This one's late. Q2 ended in June and it's now August, but the events were too good not to write up properly, so here they are before they slip further into memory. Easter in Turkey, co-organising the biggest conference our department has ever run, a gruelling 20km walk along the Jurassic Coast, World Cup 2026 landing on Football Cal, and a Duolingo streak that got reset from scratch. Here's how Q2 2026 went.
Life stuff #
Easter weekend took us to Dalaman for an all-inclusive break. Squeaky clean, good food, everything you'd want on paper. But the culture towards women didn't sit right with either of us, and it took some of the shine off what should have been a straightforward relaxing week.
Back home, I joined a volunteering day clearing up the Milton Keynes canal routes - genuinely good fun, not least the bit where we got to catapult wild seed to help the wildlife along. Small thing, satisfying afternoon.
Mrs J and I had a last-minute dash to London for Avenue Q at the Shaftesbury Theatre, tacked onto one of her work trips. And closer to home, Russell Kane's Chuckl show at Benn Hall - one of our favourite British comedians, and I sat brave in the front row. Dodged the heckling entirely though, thanks to a much more suitable candidate sat next to me.
Another late decision, another good one: the Totally 90s festival in Oxford, a full day of Britpop tribute acts with the kids in tow.
And a Christmas present redeemed close to my birthday - Becky Hill at Cannock Chase, in the woods. Beautiful setting, entertaining show.
Prod Dev & Data Con #
The standout work moment of the quarter. I co-organised the biggest event our department has ever put on - close to 400 people, three streams running 20+ talks, plus keynotes and awards. A genuinely huge amount of coordination to pull off, and it landed well: wonderful feedback from attendees and a real sense of achievement once it was done. The kind of thing that's exhausting in the run-up and worth every bit of it afterwards.
Conferences & people #
Two days at LDX3, nerding out with fellow tech leaders. Good crowd this year - familiar faces from Rightmove and old friends from ASOS, plus a decent number of new connections from useful sessions. Better than last year, though maybe that's partly about resetting expectations going in rather than the event itself changing much.
I also had a follow-up call with Suzan Bond after her workshop on AI agreements in teams, specifically how that works alongside legacy tech and long-running teams. Worth chewing over given where PETALS and the wider engineering org are both headed.
PETALS #
The login experience got a proper redesign this quarter, focused on single sign-on and magic links - a more modern and safer approach to authentication than what was there before.
The more unexpected development: Truefans hosting for both the PETALS podcast and Si Cast, off the back of an exclusive invite from CEO Sam Sethi to explore what's new in podcasting 2.0. Good timing given how much I've been thinking about podcast tooling this year already.
Side projects #
Football Cal's World Cup 2026 edition launched this quarter - 20 years on from the original World Cup Kickoff site I built back in 2006, and comfortably the biggest edition yet: 48 teams, 104 games, three host countries. I wrote up the full story separately in the portfolio post - the short version is an 11ty migration, a messier-than-usual data problem thanks to FIFA publishing the schedule as a PDF, and Claude doing far more of the heavy lifting on data wrangling than ChatGPT and Cursor managed on the last edition. Plenty of updates followed as qualifiers were confirmed and traffic started rolling in.
Managing Engineers wrapped its season this quarter with v2.9 and v2.10 released.
House Finesse had two mixes from One Phat DJ this quarter - HF321 and HF330 - with the second timed deliberately to land on the anniversary.
The HF VIP Club kept building, with an Angie Brown re-release as we try to grow that community further.
This blog #
Behind the scenes, the site had a decent quarter of its own: a "Garden Mint" spring theme, a burger menu for the header nav, a proper blog index page and RSS feed, and a chunk of work on Netlify build times before eventually moving hosting over to Cloudflare Pages. Micro posts also got automated - YouTube uploads now sync straight into the site rather than needing manual write-ups.
WWDC 2026 got its own first impressions post back in June - Siri rebuilt on Gemini, the EU/China rollout complications that emerged a couple of days later, and the usual mix of "finally" and "we'll see about that." Worth a read if you missed it rather than repeating it here.
Fitness #
Training properly ramped up this quarter: a 30km walk to Coventry to build up the legs, followed by the main event - a 20km walk along the Jurassic Coast on 23 May, raising money for the British Heart Foundation with the Hazeley Hikers group. Fantastic scenery, genuinely gruelling inclines, and a heatwave that made it harder than expected. Huge sense of satisfaction crossing the line on that one.
I don't have Q1-vs-Q2 activity totals to hand for this post - happy to add the comparison table like previous quarters if you want to send over the numbers.
Duolingo - Q2 2026 #
| Metric | April | May | June |
|---|
| Avg daily XP | 427 | 259 | 299 |
| Avg accuracy | 92% | 89% | 92% |
The bigger story here is a reset: the long-running French/multi-language streak that got to 973 days by the end of Q1 broke, and a new Greek-only streak started on 10 April - ahead of the annual trip to Greece in August. April's numbers reflect the settling-in period; by June the accuracy was back up to Q1 levels even as daily XP stayed more modest.