2026 Week 11

I missed the opportunity to publish a weekly recap last week. It was Thursday by the time I sat down to write, and by that point it felt like I’d missed the window.

At work last week I continued the theme of meeting application developers who use our platform. The feedback we’ve been given is interesting. We’re forever being told what developers want, developers need and how developers need to be measured. It has been quite refreshing to hear from development teams directly what they see as the benefits of an application platform and where they see some of the challenges.

Hay fever has been insane the last couple of weeks. There have been a couple of days where I’ve ended up face down on a pillow, burying my eyes in an effort to try and alleviate the symptoms. That said, it’s been great to have a few days of sunshine. I managed to complete a 9K run. I think this is the longest run I have to do ahead of the 10K next week. I’m not looking to set any record times, I’m really looking to comfortably complete the race without injury.

Evenings at home have been dominated by what I can only describe as a greetings guard production factory that has taken over our kitchen table. At school, Oscar is participating in a ‘Grow a Fiver’ initiative. It has been interesting watching him come up with a list of ideas, whittle them down to what he eventually chose, and then go through the subsequent self-doubt as he realised what other people were doing. He was convinced that a raffle for a bag of sweets would make infinitely more money in a school playground than greetings cards. As I dropped him at the gate, he looked at me and said I think I’ll sell none. I was gearing myself up to talk to him about how this was an opportunity to test the idea, to learn about target market, refine it, or pivot. But to my surprise he came home beaming with delight. He’d sold out. He’d managed to tap into a market that he hadn’t considered the staff at the school, who all wanted greetings cards for various reasons, and older girls looking for Mother’s Day cards.

I finally managed to publish a blog post looking at how the children’s audiobook pens work. These are the pens that allow a child who can’t yet read to touch the pen to a page and hear an audio description or reading of the book in question. I found myself going down a rabbit hole of how the optical encoding on the pages might work. I’m amazed that the encoding mechanism allows a pen to identify where it is on an areas the size of Europe and Asia. Since publishing the Post I’ve realised that there are still some gaps in my understanding but it was fun to dig in to this regardless.

I also managed to close my AWS account. The fiddly part of this was moving DNS records around. I moved upwards of 150 DNS entries around to various providers, largely DigitalOcean. I think I only made one mistake and that was down to not understanding the quirks of SquareSpace domain validation.