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By Tom Watson in weeknote —

Weeknote 40

Hitting my weeknote midlife crisis age… Opening sign ups to TechFreedom, building a a standalone browser extension (and MCP) for my memory, falling behind on a project, finishing the week on a high note, and lots of interesting things, including a blog about seeing an otter in saltaire.

Weeknote 40
The banner of TechFreedom website

Hitting my weeknote midlife crisis age…

  • Started the week by having a coaching session with Jesse. I had some sessions about 18 months ago, and found them useful, so have started a few more. I’d say I’m pretty self reflective most of the time, but we all need help sometimes. Most of the time it’s me who is the one helping, I mean that’s what being a consultant/contractor/advisor/coach offers. We talked about a lot of things, about my default to run towards excitement and challenge, not safety. I said I’d like to explore a plan that isn’t a plan, no gantt charts, but cairns, vibe and colours. 
  • Spent time on trying to wrestle a schema and taxonomy for digital inclusion, linking to Open Referrals and other data into something that can actually be used in Airtable. 5 versions in, and at the time of writing I might be getting close, although doing anything on Airtable on train wifi is not happening. The challenge of what is good from a data point of view and what is good from a usability perspective has been more tricky than I’d thought initially. Interestingly I found several versions of Open Referrals as Airtable, and saw many of the same issues I’d be grappling with, without, in my opinion, any simple & elegant solutions. Anyway this has taken longer than I wanted, and caused delays for people using it to do the actual mapping of digital inclusion, which I feel a bit guilty about. 

Sidenote - One of the challenges of doing this in something like airtable is the inability to do bulk changes to structure or redesign in the interface. So obviously I built a JSON builder which interacts with the API and can create, edit, and populate bases in seconds. I don’t know why this hasn’t already been done by Airtable themselves. 

  • Had a random chat ™  with Emily. We’ve met in person at a vibe coding session we ran in Newcastle, but it was nice to just have a random chat, and hear what she’s up to with data and climate. Random chats are available.
  • Had a couple of chats with Open Banking intermediaries exploring allowing users easy access to syncing their bank accounts to https://flowlance.io/ for predictive cashflow. Open Banking may be open, but it certainly isn’t cheap is my take away from those conversations! I have built all the tech, safely and securely (and have the connections for my own accounts), but to use an intermediary would require either a lot of users to bootstrap it, or some investment, or building individual connects to each and every bank and then FCA approval etc etc. So I’m having to park this feature for now. 

Speaking of Flowlance though, I’m offering 6 months free use for agreeing to give feedback via 3 surveys. If you would be interested in doing this, please complete this form. 

Drift — Forms that flow
A forms platform built around a simple idea: forms should flow.
Drift
  • Spent a bit of time writing about and then extracting a browser extension from the My Memory app I’ve been sort of building. What is my memory? I first did a post and then thought a little about just having a standalone browser extension that allows you to save your own memory from AI chats into local markdown. So I pulled some of the core code, and reshaped it a little. The repo for the browser extension is here.
    And then someone said, but what about LLM’s in apps or desktop rather than web, and so I built an MCP Server which works with at least some of main LLM’s (some are a bit more tricky). Might come back to it in the next week or so. Why bloody bother Tom you may ask? Well, sometimes you have to show the thing rather than just talk about the thing. 

Talking of showing the thing. TechFreedom is now open for sign ups! Me and Doug have been developing the cohort based programme for a while now and finally pushed go on sign ups. I wrote a post about the WHY of the programme here Why we created TechFreedom, and why we think it's important.

TechFreedom — A clearer forecast for your organisation’s digital future
TechFreedom helps organisations understand their technology dependencies and start making deliberate choices.
TechFreedomRichard Edwards Outlandish

The first cohort is at a reduced price (£300). You should at least read what it’s all about. Or sign up. Yeah, sign up. 

  • Finished the week with a lovely day with the Innovation Team from Citizens Advice SORT. It’s the second workshop I’ve ran with them, and this one definitely felt better, we’ve built a bit of a relationship now from the first workshop, and I thought a bit more carefully about dynamics, structure, timing etc, tweaked things and it worked better. A nice mix of strategy and 15% changes to get on with. Also you should vote them in the Digital Leader AI awards (they did not pay me to say this but now I mentioned it…)

Running has been good this week. Finally feel like I’m in a rhythm again. Got out for a nice run in the forest

The forest in the glorious sunshine that burnt through the mist

Interesting things

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