By Tom Watson in weeknote — 08 May 2026

Weeknote 50

Weeknote 50. Yes 50. Collective resilience, time in norwich, the second TechFreedom session, working on tools, vibes as infrastructure, venues as participants, strava kicking me while I was down.

The assembly rooms in Norwich - such a lovely venue - good vibes

50 weeknotes. Who would have thought. Certainly not me. I wasn't sure I'd get beyond one. Last year I kept at it, even if sometimes it was 3 weeks in one note. This year I've somehow managed absolute consistency of one a week. I'm going to celebrate that. Although these are mainly for me, others have found them useful. Thank you for reading and coming on the random journey that is my life and my mind

What I've done.

Another busy week. I'm writing this on a train traveling back from Norwich where I've been since Wednesday evening. I've spent the last two days facilitating a Collective Resilience workshop with Liz and people from Great Yarmouth as part of the OR work with Lloyds Bank Foundation. I find facilitation draining often. But as I sit here I don't feel tired, because the last two days have been so nice, relax, productive, uplifting. The vibe has been great. I've held no tension through the workshops, because the conditions for this work have already been laid, and did I mention the vibe? The venue was great, The Assembly rooms. I've thought a lot about venues and spaces the last two weeks, how they are a condition, they can either help or hinder. This one helped. And the people came with grace. Not niceness, there was challenge, and disagreement in parts, but all done with grace. Some of that I think we helped with, both on the day and through the last 5 months, but much of the conditions have been laid by others.
What was great to hear through the two days is how much people have valued the programme, the connection, and how much progress they have made.
Me and Doug ran the second TechFreedom pilot session this week. This one entitled Assess - assessing the risks within peoples tech stack. We left a lot more space for conversation this time, and both me & doug and the cohort seemed more relaxed. The conversation felt both easy and deep. I think people found it useful. I'd updated the website as part of the prep to allow for easy risk assessment and alternative checking for people. I think that was appreciated. You can run your own assessment here. I'm really enjoying the pilot.
I spent time on an update for my Bearing tool - the tool functionally is exactly the same, but I did a lot of work on the data model behind it for the AI model recommendation. I pulled in open benchmarking data from LMArea and Artificial Analysis. I changed the weighting and improve how the complexity of the task affects the model recommended. I think it's a bit improvement, but also recognise there is always more that could be improve. I plan to add more models now I'm happier with the data model.

I spent some time making improvements to the Race Report data platform. We've had some nice feedback about it so far. Bits of work still to do, but hope to finish version one next week.
Made some updates to Stackmap to fix a bug based on feedback

Asked people to join as testers of DriftForms my new form platform.

Having been so ill last week I was informed by Strava that I lost a 172 week streak of running at least once in a week. Way to kick a fella while he's down strava. Anyway I was pleased to feel better enough this week to get out for a couple of easy runs, two of which were in Norwich. I love exploring places through running. Norwich was lovely. So many churches (one for every sunday I was told - also one pub for every day of the year - make of that what you will).

Wrote my yearly My Stack - going local blog where I explore the tech I use on a daily basis.

I'm looking forward to a few slightly less busy weeks coming up.

Interesting things

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