Weeknote 38

What I did

Spent time with two clients coaching them through using Airtable* in their organisation. The two are at different stages, one I'd began helping at the beginning of 2025, the other just starting, so their knowledge and needs are different. What is also different is Airtable itself, which has leaned hard into AI (who hasn't) with their omni. - sidenote, I also discovered their new product Superagent which according to them

is a new, AI-driven, multi-agent system designed to automate complex business research and content creation, moving beyond simple chat to generate finished reports, slide decks, and websites. It uses specialized, autonomous agents that operate in parallel to conduct research, cross-reference data, and produce actionable, board-ready deliverables.

I mean what isn't multi-agent these days. It seems, umm, fine. Anyway I digress. Airtable has changed a lot over the last 12 months, and their omni, which is an AI driven builder is actually pretty good. You can get it to create a pretty good base from a quick outline. Gone are the days of needing templates for fairly standard stuff. What this does mean however is knowing how to describe what you want, what questions to ask and how to know if what is created is actually what you want is more important.

And I think this is where the coaching approach I use with clients actually has a lot of value. I get them to explore, try things, find where they have knowledge gaps, know what questions to ask, and then I help them work through them. This way they begin thinking about architecture, workflows, making decisions along the way. And this isn't just an Airtable thing, I think that in a world where everything is going AI, where we can build most anything with natural language, these are the approaches I think we need more of. We need the architects.

*european alternatives are available - Baserow

• Caught up with SOS about improving the RACE report data collection process. Have worked with them for a while, mainly in discovery mode, and now getting into actually building which is the fun bit. Hopefully improving the process for people contributing data and for the central team collating and analysing the data.
• Wrote my final ever post on substack. I'd moved to ghost 14 months ago but still did a (very) occasional post on substack which summerised all my posts here. I only did 3 in that time, but actually what I found was that the summerising was a really useful process. Looking back at what I'd done over the last 3 - 4 months, the writing, the weeknotes was really handy for me. I've written before about how we often forget the incremental change and only really remember the big things, or the end point. And so, even though I've fully switched to here, I'm going to keep doing summary posts, for those that want to read them, and for me, so I don't forget.

• Spent some time on https://techfreedom.eu/ - developing the self diagnostic and materials for the cohort sessions. Excited to get this fully out and start. Sign up on the form at the bottom of the site to be kept up to date (or subscribe to this here site if you like)
• Spent time building. Made progress on improving (and renaming) my tool for learning and sense making. It's focused around observations, signals, and reflections, leaning heavily into emergence and patterns. And I also want it to look and feel lovely.

• Other than all that, managed to get ill. Have struggled (relatively) this year to stay fully fit and healthy, and this week have just felt rubbish, some kind of virus, sending everything a bit out of whack. On the grand scheme of things I am healthy, but I'd like to be back to feeling well. The sunshine and the forest help.

• Oh also, how good has the winter olympics been?! The biathlon was incredible, the snowboard half pipe amazing, skimo bonkers. Got to say, it's better than the summer olympics right? How about some data story telling about curling stones?
• Logged back into Mastodon after about 3 years. Seems nice. Going to try to be there a bit more I think
• It's half term up here next week, which is seemingly different to everywhere else in the country, so taking some time off.

Interesting things

• Cats in Japanese Folklore and Culture - From kawaii (cute) to kaibyo (supernatural)
• Computer Says Maybe When certainty gives way to judgement
• AI is Coming for Conservation Organizations – and Most Are Not Ready
• AI and everything else - our call to action a digitally confident Scottish voluntary sector - SCVO
• AI Agent Lands PRs in Major OSS Projects, Targets Maintainer... - An AI agent is merging PRs into major OSS projects and cold-emailing maintainers to drum up more work - eek
• The future of data centers: how is the industry changing in the AI era? - '
• How I’m dealing with the pressure to adopt AI as a designer — mynameismartin
• Leadership health metrics - Team health metrics focus on team performance, but leadership’s impact on teams is often overlooked. What if a leadership team’s effectiveness was measured too?
• what-is-data-governance-report.pdf
• What is OAuth? - Wherein I [try to] answer a seemingly straightforward question: "WTF is OAuth, anyhow?"
• devlog: Small tools for small orgs
• Challenge Validation
• Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web - Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.
• It’s a process; not a product – Terence Eden’s Blog
• Who Decides the Question Decides the Future - a good read and one I'm obvisouly interested in.