work we can be excited and proud of.

There have though been a couple of situations where in reflection I could/should have acted differently or done better. I feel I may have let a couple of people down. Annoyingly I still haven’t mastered not being too harsh on myself when I make these mistakes. I need to build in better ways to test whether this is just me not meeting my own high expectations or if this is also other people’s perceptions of these events. I plan to loop back around next week with those I fear I may have annoyed to test this out. Regardless of this I made it through a busy week largely with my mind and body in tact - I’m very thankful for colleagues who have had my back, rallied with support when I’ve asked for it, been flexible, understanding and patient. My backlog for next week still feels challenging so the priority for the weekend is resting up & recharging.

Other thoughts…

In addition to doing a great job of re-stocking my sticker collection this week Jukesie posted some thoughts on the power of multi-hyphenates. Judging by the reactions on twitter it resonated with me and quite a few people who find themselves in similar job roles. It’s taken me quite some time to actually appreciate that being a π (pi) shaped person with a range of skills and experiences across a few disciplines is actually a strength and not necessarily something that makes me less than those who are expert in an individual discipline. I’ve recently been giving some thought to my personal development though and I’m really interested in picking something that I already have some experience in and going much deeper. What I’m wrestling with is which particular area would I want to choose to add depth in? I don’t have answers yet, it needs more thought - I’ve started listening to Range by David Epstein (audiobooks work well for me) which seemingly explores this subject in a bit more detail and I’m hoping alongside some research into a variety of options it will help bring some clarity.

Photo of the week…

Top tunes…

I’m back to Bastille - Specifically the This got out of hand edition of Doom Days which has a great mix of melancholy but married with some great uplifting orchestral support.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Fresh paint

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: data, tech, experiments, climate

It feels like I change blogging platforms more often than I actually write blog posts…but rather than just a desire to apply a fresh coat of paint this time my rebuild had purpose. I had three main goals in mind…

1. Reducing my hosting costs

Considering I seldom post or get much traffic to my website and I burnt through my free AWS credits sometime back paying for an EC2 instance on a monthly basis seemed a stupid waste of money.

2. Apply Learning

I’d been tinkering with a few static site generators and JAM stack projects in my downtime. I wanted a real world thing to build rather than a fictional site for my dog (which I have made already) as this would likely be more rewarding.

3. Take climate action

I’d been doing a little research at work about product design and technology choices in relation to climate action. I wanted to take actual steps (however small, tiny or tokenistic those may seem to be) to move to hosting being powered by renewables (or at least suitably offset) and also explore using page budgets and PWA to reduce compute/storage and data transfer.

I’m happy to report I’ve accomplished all three of the goals above. In addition, I think this might be the best user experience of all of the iterations of my blog/website in quite some time and equally I think i’ve ended up with a solution which actually works better for me as an author/publisher. Winning!

If you fancy a long ramble about website nerdery read on to find out more about the changes and my thought processes. If this doesn’t interest you then maybe bail out now and go and have a poke around the rest of the site instead.

Summary of changes

Platform/CMS I changed from using the Ghost blogging platform to using the Gatsby static site generator. I really liked Ghost and still rate it highly. As a far as content management systems go it’s a lovely user experience that’s less cluttered than wordpress or drupal. If I’d stuck to ghost though it was going to be hard to achieve the first two of my goals. I did toy with running it in a headless configuration with a static generated frontend, maybe even running ghost locally on demand but this seemed needlessly complex for my needs.

I also considered other headless setups with SaaS services like Contenful. I discounted these as an option firstly as it meant I was using an additonal cloud service (potentially adding to my carbon output) and secondly although a content API is a beautiful thing - for a project of this micro scale where I am unlikely to ever want to present the content anywhere other than in this one place it seems overkill.

Discounting headless options led me to keep things simple and to use markdown files to store and markup my content. This also makes it much easier in future if I want to migrate content from one static site generator to another. I’ve recently started using Typora which is beautiful, themable, cross platform, clutter-free markdown editor. I sync the files using dropbox allowing me to access and write meeting notes across different devices. It also means I can write offline (which on trains is super useful). It’s been a long time coming but I think I finally like markdown. Publishing is as simple as copying the finished post into my site folder and pushing to github.

Gatsby was my static site generator of choice purely because I’d played it with before and found it to be both powerful and flexible - compared to some of the alternatives the documentation is also excellent.

Hosting I knew that moving to a static generated site would effectively remove my hosting costs completely and help me meet my first goal. The site is small so storage is negligble and numbers of page views are low (mostly me…ha!) so bandwidth is also not a concern. There are a range of services out there that will host your static files for free whilst also making it dead easy to deploy from the command line (surge, netlify, github pages, firebase, zeit to name a few).

This meant the choice would primarily be made on their green credentials and for this reason I ended up going with Zeit. It had all the features that are important and common across all of the services I mentioned above (simple command line tools, github integration, domain name support, content delivery network) but under the hood it’s running on google cloud computing which from what I could deduce from my research is a more sustainable choice than say Netlify which runs on AWS.

Note: Resources like the Green Web Foundation and the climate action slack community have been useful resources in my research on this subject.

Carbon optimisation Largely reducing the carbon footprint of a web page is the same process as optimising for performance. You want pages to be small and fast, Smaller files mean less data has to be sent and recieved over the wire. The nice thing about Gatsby is that it’s been designed to be pretty damn efficient out of the box - optimising pages to be super light.

There are lots of things I love about Gatsby, one clear winner though in terms of carbon optimaisation is the gatsby-image plugin. It’s so easy to optimise image sizes to be used across device / viewport sizes. It also has some neat lazy-loading and art direction features - transforming images to mono or duotone at build time as examples. A sensible way to handle images was crucial for me. I did want to experiment with optimisation but I didn’t want to go too far and feel like I was compromising on features and experience.

