The absolute best thing about being able to hand over my Head of Software Engineering role to the wonderful Steve Newstead in favour of being a roving problem-solver (currently: incident management processes, procurement workflows, monitoring and alerting, line management coaching) has been the colossal amount of mental capacity it has freed up outside of work hours.

This means I have the space to do things like a) write this blog! b) write code! and most importantly c) read!

This means a resurrection of my feed-reading habits for a start (more on that another time) but also that when people I know and respect post linklogs I have time to actually plough through some of that material they’re sharing, and then read the links out from there as well!

I am always desperate to learn something new and interesting – it is my favourite dopamine hit. Whether it’s about strategy implementation, the differences in people’s visual imaginations, or services that “check for link rot in real-time, and fall back to the Internet Archive to restore broken links”, I love it all.

I’ll be off to my next contract soon, at which point work will be consuming all my spare mental cycles once again, so it’s a pleasure to try and make the most of my brain whilst I’ve got it to myself!