This week was my first time back to Sofia since repatriating and after relearning the art of crossing roads, it was brilliant seeing how well my old team are doing, catching up with friends and making some new ones.

• On Saturday, in the heat I walked around the entire city through every park — including some I hadn’t visited while out there. South Park is lovely!
• Between catching-up & work, I also did a midterm exercise on Algorithms: The hardest part was revising pseudocode! 😅
• Unfortunately though not all was good, and politics came to a head resulting in a government shutdown. Meanwhile the US supreme court, in a heartbreaking regression to human rights, has put many in medical peril. RMT in the UK are also fighting for workers rights. There’s a strange energy in the air right now.

What brought me here was the chance to, face-to-face work with colleagues on the product coexistence challenge:

• We ran through a list of product & tech capabilities and identified common themes with each around Ownership & Focus, Real-Estate and Enablement. These themes a great starting point for a diagnosis.
• Nothing we learned was surprising, which meant we were already well aligned, but it still was useful to talk through everything. The realisation that many of our constraints aren’t technology reinforces my view that it’s all solvable.
• Next steps are, continuing in a working group to draft a proposal including some suggested next actions. Part of that will include engaging a wider audience to try and build consensus, so, all-in-all kind-of exciting really.

Between the gaps, this week I’ve been working more on my blog - and I broke my two-year-long blog-post silence:

• Following LeadingEng, I wrote up a summary and some of my takeaways. My main regret is not starting on this sooner while it was fresher in memory. This is the case for a lot of my writing, so I believe to meet my objective of writing more, I need to start on drafts far sooner.
• Fighting anti-malware related slowdowns, I’ve got a few further in-progress features on my site, although I’m now trying to decide if I implement them in Gatsby or in whatever I replace it with.
• I now have a plan for how I should assemble my site: Instead of static vs. dynamic, I’m going to try and do both. Content is mostly static and could continue to be Gatsby even as I replace most of the rest of the site.