My first few iterations of the site in development saw me starting from the most basic Gatsby starter and slowly bringing plugins together, building basic components and styling it up using bootstrap. My rationale being that only adding things as I needed would ensure I didn’t add any unnecessary bloat. On many levels it was a success. I had a super fast site with all the features I wanted and I’d managed to get the appoximate amount of CO2 produced on a site visit to 0.11g (I know this as I got slightly obsessed with checking it on websitecarbon.com).

There was one small problem with the site though - it was a little, well…Ugly! It was passable. I could of lived with it for quite some time but it had it’s niggles. I’m no visual designer and modern css baffles me (So. Many. Choices!!). I just didn’t love it.

I left it alone for a bit…days and weeks. Then I started again.

My second attempt is ultimately what you are reading now. This time I started with a different Gatby starter. This one already looked closer to what I wanted visually, just a few subtle tweaks here and there to make it my own. There was a little more tweaking of react components but that was pretty easy using the learning from my first attempt. This new approach wasn’t quite shaping up to be as CO2 light though, I had gained a little bloating. It was still good and certainly better than many other sites but not as good as my first attempt. I removed custom fonts, un-necessary styles and this manged to get it back down a little. I also contentrated on getting top scores in google lighthouse across the board. I would imagine Lighthouse isn’t a perfect tool but its a great way to quickly check performance and that you are meeting basic accessibility guidelines. There is also a cool lighthouse integration built into ZEIT so every build gets tested.

Lastly I configured the site to work as a progressive web app. This obviously has some potential environmental benefits but only really for repeat visitors and only if the user chooses to make this choice. I’m not sure it would ever be used by anyone on my blog - but it’s fun to fool around with and again made ridiculously easy to setup in Gatsby.

That’s about it. A bit of a ramble - you were warned! Considering I pulled together this iteration over a lazy weekend (including migrating old content into markdown files) I’m pretty happy with the results. I’m happy to have a new site but the practical task of optimising site performance through a lens of carbon emissions was really interesting to me and rewarding in itself. Like many design and development decisions it ultimately became about trade-off and balance. I’ve learnt a few new things along the way.

Maybe the new paint will even inspire me to publish more posts…maybe 😂

Photo Credit:- Joey Huang on Unsplash

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Let's keep talking about this

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Rest

Tagged: babyloss, reflection, awareness, support, life

These two toys once sat in a beautiful garden at our local cemetery. That beautiful garden is the resting place of many babies lost before, during or shortly after birth.

Buried there are 3 of my daughters. The twins - Morgan & Bethany and Pob. Time has passed, the sadness has faded but I still hold them dear. Over 18 years on and I have drawn strength from these experiences but still remember the darker days we went through.

This week is Baby Loss Awareness Week. Baby Loss is common and hard on Mothers, Fathers, Siblings and supporting family members. It’s important we talk about it and support each other and fight to help improve bereavement care.

I’m always happy to talk to people about my own experiences but more importantly happy to just listen if that’s what you need. Dont hesitate to reach out. Stu x ✌️

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Week5 - Late Notes

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, event, feedback, learning, reflection, notes

I was hoping to post these last Friday but I got side-tracked with all of the other things! Main point to note was that I returned back from a much needed Easter Break feeling massively refreshed.

3 Highlights

1. General Vibes - As hinted at above it was actually just really nice to be back at work having a renewed sense of energy & perspective following my Easter break with family and friends. This energy was used to re-prioritise a bunch of tasks, put some effort into sales activity and also input into a couple of projects. I found that things that had been stressing me out were now barely blipping on my radar. In addition to just having a break I think returning to work without any course assignments or exam deadlines hanging over my head also made finding balance a little easier. Towards the end of the week I was also involved in some productive conversations with colleagues from another company. It’s good that opportunities seem to arise more often where we can collaborate with like-minded orgs, and combine our strengths to solve problems in the sector rather than just be competing. Always good to be reminded you are not working for EvilCorp.

2. Event - On Wednesday I attended an event over at the AWS offices in Holborn. Hackney council and Made Tech hosted a panel conversation and networking event giving attendees an idea of how Hackney council are moving on from legacy technology whilst still keeping the lights on. Cate, Rashmi, Matt & Luke all did a great job sharing their successes and challenges.

The thing I found most interesting was when Matt was asked a question about aligning multiple services, stakeholders and projects with new product choices and technical standards etc. In response Matt shared one of the things he has learnt so far is to ‘worry less’ about some of these things. I may be mis-interpreting his response but I think he was saying that good product choices are key, using modern development practices hugely beneficial, adherence to standards always the ideal BUT equally you have to be pragmatic and tactical at times. Yes - aim to align on the best technical choices, reduce/rationalise your portfolio, put microservices in place to provide better long term products etc etc etc…but crucially realise you won’t be able to do all of that in one go…and more importantly achieving this tech utopia at the expense of delivering value to users or improving services in the more immediate or short term is not delivering value or going to buy you much trust.

It was interesting to see some reactions elsewhere in the room where this obviously was more challenging or just difficult to imagine in other contexts where maybe different leadership or cultural factors were at play.

I finished the evening having a really good chat with Rashmi & Selwyn from the HackIT team about many things. They are a great team, doing interesting work over at Hackney right now. It’s been a real privilege to work with them all and see them grow over the last couple of years.

3. Feedback Fallacy - A slightly random conversation via twitter DM with Dom one evening about giving and receiving feedback also peaked my interest and makes the highlight list. The conversation had no real conclusions and I’m sure we’ll pick it up another day in more depth but Dom shared this post with me which I found super interesting. Well worth a read. I’m interested in pursuing how we can test some of what’s unpacked here in more practical ways as we improve practice and support people to develop.

