Last week in Followsound 2022.38


Even though the week began with a bank holiday for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, it seemed long and busy! D and I watched some funeral proceedings, namely the service at Westminster, which seemed like a more family event. I’m not a royalist or a monarchist; I appreciate that The Crown stops other people from having certain powers. We can see from the USA that it doesn’t always go to plan having elected heads of state. I do feel for people who don’t like the monarchy, as it did feel, I can only imagine, like living in a communist state for the past two weeks. I would welcome a trimmed-down “working” Royal Family and see the rest cast out to fend for themselves like the rest of us have to.

News from work: we have sold one of our brands. What this means for me is unclear, but I don’t think there will be much day-to-day impact. I assume there will be some infighting about staying with the group or leaving with the brand, something I purposely don’t get involved with.

We’ve had some significant outages at work this week too, so there are post-mortem sessions to be had in the coming weeks. I’ve been happy with keeping my “Weekly Engineering Review” log as part of my Evergreen notes, enabling me to review daily notes more efficiently. Basically, the Engineering review is a summary of my daily notes. Then some of these are graduated to become fully-fledged Evergreen notes as I have the time.

This weekend I also spent time with an old client, who was nice to see. I was there fixing an internal application I built years ago that hasn’t been upgraded. That meant I needed to do some fiddly upgrade work before the app would respond when running on the upgraded hardware. It was good to have a different challenge to my usual daily routine, where we commonly get the “latest and greatest” working, rather than having to massage something written over 8 years ago.

D, B and I spent the latter part of the weekend in Manchester and managed to have a fun and relaxing time, which was very much necessary. We also calendared until Christmas, so hopefully, we’ve covered most of the major events for the year.


In summary:

  • Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II (dominated the country’s focus);
  • The need for some retrospectives at work;
  • Lots of planning, taking us to the end of the year;
  • Family time.