This week I have learned:
- Some weeks are just hard. This was one of those weeks. Travel, emotional drain, the anticipation of eldest’s GCSE results. And I only had four days off actual work.
- Monday was a day touristing in London. I maintain it’s important to tourist your own town every so often so you remember what’s great about it.
- I got a note at the weekend from an author whose work I admire, to whom I sent a copy of our book. He raved about it. He’d warned me he was busy for a while when I sent it weeks ago. So it was all a bit of a surprise and very appreciated.
- Building the audiobook app this week, I got to a point where the LLM made a couple of errors. It can’t compile and test in the tool I’m using, so I was kind of posting code blind. Claude then suggested a tweak to the GitHub config to run code validation before committing changes. This actually blew me away. It’s now proactive. When I think back to coding experiments a couple of years ago, the progress is startling.
- Getting feedback from users is great. Sometimes, though, you get questions at a fundamental level that are equally intriguing, frustrating and ultimately helpful. It reminds me of when I did the work to implement Google Apps back in 2009 at Imagination, and my then boss asked me, “Why do email and calendar have to be in the same platform?”
The answer is, of course, “because that’s how it’s done”. But digging deeper, it was a fascinating question to test broadly held assumptions. - So many people have forgotten that if you are producing presentation materials to be used in an actual room in front of an actual audience, they need to pass the “t-shirt test” (ie could be read if they were printed on a t-shirt).
We have become so used to slides being read only by an individual sitting directly in front of a laptop. - He did fine in his GCSEs. He could have done better, but he did better than I did at O Level. The move to a 1-9 scoring system, though, makes reasonable marks (5s and 6s) look mediocre in comparison to when they were called Cs and Bs.
- Crikey Scotland lived up to its reputation when I arrived on Tuesday evening. 14 degrees and drizzle. Quite a contrast to 36 degrees on Thursday last week…
The week in media:
Saw
- Ted Lasso. A few episodes of The Studio which was fun. Project Hail Mary – also fun. Oh, and the first Watford game of the season. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed a Watford match…
Read
- Continuing Christopher Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Evening. Good fun.
Listened
- Quite a bit of my own audiobook as the testing continues.
Next week: Some questions to answer.
The week in photos:
mmitII 