September 2021

In a month full of birthday celebrations, charitable donations, work normality attempts, podcast-specific community, season 7 of Make Life Work, excessive life tracking, my oldest domain, vinyl classics and a new podcast playlist.

Life

Lunch at Bacco Lounge and crazy golf in Rugby for sister-in-law’s birthday
Back to school for all the family with typical mix of germs causing concern
Virtual gin tasting with disco Princess, Sophie Ellis Bextor and Craft Gin Club
PCR tests for both kids following COVID symptoms, thankfully both negative
Outdoor charity cinema night at Winwick Hall watching Pirates of the Caribbean under blankets
Impromptu dinner visit from Greek holiday chums, Donna & Maizie
Raised £300 for Macmillan with our garden coffee morning plus good friend Hayley singing for our guests
Garden birthday celebrations with mum and gran
Kids started more after-school clubs with football and brownies for Princess and RAF Cadets and tae kwon do for The Boy

Work

One new starter and one resignation – the roundabout of line management
First Engineering Manager Community (EMC) meet-up in London to discuss shared initiatives for FY22
Second work “pub quiz” to break in the longer Autumn months
Re-Assembled sessions to bring staff together in London office aligned on FY22 strategy
Looked into different pathways for senior software and QA engineers
Failed to secure our only recruitment candidate of the month following contract offer
Successful probation for my first recruit since returning to ASOS
Analysis of late month’s Vibe Survey results identified fair evaluation and remote working as main concerns
Team gathering in the office for first time since July with TWO fire alarm evacuations
Commenced efforts with working group to create a tech podcast
Lightning Talks from Callum about URL injection framework in mobile apps and Georgie on British Sign Language
Tried half-hour Tech Develop Wraps for focused snappy feedback from the monthly day of learning

Sides

Created ComedyPods Slack community for syndicating and sharing comedy podcasts
Make Life Work S07 with Shari, Jamie & Lion and Wookie and Dan Moore
Moved MLW certificates to Cloudflare with some unexpected complications on DNS settings
More life tracking with Trello (work), TickTick (personal), Strava (exercise and weight), Goodreads (reading) and shares metrics
Renewed SuperRams.com for the 19th year despite zero effort to develop
Revived sporadic “verbal diary” recordings to and from the train station when visiting the office
Setup sijobling.com email on iCloud+
Setup Jobling coins on Bitclout

Entertainment

Mary Kills People S1 on All 4
Help (with the brilliant Jody Cromer) on All 4
Back To Life (with Daisy Taggart) on BBC
Degrees of Motion – Shine On on 12”
Braxton’s The Boss (Masters At Work Mix) on 12”
Indeep – Last Night A DJ Saved My Life on 7”
Young Disciples – Apparently Nothing on 7”

Podcasts

(NEW: automatically curated with some SQL on Apple Podcasts SQLite database – details here)