WeekNotes 2026-43 • Si Jobling

The Countdown to Head Of reached 56 days to go after a chaotic week in tech. HF346 went out on Friday, the PETALS Slack integration is in testing, and I finally watched Ready Player One.

Countdown to Head Of: 56 days to go #

The Countdown to Head Of series carried on this week and reached 56 days to go, after a chaotic week in tech that I think we all felt one way or another. It was a run of security vulnerabilities: PHP2Shell, then a GCP outage at the London data centre, then the Node.js vulnerabilities, and finally the SSL certificates on Friday. Friday's recording went out late and a bit flustered, so it ended up being real reflection on handling the chaos while still delivering something.

The episodes so far this week:

And here's the latest, 56 days to go:

It's quite rewarding to put something out almost every day. I think I missed one this week, but I've enjoyed quickly recording something off the cuff before downing tools at the end of the day. Any vanity metrics are just a nice to have, and I'm looking forward to analysing all the content at the end too.

Watch the Countdown

Fitness #

Walking

7.8 km

-2.5 km on last week

Running

4.9 km

+0.7 km on last week

Swimming

3.5 km

-1.2 km on last week

Total time

4h 32m

-1h 15m on last week

Total distance

16.2 km

-3.0 km on last week

Week-on-week compares 19 to 25 October with 12 to 18 October. This week was three swims, three walks, a run on Sunday and a 30 minute elliptical session on Tuesday. Last week's figures match what's in WeekNotes 2026-42. Elliptical adds time but no distance. Saturday was a quiet day.

HF346 with Andi King #

HF346 with Andi King went out on Friday: disco-soaked vocals and big basslines this #FinesseFriday, from Dave 'Love' Lee to Jonas Blue. It runs to 1h 12m with 14 tracks.

HF346 with Andi King cover art

On the HF site side, I removed the leftover Netlify references.

Listen to HF346 Join the VIP Club

PETALS #

Blog. Sertan's new article, Why PETALS asks how people feel as AI changes our work, went live on Friday. It looks at what recent research from METR and DORA says about AI and software development, from the gap between how fast work feels and the value it delivers to the burnout and friction that delivery metrics miss, and ties each finding to one of the five petals: Productivity, Enjoyment, Serenity, Learning and Teamwork. It lands on why it's still worth asking how work feels as the tools change, and leaving room at the next retro to talk about the scores.

Two cats on a whitewashed wall at sunset, the featured image for the article on how AI changes our work

Slack integration. The app didn't get much attention this week, but Brian has been working on the Slack integration, and I've been testing it and feeding back to him. This is the happy path journey: connect a Slack workspace to your PETALS organisation, choose the channel each team's notifications post to, and use the nudge button on a snapshot to prompt the team in that channel. It's behind a feature switch, so we can push it to production and work with real world data. Here it is in its current, basic form.

The Integrations tab of My Organisation in PETALS, with a Connect Slack button beside the line Send PETALS notifications to your Slack workspace — Connect Slack from the Integrations tab

The same Integrations tab after connecting, with a banner saying the Slack workspace PETALS is connected, a Connected label and a Disconnect Slack button — Connected, with the option to disconnect

The Slack Notifications section of a team page on a phone, with a channel drop-down set to Don't post to Slack and a Save button

The channel drop-down open on a phone, listing Don't post to Slack, public channels general and posthog-inbox, and private channels dev-team and test-team, with test-team selected

The participation section of a snapshot on a phone, showing 0 of 2 responses, a link to copy to nudge the team and a Nudge in test-team in Slack button above Close early, Extend plus 1 day and Delete

Side projects #

I've also started integrating last week's circle cards, the OKR rings, into the existing data model. On this site, the MapTap page got a scoreboard-style head-to-head with Gary, and the Reading page added the audiobooks I've listened to on Spotify.

Habits #

MapTap record

3-3-1

was 3-3-0 last week

MapTap avg

815

+6 on last week

Sudoku avg

3:47

was 3:01 last week

MapTap: a draw of a week, 3 wins, 3 losses and one tie against Gary. My average edged up to 815 from 809 (Gary's was 786 against 783). The best was 889 on Friday, and Sunday finished level at 750 each.

Sudoku: slower than last week, averaging 3:47 across six games (3:01 across seven the week before). Fastest was 3:09 on Sunday and the slowest was 4:58 on Friday. I missed Monday. Note the Yudoku redesign no longer shows mistakes, so I'm only tracking time.

Entertainment #

Watching: the main viewing this week was Ready Player One on Saturday night. I really enjoyed all the nerdy pop culture and techy references, and it's scary to think Wade is born next year! I gave it 4 stars on Letterboxd.

Listening: I've been experimenting with Claude dashboards built directly on my Spotify data to see what I can come up with. It now updates nightly, so I can see some insights into my listening habits. These are the October figures so far, up to the 24th.

Spotify dashboard stats for October: 476 plays this month, 208 different artists, 72 plays on the busiest day, a current streak of 10 days in a row, a longest streak of 10 days and 3 days with no plays

Spotify dashboard bar chart of plays per day from 1 to 24 October 2026, split into plays by artists already heard this month and first plays of new artists, with a dashed linear trend line sloping gently down and red dots on the three days with no plays

Spotify dashboard showing top artists this month, led by Adele with 23 plays, then Olivia Dean with 20, The Shapeshifters with 19 and Olivia Rodrigo with 16, next to a donut chart of how the five most played artists split their plays

This week's Spotify log has 118 listens against 145 last week, with plays on all 7 days (6 of 7 last week). Both counts include some double-logged plays.

Monday afternoon was a proper Britpop block: Blur, Pulp, Oasis, The Verve, Supergrass and Primal Scream, running from about 1:30pm to 3:30pm.
Tuesday morning and Thursday morning were house: Revival House Project, Ben Westbeech, Serge Funk, Kelli Sae and Michael Gray.
Wednesday lunchtime was soulful and Sade-heavy, with Sade, Fleetwood Mac, The Doobie Brothers and Lenny Kravitz.
Friday evening was The Shapeshifters on repeat, with Everything's Changing (extended mix) three times.
Saturday had Olivia Rodrigo at lunchtime, then a long house run in the afternoon with Mousse T., Hutch and Soul Avengerz.
Sunday evening was two Dave 'Love' Lee tracks, Soulsearcher, King Unique's Knee Deep classic club mix and The Shapeshifters' Lola's Theme.

More soon.