WeekNotes 2026-41

The 50km walk was the main event this week, with HF344, a new calendar on the HF site and PETALS release notes around it.

50km Ultra Challenge #

The week was all about the Ultra Challenge Kent, 50km for Dementia UK on Saturday. Fitness before it was mostly warming up, with calmer sessions focused on endurance and calves.

The walk itself was exhilarating. There's the camaraderie we've come to expect from the Ultra events now, and the weather was perfect, dry and mild. The first 12km went really fast, then we refreshed at the rest stop and blasted through to halfway for lunch. After recharging on the "meal deal" and a change of socks, we carried on through the harder stretch to the final rest stop, where I topped up on caffeine and sweets and put my new head torch on for the final 11km.

That last section was hard, especially once it went dark and we hit a steep incline for the final 2km. We got together to run over the finishing line though. I'm really happy with our moving time of 9h43. The total including stops was 11h 30m, and that's what the leaderboard goes by, so when we saw it we realised we were in the last 100 of 700. Time to work on our pace.

Week-on-week compares 5 to 11 October with 28 September to 4 October. Strava has the walk as 50.8km, and the Tuesday elliptical session adds time but no distance. Total time uses the 9h43 moving time for the walk rather than the 11h 30m with stops.

A HUGE thank you to everyone who donated. We smashed the original £400 goal and raised £650 in the end, which Rightmove will generously match fund, so we've raised £1,300 in total for Dementia UK. Thank you so much.

Sponsor me for Dementia UK

HF344 with Taylan #

HF344 with Taylan went out on Friday, and it's another banger of garage and house. It runs about 30 minutes longer than usual because he was getting into it.

On the HF site this week:

• The footer newsletter form is replaced with a Patreon VIP Club banner, in keeping with shifting people across from the mailing list.

  

  

• The calendar page now shows a release schedule grid (Thursday to Sunday for each release weekend), built at deploy time from the House Finesse Google Calendar feed. If the feed can't load, the page falls back to the old embed rather than breaking the build.

Listen to HF344 Join the VIP Club

PETALS #

The latest app updates went to production this week, alongside the content below.

Release notes. I wrote up the release as Anyone can start a snapshot, plus copyable results and a security tidy-up, which went out on Thursday. It covers team members starting snapshots, the new Copy results button, the sign-in security tidy-up, and a catch-up on Huel.

Marketing site. The What page picked up jump links to each factor, with animated scrolling and clean /what/<factor>/ URLs, and the URL updates as you scroll through the sections. The September newsletter roundup is drafted too, with a couple of image fixes so it works in Brevo.

App. On the admin side, the Organization page now shows team, snapshot and last snapshot counts, and a read-only list of teams and employees. I also documented the staging and production deployment process in the README and corrected the production Heroku app name in the billing runbooks. Brian spent Thursday on dependency updates, including some risky cryptography libraries and a PyJWT fix, plus a fix so snapshots send properly for non-members. The staging pytest 9 conflict that followed was sorted on Saturday.

Customer story. I also recorded a pub conversation with Ollie from Huel about the journey they've been on with PETALS, along with his own observations about how it's become a staple habit in their culture.

Countdown to Head Of #

For the past two weeks I've been recording a daily YouTube series about leadership, using what I observed as an Engineering Manager before moving up to Head of department. Each episode has gone up daily as unlisted while I built it up, and the whole Countdown to Head Of playlist is now public, so here it is.

Watch Countdown to Head Of

I started noting down ideas of things I want to take forward into my new role, then realised it could be worth sharing for other tech leaders. I also miss making video content, so it's a chance to fulfil that habit too. Each episode is only 5 minutes long, so it's easy to record on the webcam, do a quick edit in Descript and export to YouTube. Once there's a good dose of content, I'll syndicate it on my Si Cast podcast as well.

Habits #

MapTap: a see-saw week, with 3 wins to Gary's 4, and he edged the average too, 767 to my 762. My best was 891 on Monday, and On Saturday I scored 707 with a 7 in round two, because I got it completely wrong. Gary's 877 that day was his best.

Sudoku: a much quicker week, averaging 3:41 across the five days I played, with a fastest of 3:00 on Wednesday. Monday's 5:35 and six mistakes was the only slow one, and Friday's single mistake was the tidiest.

Entertainment #

Watching: entertainment was minimal. We watched The Substance on BBC on Sunday evening. My review: "It started off quite interesting, almost like a Black Mirror episode and very stylish, but it went wildly absurd and lost my interest. Shame as I liked the idea and Demi showed promise."

Listening: I was mostly listening to music podcasts on my walk, including a few Glitterbox podcasts, and those don't show up in the Spotify track log. That's probably why it goes quiet from Thursday night until Sunday afternoon. The log has 60 track plays from 5 to 11 October against 175 the week before. A few highlights:

• Adele and The Weeknd tied for the most plays at 4 each. Adele had 19 the week before, and The Weeknd got his plays on Wednesday evening, with Dua Lipa, Harry Styles and Bruno Mars's Finesse remix alongside.
• Thursday lunchtime and afternoon was a proper house block: Tseba, LF System, Hardsoul, Wolffman, Rony Breaker, The Blessed Madonna and The Shapeshifters.
• Sunday afternoon had a Radio 1 Live Lounge theme, with Kasabian, Cage The Elephant, Lily Allen and Sam Sparro.
• Sunday night went acoustic and sing-along, with Ashe, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Lukas Graham and Plain White T's.

How this is made #

Two tweaks to the WeekNotes task this week. Films now come from my Letterboxd feed, which is the reference point for movies watched, and the steps the task follows are now written down in a weeknotes-draft skill in the repo, so they don't only live in the scheduled prompt. Spotify, Strava, the habit logs and the repos feed it as before. The Netflix export was empty this week, so TV is down to what I tell it.

More soon.