Ah yes, December.

• Thankfully nobody has played Last Christmas by Wham yet. Yet.
• This whole Log4j thing is a bit of a mess isn't it?
• Happy Birthday Harry Nick
• I hit a 1370 puzzle rating on chess.com. If only that corresponded to my ability to play.
• Oh it's the twelfth. It's probably too late to start with Advent of Code now, right?

In the last few working weeks of the year, I've begun making the annual pilgrimage to the summit of admin mountain.

• Admin has otherwise been a major theme of my work this week.
• We've spent the past few weeks really honing our new product development process to bake in everything we learned this year - from recruitment to team processes.
• Including baking in better engineering-led quality processes, ranging from testing to accessibility.
• And on an accessibility-kick, bringing captions to Expert Series was pretty rewarding work this week. I really regret not doing this sooner because it would have been far easier. But in the spirit of continuous improvement we've added light-touch transcription to the video production process.
• But anyway, I kind-of made the admin workload harder because...

In January I'm joining a new team - Customer Products.

• (That's the bit of the FT who build FT.com & the mobile apps)
• It's a good time to join: As well as helping answer questions about how teams & products should work together, there's some pretty bold new product & technology objectives which pose some fascinating technology challenges around architecture & scale.
• And I'm equal measures excited and nervous. In some ways it'll be quite different - on the flip-side it means working with some pretty remarkable people.
• Customer Products, my soon-to-be-previous team Enterprise & other parts of the FT are all hiring: Come join us!

I got a booster vaccine!

• After hearing that the NHS had silently allowed people in my age-group to get them, on Friday & Saturday I went to a few walk-in sites but got there too late.
• Today I walked down the road to Roehampton - and with no queue was in-and-out in about 20 minutes.
• If you're reading this in the UK - if three months have passed since your last dose, you're probably eligible.
• Now if only the passport renewal process would complete faster...