Elsewhere

**Parenting project phase 589 - ** Mostly it now seems like our role is to offer advice and guidance during this long transition to live! We’re often asked to take a human centered approach to help solve problems such as… How do I work out if I want to go to University? What career options suit me best? How will I cope without my parents? or living with other people? **We have sharpies and post-its and a trello board. What could possibly go wrong? ** 😂

**Monty turned 4 - **Happy Birthday Dog!! 🎉 ( I missed the celebrations as I was busy in London working to put dog treats on the table).

Avengers Endgame (Is great) - Seeing the Avengers films has become a bit of a father and daughter ritual so was actually quite sad to see it end. We’ll make do with other Marvel offerings and cross fingers for some less-terrible Disney Star Wars action towards the end of the year.

Maps and data - I continue to play with maps and data.

Miscellany

Tunes: Bastille released Doom Days which although fairly sobering has me itching for the new album From the gram: My realisation that window cleaning in central London is a very different gig to that in the 'shire.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Week4 - 333 Slides

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, learning, privacy, gdpr, training

This is going to have to be brief. I’m on a train, batteries dying (mostly mine) and dodgy wifi. I will try harder in future.

The week in brief

I made a sticker 🏵 - People seemed to like them 😍
I finished my ODI course 🕺
I spent 4 days in a classroom learning all about data privacy legislation 🎓

Where my head is at

The changes brought about by the GDPR are a massive step forward in protecting the privacy of people. The real challenge is ensuring orgs don’t get stuck in the space of just ensuring compliance. True change is only going to be realised by moving beyond compliance to fundamentally ensuring privacy is baked into everything by default (by design) and part of the culture of providing better, fairer, transparent services. There are lots of parallels I could draw between this and the implementation of the Homelessness Reduction Act. I’ve not had headspace yet to digest it all but I feel like there is also something interesting in the point of intersection between my two data related course experiences. Something that draws a stronger line between data ethics and data related law. Something to mull over 🤔.
I am tired! Like ridiculously tired. Learning all these new things over the last month or so has been an amazing opportunity and I am very appreciative to FG for the investment. At times I’ve felt overwhelmed by all the new things. I am extremely grateful to a bunch of colleagues & friends who’ve had my back. Checked in on me, given me hugs, shared a beer or just checked in via slack. You all rock!

What next

A week off 🎉 Spending time with the family, catching up on sleep and hopefully some fun in the sun 🤞
and then… bounce back - fully recharged! Learning is great but it’s applying what I’ve learnt and sharing it with others that’ll make a difference.

Miscellany

From the gram: How Stu survived 333 slides and learnt to love a flat white made from electronic tears!

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Week3 - Dear Diary

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, reflection, life, learning

3 weeks of weeknotes and 3 weeks without smoking! 🎉

I thought I’d try a different format this week and give a daily digest of my week. I’m not sure it’s something I’m likely to repeat often. I’ve left out hefty amounts of what actually happens with clients and projects as that feels a little odd to share without permission. It’s still a very long read (but then it’s felt like a very long week 😃). I’ve drawn out my key reflections in bold if the detail doesn’t float your boat…

Monday

My day off. **Sunshine and a 6 mile stroll with the dog. Glorious! **

Tuesday

Early train from Dorset - No wifi and spotty tethering . . . just about managed to catch up on slack, emails and started writing up some notes from the previous week and model some project costs (exciting huh!).

I’d been invited to an internal training session covering how we’re improving onboarding and recruitment at FG. The afternoon teased out some really interesting conversations about how we form a more consistent approach to people management and development. This is an area where I feel I want to contribute more I just need to figure out how - or if I should? - I can’t and shouldn’t do all the things!?

I finished this rare extra day in the office talking Matt through some work Sally and I had done the previous week to plan our approach for a future opportunity we really really really want to be involved with.

I started my evening catching up on the final ODI course tutorial I missed earlier in the day. I’m very sad this is nearly over 😭.

I then spent some time testing a little experiment I’d kicked off last week. As the team grows and communities of practice evolve I think we’re starting to find the edges and limitations of some of the tools we’ve previously used to hold and share knowledge. The tech and data CoP I lead seemed like a safe space to try something different in the form of a wiki.

I’d shared my thinking on this with Jaye and Dom F the previous week and Jaye had taken my sketchy (but neatly prioritised) user requirements and busted out a robust, user-friendly and workable solution in insanely quick time 💪😍. After testing I worked through some simple ways we could structure the content on paper before bed. I might have tried to listen to an audiobook? Not remembering means I nodded off! Room for improvement.

Wednesday

A mixed day split over a couple of exotic London locations. The morning was mostly catching up with some projects in flight, giving advice, and input where I could. I think most notably was a really productive session with Julian and Richard to plan a workshop for a new project.

In the afternoon I headed back to the office to join Matt on a call with a prospective new client. The rest of the day was spent inputting into some sales responses and also beginning to add content into the new wiki.

Towards the end of the day a colleague asked if I had any time for a chat about work-life balance and travel. The crazy juggling of travel, challenging work (in teams), relationships, family, health, geography, hobbies etc is something that affects us all at some point or another. It’s not a job everyone could or would want to do. I know I struggle with this. I find just talking it through with someone can often help frame my messy (and often emotionally charged) thinking. Sometimes it’s just nice to know you’re not alone. I didn’t have many solutions but was happy to lend an ear and share some of what I’ve learnt through trial and error. I think it ended up being slightly cathartic for us both.

At some point during the day it had dawned on me that if I could create a reasonable amount of wiki content to start the ball rolling it would be in a good place to share at the whole team meet the next day. This was compelling because I knew I was going to be out of the office for the next two weeks. On my return I know I’m pretty stretched across projects so I wanted to maximise my time this week whilst I had the ability to flex.

