January blues out in full force this week! I'm not sure where the time in Jan has gone, but after last week, I'm glad it's over; slightly slower and less energy than the start of the year. Some nice time spent out of work, and made some good, clear decisions at the start of the work week, energy very quickly diminished however.
Work
Time in meetings: 15.6hrs
- Architecture and planning for new product: Cryptic, but continued exploring the requirments for an exciting brief that we will shortly be working on, including some initial sketching of infrastructure and design solutions.
- Reviewing node reductions: Following the pilot of reducing our our web server nodes from three to two, I reviewed the impact on performance, latency etc client side, and collectively made a decision on the approach moving forwards. Learning lots about load balancing etc.
- Sprint priority setting: Somehow, we're already a month into 2026, and near-the-end of our second sprint, therefore made sure we're in line with what we planned to deliver within the first month, along with planning for our third sprint commencing next week.
- Form infrastructure: Have now agreed clear direction and next steps for a project in which we're looking to move to a new solution for our quite significant form infrastructure (hugeee amounts of technical debt).
- HR bits and bobs: More considerable time spent on bureaucratic HR admin, along with some further team business cases for future project resourcing.
- Broadening our experimentation capabilities: Attempting to create more of a circular feedback loop in discover- design-deliver-test, by bringing our CRO lead closer to the rest of the team.
- Actioned some previous retrospective feedback: As an action-driven leader, took forward some of the feedback on ways of working from a previous retro to one of our clients.
- Design and content feedback: Some really exciting new content coming from the team over the next few months, took some time to review and provide feedback on ways we can elevate the experiences further. Importantly, it comes from a position of 'only consider this', rather than 'you must do this'.
Read đ
Work
Focus on AI agent orchestration this week, with some additional bits and bobs:
- https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks-guide
- https://uxdesign.cc/designing-with-claude-code-and-codex-cli-building-ai-driven-workflows-powered-by-code-connect-ui-f10c136ec11f?gi=fb8cbb148114
- https://happy.engineering
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/everyone-tech-lead-now-steven-newstead-ggwoe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via
- https://devclass.com/2026/01/05/dramatic-drop-in-stack-overflow-questions-as-devs-look-elsewhere-for-help/
Fun
Began reading Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Listen đ§
Focus
- Rethink... the promise of AI
- Tailwind Layoffs, Cloudflare Buys Astro - PodRocket
- The standard EMQs + Rest is Politics + Foreign Desk for my weekly politics
Music
Missing Spotify API Credentials in .env
Missing Spotify API Credentials in .env
Missing Spotify API Credentials in .env
Play đšī¸
Watch
- 28 Years Later - Bone Temple
- Star Wars - The Force Awakens
- Star Wars Rogue One ī¸ī¸ī¸
Other
- Cinema to watch Bone Temple on Tuesday
- Work leaving drinks on Wednesday (mid-week not the one!)
- Long run sightseeing in London on Sunday
- Some drinks in Dulwich on Thursday