I don’t have a great deal to report this week. I spent most of it either preparing for, or presenting, my talk - “Mind the Gap: Building a Bridge between Strategy and Delivery” - at Platform Engineering London, on Wednesday evening.

"That's me, in the corner"

It was the first time I’d given this talk, so I was nervous about its reception. Fortunately, it was well received. There were a couple of great questions, and I had some really interesting conversations afterwards.

The plan is to create an article and one or more digital assets based on the talk. Whilst I’ve been preparing the content for this, new research and articles have been released, and I’ll incorporate their findings into the final piece (and future outings of this talk).

I think what made the event for me was being able to meet, in person, a couple of ex colleagues that I’ve only spoken to remotely for the past 5 or more years. It really does my heart (and head) good to connect in real life.

Thursday was a leisure day (apart from having to get back from London). I managed to decompress and have a couple of very good nights' sleep.

The good news is that I’ll be doing more real-life connecting next week at GovCamp Cymru 25. We had our penultimate ‘camp makers’ meeting on Friday (the final one will be the retro in a week or so’s time), and are rapidly ticking boxes as all the pieces fall into place for what looks to be an excellent event.

This week’s watch list included:

• Celebrity Traitors
• Down Cemetary Road - brilliant!
• Return to Paradise (Series 2 episode 1). Guilty pleasure.

Amongst other things, I listened to:

• Tchotchke - “Playin’ Dumb”
• Lorde - “Virgin”
• Klaendestine - “We Shall Share”. New band; well-travelled musicians.

And my listening figures are in for October. There are no surprises, if you've been following along with my weeknotes of late!

"Other bands are available"

My goal for November is to listen to something other than Stealing Sheep and M.I.A.
It’ll be a hard, but I’ve got the latest Florence + the Machine and Lily Allen albums in my backlog to look forward to. And the new Klaendestine album will get quite a bit of airing, too.