Collecting feedback and analytics sooner, rather than later, to help evaluate whether the experiment was worth further effort/headspace is always appealing.

So . . . I got back to my Peckham pad at 8pm opened up the laptop and beavered away until the early hours. **There was a small lull in activity to have a rather hilarious conversation with my wife about pretty much nothing! I take joy in these moments. **

Thursday

I headed out early for a Delivery Manager breakfast. I’m no longer in the role but really value the community that’s formed around the practice. Only Will and Rich C could attend this week but as usual they had loads of interesting things to share. They are both very positive people and with me being a little tired the time with them helped set me up well for the day ahead (as did the bacon buttie!).

A couple of quick phone meetings (always be planning & communicating) and I headed out to client site to check in on a few project related gubbins and attend a meeting (it resulted in action - which makes me happy). I then swiftly turned back around and headed to the office to progress some project tasks, and input into a CoP session. As always on team days I learnt a few things, had my thinking challenged and felt the value of just being in a space with super smart people. My trello board(s) swells with new actions.

Our monthly all-hands team meeting was great. There is lots to celebrate at FutureGov and it was great to hear some of the work going on elsewhere. I was really pleased to spend 5 mins unveiling our little wiki experiment and this gave rise to a few interesting follow-up chats about other uses for both content and tool which is exactly what I had hoped for (sewing seeds?).

Alex and Kris had organised a social event for the team. After racking up a fair few hours over the previous 2 days I was pleased to have an excuse to down tools and enjoy a beer (or err 6?) in great company. There was a quiz - my team didn’t win. Shamefully I got a Star Wars question wrong. This made me sad!

Friday

Another reasonably early start to pack up by bag and head to the office to grab supplies for a project kick-off. My Macbook Air decided to attempt an update, failed miserably and went into an annoying boot loop. After demonstrating all of the normal behaviours of swearing and gently beating my fists on the keyboard like a tired and confused ape, the internet came to the rescue with ‘how to boot a mac into safe mode’. I was then able to sort out the rogue update and get on with my day. Still a frustrating waste of an hour.

Shortly after resolving the laptop thing Robyn (my daughter) Whatsapp’d me. She is 16 so this in itself is unusual. She’d found Jon Bellion (who’s music we both love) was going to be playing in London in October and she’d snapped us up some tickets for my 40th Birthday. My mood instantly improved. Not only at the thought of going to the gig but equally how proud I am that Robyn has turned out to be both thoughtful, generous and have ok musical tastes! She is still the best project I’ve ever worked on, even if it has run seriously over budget 🤪.

I celebrated on a bus ride across London by listening to Jon Bellion. The ‘new project kick-off tummy butterflies’ launched into excited fluttery overdrive and this stayed with me for most of the day. The project has a great team and the folks joining us client-side were engaged, energised, organised and raring to go. Honestly, it’s quite rare to find the combination of all these things on day one. Change can be hard and often people are already fatigued before we walk through the door; I feel we have a responsibility to give people a boost. It wasn’t needed here. The energy levels remained high all day. I left a little early to get a train home but by the time I left we had built a shared understanding of our purpose and objectives, got rituals in place, openly shared our hopes and fears, mapped key stakeholders, started a comms plan and worked up in more detail what done might look like. I also got to witness Britt and Richard experience their first Tunnocks teacake. It’s going to be a great project!

I managed to miss the train I had hoped to be on by about 15 seconds which although annoying meant I could grab a drink and a snack. The train yet again had no working wifi (thanks SWR🖕) so more sketchy tethering meant I only just about cleared slack, inbox and timesheets. I’ll have a few loose ends to tidy up this evening including finishing the ODI course but Chloe is working a night shift so it’s all ok 👌.

A good week, lot’s of variety. Next week sadly won’t be anywhere near as diverse. I’ll be locked in a training room for 4 days understanding data privacy law 😬🤓.

Elsewhere

Tune of the week: Jon Bellion - The Internet (obvs) Gram of my week: That weekend sun!! A shot taken at Portland Bill 😍

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Week2 - How High

Fri, 29 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, challenge, teamwork, adventure, reflection

I’m back for a second week. Yay! but no longer on Medium. It potentially limits my audience but I’m not writing for fame and fortune so that’s ok.

Last weekend Chloe had organised for Robyn and I to join her and some of her work colleagues to tackle a high ropes course at a nearby outdoor adventure centre. I’m quite glad I had forgotten about this event in the calendar until the night before - I’m not overly keen on heights (actually quite scared it turns out) and not having much time to talk myself out of it was probably for the best.

I won’t go into all the details of the day but it was a great experience and a fun way to spend time as a family. I ended up pushing myself much further (and higher) than I thought possible.

I’ve been reflecting on the factors that got me both beyond my comfort zone and to a position where I could value the new perspective that this gave me (in a literal sense when your 30ft above the ground). I appreciate it’s a bit of a cliché to draw parallels between this and practicing as a consultant but it was a really well facilitated experience over a period of just a few hours which makes it super easy to identify the things that were put in place that helped achieve this positive outcome.

