WeekNotes 2026-39

Week 39 of 2026 brings a side project going live, two PETALS posts out the door, One Phat DJ back on the decks, season 3 of Managing Engineers underway, a habit tracker catch-up, some serious mileage ahead of a 50km walk, and a job I can finally talk about properly.

OKR Daily Card is live #

The side project I've been poking at for a few weeks now has a real URL: okr.sijobling.com, running on Railway.

It started as a single-user demo for tracking quarterly OKRs, a mission per objective, a few daily actions to tick off, key results they roll up to. Every tick asks "what did you actually do?" so the history is real evidence rather than a bare streak count. Over the last couple of weeks it's turned into something closer to a proper (if still very personal) app: magic-link sign-in instead of a password, a guided onboarding flow that turns your own answers into your own objectives and daily actions rather than my invented demo data, a weekly view with a "copy week summary" button for pasting into a check-in doc, and an MCP hook-up so Claude can check in on it directly. Ten stories in, all done. Nothing fancy, just useful.

Two PETALS posts out this week #

Both landed on the PETALS blog Thursday evening, back to back.

Is AI a friend, a foe, or just a really enthusiastic junior? starts from Atlassian's research that nearly half of knowledge workers say their AI knows about as much about their company as a brand new hire, and asks where that actually leaves AI in a people-first framework like PETALS. Short version: not a sixth petal, not a priority to optimise for its own sake, just an assistant that needs the same onboarding and context you'd give any new hire.

Conversational debt and the price two teams pay for silence takes Gustavo Razzetti's idea of conversational debt (every avoided crucial conversation compounds like an unpaid loan) and runs it through two hypothetical teams at different sizes to see exactly where psychological safety does and doesn't intervene.

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No dev-time session this week though, everyone was busy. Still caught up async on a few feature and content updates between us. Fine by me, some weeks go like that on a side project.

HF342 with One Phat DJ #

House Finesse 342 landed this #FinesseFriday, my first set back after a long summer away from the decks. Fresh cuts to open (Georges & Fleur De Mur, The Sunburst Band's "Reach For My Love") tipping into classics reworked, Kathy Brown, Soul Central's "Strings of Life", CeCe Peniston's "Finally". Soulful house front to back, glad to be back on it.

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Also quietly finishing off the Q4 schedule behind the scenes. Already filling up nicely, with some more back-to-back fun planned with Andi King and Disco77 around Christmas.

Managing Engineers, season 3 #

Neil and I got the mics out again this week to start on season 3 of Managing Engineers. The warm-up and the first proper episode are both recorded, and we're aiming to get at least one more in the can before we start releasing anything.

Fitting timing to restart it, we're both mid-transition into Head Of roles right now (mine at Warner Hotels, more on that below), so expect some of that to come up. Still grounding it the way we always have though, in the actual evidence we've built up from our careers to date rather than just opinions.

Habits catch-up #

Actual week-on-week numbers this time, not just "is it up to date."

MapTap: my own average score climbed nicely week on week, 768 up from 692. Trouble is Gary's climbed further and faster, so I only won 0 of the 7 head-to-heads this week (one draw, on Thursday's tied 781-781), a sharp reversal from winning 5 of 7 the week before.

Sudoku: solved every puzzle set this week. Fastest completion dropped to 3:10, four seconds quicker than last week's best. Mistakes were more of a mixed bag though, a clean 0-mistake solve on Wednesday against a messy 5-mistake one on Monday, a wider spread than last week's 0-4.

Duolingo: deliberately easing off for the rest of the quarter. The family Super price has gone up to £110/year and I'm questioning whether it's worth it, given I still struggled to actually speak Greek out loud this summer despite months of lessons. Complicated slightly by a France trip next month, so French practice needs picking back up regardless of what I decide on Greek. Also gives me time to sort out that garbled export from a few weeks back before any of it goes near the site.

Dropping Solitaire from these posts, it's not really happening at the moment and pretending otherwise isn't useful.

Building up to 50km #

Two weeks today I'm walking the Ultra Challenge Kent, 50km from 7:30am with a few checkpoints along the way, raising money for Dementia UK. Both my dad and my gran live with dementia, so this one's personal.

Pulled my Strava log to see where training actually stands, this week against last:

Basically doubled last week's total across the board. Year to date I'm at 911.4km, already past all of 2024's total with three months still to go.

The number that actually matters, though, is the longest single session, a 31.1km walk back in May, plus a couple more in the 20-25km range since. The most recent proper long one was 25km around the Peak District in July, and that was tiring, so I'm going in eyes open that Kent will be double that distance. Last time I attempted 50km in one go was London to Brighton back in 2018, and I'm eight years older than I was then. Feeling ready regardless. If you fancy chipping in for Dementia UK, the page is here.

New job: Head of Digital and Data at Warner Hotels #

I can finally say this properly rather than in hushed tones. I've joined Warner Hotels as Head of Digital and Data, a step up after eight years as an Engineering Manager at Rightmove since 2017.

It's a product I can genuinely get my teeth into, and one that's become a lot more relatable now that weekend breaks without the kids are actually a thing we do. Leaving Rightmove is bittersweet, it's been a huge part of my career, and telling my teams on Friday was one of the harder conversations I've had in a while. But I'm excited about what's next.

How this post gets made #

New bits of site plumbing worth naming, since they'll keep turning up: statCard, ctaButton and deviceFrame are now proper reusable components, not one-off HTML dropped into this post. Metric cards with an up/down/flat indicator, subscribe buttons, and phone-shaped screenshot frames (including the slow-pan scroll effect on the OKR ones above), all droppable straight into any future post's Markdown.

Also worth being upfront about: this post is co-authored with Claude. Mostly for the unglamorous bit, pulling numbers out of Strava, the habit JSON files, and a few GitHub repos, rather than me trawling through them by hand. Next step is a proper weekly routine, a draft assembled automatically every Sunday, which I then go through line by line myself to get the voice and the details right before it goes out.

Busy week all round. More soon.