Drinks less coffee than people expect. Enjoys helping solve problems in the messy cross-disciplinary spaces where strategy, research, & delivery overlap. Does 1-1 coaching with senior practitioners & leaders in my old age. Still builds stuff.
<nods> another of my fave things for expiry dates are regular meetings — never set them to repeat forever. Six months max. That way you have to be intentional about keeping them going & talking about their value (or not ;-)
It's been my general experience that startups, especially startups built by dev-focussed folk, tend to radically underestimate the impact of people issues (moral, amount of sleep, work/life balance, etc.) on their effectiveness of their business.
In fact I saw almost exactly this story, but with dev rather than support. Going from _perception_ of their being an ever growing list of new features, massive overtime, general feeling of being overwhelmed. To showing that folk were actually getting on top of things with numbers. To some scope adjustment so we could make the hours sane. The team getting happier, and faster at every step.
Having family with catheters they would have loved this / love this.
The external valves, and associated bags, are all additional causes of infection — and this would cut those out.
It's really hard to change those bags without spillage. This cuts that out.
The external pipework getting caught on things and causing pain. Solved.
You have to adjust the kind of clothing you wear so that you can have space for the catheter bag. This would cut that out.
The location of catheter bags means that people with certain kind of mobility problems can't change them themselves - this would cut that out. This one directly affects a friend of mine right now. Four times a day that have to be around somebody who is willing to change a catheter bag with them. They cannot get up at night without somebody to disconnect/reconnect the night bag.
The whole issue of not knowing how full the bladder is - this would cut that out.
Never being able to go swimming. Never being able to have a bath. Solved.
If this can be made to work well, and it's a big if I'm sure, it is a game changer and a major quality of life improver.
I grew up listening to recordings of "Round the Horne" in the UK, which included two characters Julian & Sandy that chatted a little in Polari during their sketches. A bunch of Polari words and phrases have migrated into general UK slang — so it's not really a case of dying out… more migrating and changing — as languages & dialects often do.
> While you lose out on some of the benefits in the short term, in the long term you get the benefit that previously hard-to-decompose monolithic legacy setups can be sliced and diced gradually until you have units that are reasonable to start rebuilding cleanly. This one of those areas where layers etc. really are quite useful.
So. Much. This.
I work with very view greenfield projects. I work with a lot of existing, complicated, annoying monolithic architectures. Approaches that let me start refactoring those into something vaguely sane are a godsend.
Yes. But a lot fewer than I used to. Mostly because of space issues (I have about 40 years worth of books hanging around. Last time I moved I bottomed out the suspension of the moving van with the weight ;-).
These days I tend to get physical books when:
* They're significantly better "things". I have some lovely books that are lovely objects in of themselves. Well typeset, bound well, quality paper, folios, etc. For example my hardcover of "The Timeless Way Of Building" is a beautiful object — as well as a wonderful book. I like having beautiful objects around me.
* When the format doesn't work as an e-book. For example Stephen Cole's "The Geometry of Type" would be completely useless to me as an ebook. As would most of my books on photography art and architecture. They're not just lumps of text that can be trivially reflowed. This is something that might change if we get some really high-quality A3 portable ebook reader type things in the future.
* When I can't get them as an ebook. There is still a stupid about of immensely useful content out there that you cannot get in ebook format. For example I'm currently finishing up a re-read of Victor Papanek's "Design for the Real World". Which you cannot get as an ebook.
That said — my default for fiction/reference purchases tends to be ebooks now. With occasional upgrades to paper books if they're something I really liked and I can get a "nice" physical edition.
Literally every time I went UK->US 1996 to 2010 I got "randomly" selected by some/all of immigration, security, and customs. I can only assume I looked/behaved dodgy in some way, was on some kind of list, or was just darn unlucky!
Incidents within the EU. Zero.
I've only just got the point where I've stopped scheduling a couple of extra hours of security-slack into my travel schedule ;-)
I'm just glad that I seem to have passed through whatever set of factors that caused me to be "randomly" selected every time I entered the US for years on end.
Blog: <https://adrianhoward.com> | Work: <https://quietstars.com/coaching/>