Here’s what I noted…

Our guides were both experienced in their field, passionate about it and great communicators. We were told what to expect at the start of the day and then were given more relevant detail just ahead of us moving to the next stage.
Important messages were repeated and reinforced often throughout the experience.
We were provided with tools and methods that allowed us to achieve progress but also keep us safe.
Knowledge of the tools/methods was openly shared. Knowledge of how to get the most out of the tools - how & when to apply what tool and for what purpose was freely given.
Our guides often asked how we felt and what we were thinking and used this to shape the next steps.
Our guides offered lots of challenge but also advice and support. They let us make our own decisions about how far we were willing to go. We were left largely in control of our experience.
Plans were in place if things went wrong or the unexpected happened which was reassuring.
We were encouraged to support each other throughout. Over the course of the session we increasingly became more reliant on each other than the guides. This was planned.
They were genuinely pleased to see us succeed and encouraged us to celebrate success as individuals and as a teams. Progress was made in stages. The ambition was made clear but the guides broke the experience down into more realistic and achievable goals.
They made it fun. This helped counter some of the more stressful or tense moments.

I like to think there is plenty above I already bring into my work practice but there is always room for improvement. I’ll be chewing over this list now i’ve got it out of my head to see what I might try tweaking or changing. I’m Interested to hear if any of this resonates with you?I’m rambling…onto the highlights - I’ll keep them brief.

Highlights of the week

Study… I Continue to learn lots on my course. I got a great result for last weeks assignment submission and this week has me exploring more new tools and methods. I’m starting to form a few little pet project ideas in my mind to keep me applying what I’ve learnt and experimenting with tools once the course comes to an end in a week or so. I’m hooked on data!

New projects and teams… I’ve been in a couple of planning sessions this week for new projects. The projects are super interesting and I’m looking forward to working with some new team members. One project in particular will see me contributing to some strategy work (which is well timed based on my learning from last week). I’m very excited!

Being social… The week also included a nice breakfast catch-up with an old FG friend, a pint or 3 with Jan on Wednesday night and some team food and drinks to mark an important milestone on a critical project on Thursday. Probably a more boozy week than it should be? Yes. #notsorry

A few of my favourite things

Clicks: Why have difficult conversations when you can talk about tools instead? 😍 Strategy needs good words 💯 Benefits of being a vulnerable leader 🤔

Tune: Tom Jones - Burning down the house (From the Homes England playlist 🏡)

From the 'Gram: Video from our tree top challenge

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Tinkering Monday

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Play

Tagged: tech, webdev, cms, experiment, blogging, platforms

Publishing my first set of weeknotes on Friday reminded me how much I find Medium a bit of an irritating experience. I really do appreciate how Medium removes all the distracting guff and allows you to focus on the content and writing…but as someone who has played with content management systems and websites for a number of years - it also grates a little not to have more control. I realise that’s the point but I like to tinker on the web and I’ve learnt a lot this this way.

Today I decided to revisit the Ghost blogging platform. I had tried it out some time back but had a few issues migrating an image heavy wordpress site and ultimately ended up moving on. Since that time I’ve also played with a few static site generators and wrap around content editing tools like forestry.io and although these are amazing I then found I was spending too much time tinkering and not enough time writing. I’m hoping Ghost will give me something in between. Ghost can also be used in headless configurations so if I ever decide to explore that route, it isn’t closed to me.

Ghost and Medium’s writing experience is very similar in terms of UI and when it comes to writing both are minimal and clutter free. Using Ghost though also means I can easily tweak and add scripts in the header and footer of individual posts & pages which I’m hoping will be useful as I continue to play with data visualisation and story telling techniques as I’ll want a few more embed and styling options than Medium will allow.

Running up a Bitnami Ghost Amazon Marketplace Image in EC2 was pretty drama free…but I did run into a few issues in setting up things the way I wanted. I’ve listed them below and my workarounds.

**Accessing SSH and SFTP - ** To properly setup the bitnami image and have access to restart scripts etc you need SSH access. This wouldn’t normally be an issue but today I was avoiding my work Macbook and trying to get things done on the Chromebook. In the end I found a great little app in the play store called Termius. It acts as both SSH terminal and SFTP client and was super easy to use. Equally it didn’t struggle with the AWS .pem key files (where others did!)
**Configuring Email - ** As much as I found the documentation from both Ghost and Bitnami to be excellent I had real issues getting my instance configured for SMTP. After losing much time trying to get it working with the email provider I use for this domain I went with a workaround and set up mail using Sendgrid. It’s not likely to need to send much mail in my configuration so remains free but I’m happy to have something sorted so I can easily reset my password in a bind ;)
**Theme tweaking and Grunt - ** If you can’t already tell from the above I am no developer. Although one of the free themes for Ghost was close to what I wanted there were a few tweaks I wanted to make. On loading a copy of the theme files into Cloud9 (my fave way to tinker across machines) I was presented with a bunch of handlebar templates and some SCSS files. As much as I was relatively confident with tweaking the contents I wasn’t sure how I would compile my efforts back into a usable theme. Luckily there were some pointers in the theme’s readme file (Good developers leave clues!) and I figured out I also needed to wrap my head around Grunt (a JS task runner). Some googling later, a quick npm install and I was 'grunt sass’ing and 'grunt zip’ing my way to a new version of my theme!
Cloudflare Gotcha! - The last issue I wrestled with today was a total schoolboy error. Ghost gives you a nice easy way to upload an .png file to use as the sites favicon. After trying this with a dummy icon and replacing it I could not get any browser to pick up the new version. I nuked my chrome cache several times and no joy. It took me about 45 mins of swearing to remember that my DNS is now configured on Cloudflare so I get the pleasure of their Content Delivery Network. A quick tap on the ‘Purge Cache’ button in the Cloudflare dashboard and all was fixed. Doh!

The hurdles above overcome and the rest of tinkering then included just a bit of copy and pasting to migrate content, more theme tweaks, setting up Disqus for comments and reactions, google analytics and a little testing across devices. I was mostly done by lunchtime so I managed to drive to the beach with Chloe and Monty and stretch my legs. Winning!

On my return I realised I was once again in danger of spending more time tinkering than writing so I thought I’d blog this summary of my productive day to bring back the balance! I’m hoping by writing some of my mistakes down, I’m less likely to repeat them in future. Expect my weeknotes this week to land here on words.lostinthe.uk

Robot Image Credit: Craig Sybert

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Week1 - Be more like Robbie

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: weeknote, work, reflection, growth, balance, learning

I’ve tried to write weeknotes on multiple occasions and failed. They always end up in the bin. I find writing hard and I find committing my own opinions and thoughts down is often followed by much self-doubt and anxiety that people will judge me as stupid, incompetent or arrogant. I always enjoy dipping into the weeknotes of others though and get lots from them (far too many people to list). I’ve always believed there is value in reflecting, sharing and being open. Reflection is not something I struggle with and it’s odd that in conversation I am prone to often over-sharing and extreme transparency (sorry colleagues!) but in written form I often can’t find my voice.

I’m more actively and purposefully trying to improve and grow at the moment so this is one area where I’m going to have to pull on my big boy pants, get over myself and take a leap of faith. I’m going to take inspiration from folks like Robbie Bates, rather than just use the great work of others as another opportunity to make silly comparisons that hold me back. I’m going to be more like Robbie (just less handsome…and more grumpy)! I’ll need to play with some different formats / styles and find a routine that works…but I will publish this.

Top 3 highlights

Time at home… This is super precious in my week as I spend much of it in London away from family and friends and recently the time I’ve had at home has also been impacted by trying to fit in study. I prioritised time with them last weekend and balanced this out by taking some leave to work on the latest assignment. We used the time wisely, got out and did a few fun things. I needed that more than I had realised.

Communities of Practice… Kiran ran a great session this week exploring how we can improve the synthesis of our research activities. I learnt some things and was good to hear lots of examples of great practice but also start unpicking the things that can sometimes prevent that being more consistently applied.

Kiran and I also got together to discuss outputs from a session I had run the week before. We want to more consciously and effectively join up our efforts across team disciplines with a view to improve our planning of user research, data analysis and exploring tech landscapes during discovery phases.

As FutureGov grows to increase our impact and our teams and CoPs scale it’s vital that we join the dots between them and become greater than the sum of our parts. It’s been nice this week to have some extra bandwidth to start doing that. I’m not sure Kiran was so lucky, but I was very appreciative of her time.

Learning… So I mentioned studying. I’ve been completing a course called ‘Better data, better decisions’ delivered by the super smart folks at the Open Data Institute. It’s great! A good balance of fairly open remote learning but the right amount of structure, practical assignments and deadlines to keep things moving and on track. It’s taken a fair amount of my time. On reflection I’ve probably put more time in than is expected but it’s a great opportunity to learn skills I’m interested in and I’ve long known were lacking in my toolbox. I’ve been keen to put in the extra effort to make the most of the content, concepts, tools and approaches that I’ve been introduced to.

This weeks assignment had me visualising data to tell a story around some Fire Service data we’d analysed in the previous week. Both my analysis, story and data viz skills will obviously need more practice but you can check out my efforts here if you’re interested. I’ve definitely learnt heaps in the last 4 weeks and looking forward to the last few. The assignment also gave me a nice excuse to put together ‘a thing’ and was the first time I’d fired up Cloud9 and made any GitHub commits in months. I found Tableau Public a little frustrating to get to grips with but following a few colourful words I wrestled it to a point where it was doing much of what I wanted. I’m adding exploration of some other tools into my backlog.

Things I’m learning

Health… Taking baby steps to get back to better health is paying off. It’ll take me longer but is more likely achievable given my split location living. This week I’ve not smoked and I’ve eaten sensible meals at sensible times. More breakfast meetings FTW!! (Thanks Adam and Emily)

Leadership… My passion and experience have more value than I may have appreciated and people often look to me for not only advice but direction. I need to accept this is increasingly part of my role and stop being surprised by it. Giving good advice and exploring options with people I find easy, direction is something I often poorly communicate or fumble… especially in writing. It’s something to work on. Equally mulling over the differences between good management and good leadership.

Strategy… Is not my enemy. Past negative experiences of poorly communicated and executed strategy have made it a dirty word in my head. I need to flip my mental model. Now more than ever I have the privilege to use my experience of delivery and what I’ve learnt from the mistakes I’ve witnessed to help shape strategy. It’s often necessary to align people, money and skills to deliver change in big, complex environments.

A few of my favourite things

Link: Article 50 Petition (admirably hanging in there) and subsequently this Track: All the single ladies — I blame Lil! 💍 Instagram: When stickers go rogue!

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

Homesick

Sun, 25 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Rest

Tagged: life, homesick, reflection, travel, adjustment, work

I’m often surprised that after nearly 2 years of splitting my life between Dorset (home) and London (work) that I still suffer from homesickness. I assumed that after a period of adjustment this feeling would just go away.

It’s seldom acute but generally manifests in a weird mixture of what I would describe as feeling anxious, a little down and just generally feeling unsettled and displaced. As someone who spends most of my waking hours thinking about change and supporting people adapt to or implement change I find it both intriguing and frustrating that after this much time I can’t quite get my brain to fully adapt to my split location living arrangements. It’s also weird how I can quite literally experience the feeling gradually subside as I pass from stop to stop on the train ride home.

I’m not complaining about being away from home. I enjoy my job and I feel privileged to work for a company that gives me rewarding work, challenge, personal growth, a fair salary and importantly the flexibility to live and work in this way…and let’s not forget I have chosen to do this! The benefits definitely outweigh the moments where I’m more conscious of these feelings. Most weeks my coping strategies of throwing myself into my work or surrounding myself with awesome people distract me sufficiently that it’s a minor inconvenience. Just one I thought wouldn’t last this long.

It makes me wonder if the heartfelt connections to place, people and things that make up my concept of ‘home’ are now so hard-wired into my brain that being away from them will always have this effect on me. I still live in hope that one day it’ll all just click into place and I’ll be able to utilise the energy I feel is wasted processing these feelings on more productive and valuable endeavours. Maybe it’s just part of my programming that can’t be fixed? Is it a genetic trait similar to the one that means I don’t enjoy watching football? I’m sure science or therapy could provide me with answers but instead of exploring either of those options I thought I’d just share these random thoughts here on the much neglected blog. I needed the writing practice, a distraction and I’m not sure I could afford a therapist brave enough to take me on!

x o x

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

What Makes a Great Retrospective

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: agile, delivery, teams, change, retrospective, process

As a delivery manager running agile projects, my favourite tool in the agile arsenal is the retrospective. Having come from a background where waterfall projects reigned supreme I really appreciate how valuable having regular structured conversations with teams around improving delivery and team dynamics can be. Especially in comparison to the seldom completed and often ignored ‘lessons learned’ logs of old.

There are already plenty of resources out there which give a variety of retro formats you can try. These can help to mix up the structure of these sessions. Rather than focus on structure I’ve been collating a bit of a mental checklist of the top 5 things to consider before facilitating a retro to try and get the most out of the time.

1. Make the time

This one may appear obvious but with busy teams, sometimes working on multiple projects in multiple locations finding time can often be a drag. At FutureGov we try and make sure there is one day a week where we are mostly all in the office. Like most things in agile it makes sense to plan ahead and get time booked into diaires early but be ready to flex and adapt as needed. Although not ideal, we can often have team members joining a retro remotely, usually via a Slack call. It’s important for everybody involved to commit to the process. The more people get out of the time spent in sessions the easier you will find it to get that commitment.

2. Celebrate success

It’s often way too easy to focus on all the things which might have gone wrong or could be improved upon. Of course this is important but make sure you give adequate time to focus on what went well and what you’ve accomplished. It’s more than just focus, be positive and celebrate this! If like us you’re lucky enough to be engaged in solving really challenging problems then it should be super exciting when we make progress along the way. Break out the high fives, take a breath, smile, pass around the cookies. Whatever works to give that pat on the back and motivate the team.

3. Build better teams

Another important reminder that a retro shouldn’t just have to be about process and delivery. Consider individual needs and skills. What have we or can we learn from each other? What does the team dynamic feel like? What didn’t feel right or not work well? At FutureGov we don’t often work with the same team twice over the course of several projects and because of this we often use these user manuals and run exercises at the beginning of projects to make sure we all understand people’s skills, experiences, how to spot signs of stress, motivations etc. The retro can then become a good opportunity to check in on these and make sure we’re using the best of what people have to offer and we’re looking after each other. It’s also a chance to provide plenty of value to individuals and their personal development needs so it’s good to provide some space for self-reflection. I strongly believe happy team members equate to productive teams!

4. Encourage honesty

This one again is also obvious but vitally important. Retro’s should feel like a safe space to encourage people to be honest with themselves and the team. A retrospective is about learning and moving forward not getting bogged down in blame. If working with new teams or client teams unfamiliar with retrospectives I find sharing the ‘prime directive’ below or a variation of it really useful to set this tone from the outset. As a delivery manager you may already have picked up on some ‘elephant in the room’ issues before the session which people might avoid. If so, be prepared with some sensible questions which might help surface these in a constructive manner so as a team you can get these out in the open and address them.

5. Practical Outcomes

Some retrospectives can feel like an amazing group therapy experience. That in itself is pretty cool and is potentially a good outcome but it shouldn’t be the only outcome. Make sure you allow time at the end of the discussion to summarise and also talk about next steps. How are we recording any actions to take forward? What is important to share with other teams and how? How will we know if we’ve achieved the improvements suggested? Allow enough time for this and maybe even have some sprint planning techniques up your sleeve to break down larger tasks so things feel achievable.

Overall a retrospective, is a chance to reflect on what you, the team and the project are doing. Taking that time out is a really important way to continue to improve. The list above is not completely exhaustive and don’t feel the need to squeeze all of these ideas and thoughts into a single session. I’d love to hear what else would you add to my top 5. Answers on a post-it!?

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

LocalGovCamp 2017

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Posted in: Work

Tagged: work, localgovcamp, event, conference, gov

Recently I had the pleasure of attending my first LocalGovCamp and Fringe! FutureGov was one of the event sponsors, so a few of us went along to lend a hand and also participate at the unconference on Saturday.

Having worked in local government before joining FutureGov, I’d heard of the event but never attended. So, as you can imagine, I was excited to finally have the chance to witness first hand what all the fuss was about. It was worth the wait.

Friday Fringe

I’m unsure of the exact numbers, but there must have been around 100 people at the event. So before too long, I’d spotted plenty of familiar faces — including a few of our local government clients.

The event kicked off with a talk by lead sponsor, Arcus Global, and attendees then headed into the variety of sessions. I had hoped to attend some of these myself, but with some project loose ends to complete first, I stayed in the main hall for a little while to clear the decks.

Further thoughts to attend sessions were then scuppered by the success of our own event marketing plan. It was short and simple — “Let’s not have an event table but just go around and chat to people”.

This plan, in combination with my chosen attire of black FG tee with ‘Militant Optimist’ stamped across the back, seemed to deliver. I was easily identifiable and sought out by a couple of people wanting to talk to us about how we might be able to help. Others wanted more information about the Digital Maturity session we were running later in the day. I love talking about our work, so although I missed a few sessions, I was still a very happy camper.

After the late morning break, Matt and I were grabbed for an impromptu video interview. A new experience for me, but without the time to panic beforehand, it seemed to go ok. I don’t think it made the Channel4 news.

Digital Maturity

Our sessions on digital maturity and our Digital Maturity Assessment were received well. In the first half, we clarified what we actually meant by “digital maturity” and this seemed to resonate with most participants. Many agreed that true digital transformation means going further than just improving front-end transactional experiences.

At FutureGov, we encourage organisations to consider a complete reboot and design services from the ground up that are fit for 21st-century citizens. This often means looking beyond transactions and at business models, governance and how policies are created.

In the second half of the session, we were joined by Adam who tested our digital maturity assessment model with participants. After delving deeply into the whys and wherefores, the group formulated three reasons for assessing an organisation in this way:

Start meaningful conversations about where organisations might be in terms of maturity and challenge ingrained assumptions.
Provide an opportunity for stakeholders to form a shared understanding and a common language around the topic.
Inform strategy and next steps.

Discussions continued late into the evening — accompanied by a beer or two. And buoyed by the success of the day, a few of us ended up salsa dancing until the small hours. I can confirm that LocalGovCamp people are good souls! (And reasonable dancers).

Saturday Unconference

Saturday is ultimately the main event of LocalGovCamp — the unconference. Despite feeling a little sluggish first thing (can’t think why), we arrived back at the venue just in time to hear people pitch their sessions that morning. Choosing which to attend was tricky, as they all sounded interesting, but the law of two feet helped us out. I went along to the following:

Change the language, change the rules.
Portals and my accounts.
Chatbots, AI and the final frontier.
Let’s talk about AI.

Here’s a quick summary of each.

Change the language, change the rules (pitched by Tom Hoyland)

A really interesting session about the use of language as a tool when working with users and teams (particularly helpful for me as a Delivery Manager). Tom did the topic more than justice and covered some of the science behind it.

Portals and my accounts (pitched by Linda O’Halloran)

Interestingly, most people in the room agreed that a citizen portal/my account is not required. Not to say that we shouldn’t find ways to improve experiences by intelligently persisting customer data during interactions, but a portal should not be a thing in its own right. It’s a topic we feel strongly about and have previously posted on the topic.

A few raised the point that LocalGov needs more examples of what “good” actually looks like in this area, which led to conversations around supplier standards and guidelines.

Linda raised the idea that a “digital logbook” component could be provided by GDS alongside the identity assurance provided by Verify. Personally, I’m a little sceptical but I’m not sure I completely understood the concept being suggested so I’d be happy to be proved wrong. The first step should be identifying and understanding user needs rather than risk taking a technology first approach.

Chatbots, AI and the final frontier

This session discussed the notion that chatbots could be used to improve the delivery of council services. For me, I came out slightly more resolute in my own thinking that the boat for council-built bots may have already sailed. I’m not sure this was the purpose of the discussion, but that’s where my head ended up.

Don’t get me wrong, conversational UIs are great, but I wonder if it’s a better use of time to open up council data and work with the bots already out there rather than create new ones? With Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Facebook and Skype Bots on the rise, is it really a sensible time to be building or buying proprietary solutions? Again, do tell me if I’m wrong…

I didn’t catch the pitcher’s name for this one — sorry! If you’re reading this, do let me know.

Let’s talk about AI (pitched by Esko Reinikainen)

This was a general discussion about the future of AI and for me personally the most enjoyable session at the unconference. It raised more questions than it answered:

What should public services be doing now to get ahead of this change rather than play catch-up later?
What skills and roles will be required for this new dawn?
How will it affect the workforce, services and democracy?

At times, it felt like we were discussing science fiction. But Esko had plenty of examples to demonstrate that our musings were a plausible reality in the near future.

My takeaway, for the time being, is that all organisations should work towards opening up and understanding datasets if they want to get value from emerging technologies. But equally, this should be done transparently and with a concentrated effort to understand and manage data ethics and consent.

Sat on the train home, my throat was sore from all the talking and my brain tired from all the thinking. Two strong signs of a good event. LocalGovCamp is amazingly well organised and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone working in or around local government. Lots of great content combined with swarms of interesting people wanting to collaborate.

Post last updated: 22 April 2026 at 23:15

HelloStu - Posts

Behaviourism: Dogs, Carrots and Sticks

The big hitters in this space…

Some Initial Thoughts

Shooting Slight Return

Clean and rebuild

Motivation for change

Summary of the changes completed

Things I’m considering next

Creating alignment within Communities of Practice

The “What” and the “So What?”

So, what am I thinking?

Further Reading

Changing Plans

Birthday stroll - 46 before 46

Weeknote - Size matters

Product for the people

Life

Weeknote - Swipe right

More excuses

Work

Cornwall

Dating - peaking into the abyss

Other things in my head

Weeknote - Update and Grow

Excuses

Update

Grow

Weeknote - Bullet Train

The long weekend in bullets

The short working week in bullets

MOOAR bullets

Weeknote - Some Assembly Required

Work

Home

Other things

Weeknote - Main Character Energy

The Weekend

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday (today)

<sup>[1]</sup> Pending Life Changes

Noteworthy posts

Weeknote - Tired Bunny

The bad and the ugly

The good

Noteworthy posts

Weeknote - The Uber

Last weekend

The work

Uber

Life

Noteworthy links

Weeknote - Chimp

Work

Life

Noteworthy links

TGF Visitors Map

Weeknote - Buffet

Some of the work

Being social

Making things

Other stuff

Noteworthy links

Weeknote - London calling

Last weekend

The work week (sorry it’s long!)

Other things

Noteworthy Links

Blogging about not blogging

Building Things

Zen Friday

Rambling man

16 - Fever dream

15 - Geometry

What I’m thinking about

Other things

14 - Head above water