The Biggy-Smalls

The kids are doing well, small guy completed his first year of school and seems to grudgingly accept the concept. Today he read a dinosaur name out of an encyclopedia of dinosaurs which might be the first time he has ever decided for himself that reading is a useful skill.

Big guy is a voracious reader. We can’t seem to get enough books for her and now have a well practiced routine of going to the charity shops on London road and buying every Tom Gates, Wimpy Kid and Horrid Henry book we find.

This is very soppy but I do just love these two little pickles. I love looking at their beautiful faces and they make me laugh most days.

You Better Werk

In about April of 2025 I decided it was time for me to get a different job. It took quite a while to find one, starting with just getting up to a decent standard of job interview skill to be able to adequately explain what I’d been doing for the past 10 years.

In December I started a new job at Rightmove which is going well so far. Nice people, lots of things to do. It’s really unpleasant changing jobs tbh, I could have just marinated at the FT for another 5 years easily, but it was time to - forgive the linkedin speak - step out of my comfort zone and now, here I am, uncomfortable.

While I was in my job finding era I gave a talk on LDX3’s Director+ track about setting a technical strategy. I thoroughly enjoyed the exercise and the research phase - bringing me to Peter Senge’s panpipe garnished audiobook (The fifth discipline) was a particular highlight. This work also fed directly into helping the FT define it’s technical strategy - the resulting work being something I’m really proud of, despite leaving shortly after we launched it.

Everything I Made

I’ve stopped taking photos of things because I don’t enjoy doing it, and maybe this isn’t interesting without something to look at, but here is a list of all of the things I knitted or sewed in 2025.

• M&M September coat - very nice, almost too nice, I find it hard to wear it because I don’t want to get it dirty or get kid mess on it.
• A new M&M TN31 Parka - very nice and does not have the same problem as the September coat
• M&M Winnie Pyjamas - too short in the body, quite a lot of work (uh, obviously). Trouser pattern could do with some side pockets.
• A Curlew top, a lovely pattern but not made for someone with my proportions. I did enjoy making the pattern adjustments though.
• A Bantam vest - A classic. My 5th probably.
• M&M Saltmarsh skirt - Smash hit, very wearable, very nice in summer.
• A Sophie knitted hood in alpaca, which is a bit itchy >:(
• Two hats with ear flaps and bobbles for the kids
• A Petit Knits Friday Knitted T-Shirt which I love
• A Favourite Things T-shirt which is, very annoyingly, also a bit too itchy and I will make again with a less itchy yarn

Everything I Read

I am not good at media criticism, as you will see. I don’t think about things that deeply and I don’t enjoy thinking about the things I’ve read that deeply. I have to say this because you guestures at friends on the world wide web are so good at it and I enjoy reading your reckons.

Paper Books:

• Crying in H-mart - Michelle Zauner. Fine. Learnt a lot about Korean food. ★★★☆☆
• What I talk about when I talk about running - Haruki Murakami. A pleasant and easy before bed read. A different way of thinking about running. ★★★★☆
• Yellowface - R F Kuang. Great holiday read. A bit too inside baseball sometimes (main protag is a novelist sooo….) ★★★★☆
• Pirenesi - Susanna Clarke. Tore through this over chirstmas. I did have to google if it was important to remember all of the stuff about all of the rooms, but it wasn’t. ★★★★★

Audio Books:

Fiction:

• One of us - Elizabeth Day. I really enjoyed the previous in this series - The Party. This was a bit less compelling, but it did get me through a lot of painting my office. ★★★☆☆
• Caledonian Road - Andrew O’Hagan. Shovelled a lot of topsoil to this. Fine. ★★★☆☆
• Fly wild swans: My mother, myself and China - Jung Chang. Not as good as the original but still a great listen ★★★★☆
• Really Good, Actually - Moira Helsey. I can’t remember this. ★★☆☆☆
• The First Bad Man - Miranda July. Grim, couldn’t finish it. ☆☆☆☆☆
• Paradise City - Elizabeth Day. Bit boring. ★★☆☆☆
• All Fours - Miranda July. This Miranda July is why I bought the other Miranda July. This was weird and interesting and a bit gross but mostly good. ★★★★☆
• Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut. Fantastic. Loved it.
• Soldier Sailor - Clare Kilroy. A painful beautiful story about motherhood. Loved it. ★★★★☆

Non-Fiction

• Careless people - Sarah Wynn Williams. An exposé on Facebook. Terrifying but also at times quite annoying. ★★★★☆
• The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge. Lots of things I’m still thinking about. ★★★★☆
• The five dysfunctions of a team - Patrick Lencioni. Good, easy to read. Useful ideas. ★★★★☆
• Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows. I cannot remember this at all although my Audible says I’ve read it… … ?????
• Some kids I taught and what they taught me - Kate Clanchy. I liked the central thesis of the book (send your kids to public school) but the writing is (as has been discussed) at times problematic. ★★★☆☆

Other Events

Class Divide

At the end of last year I said some things about Class Divide, and the work I’d been doing with them. In March I gave a speech at a council meeting in support of the changes. It was extremely nerve-wracking, which is strange because I’ve spoken for longer about more complicated things in front of more people but this… this was a whole different thing.

The changes were voted through by a massive majority. The changes were then challenged very thoroughly by the local parents, and in September those challenges were forensically debunked by the adjudicator.

In the meantime I’ve been doing bits where I can for Class Divide, mostly around getting better transport links for children to whichever schools they end up at.

As a leaving gift I asked my colleagues to send some money over to the Crew Club, a youth club doing amazing work, in Whitehawk. They raised a frankly astonishing £800ish quid, which the FT then matched up to £500.

France 2025

Per my goals described in my last year round up, I did finally manage to get the family on a boat and into the great nation of France. We went to a eurocamp type place with several very good swimming pools. We had a good time, we will go back. Next time I’d like to plan a bit more before we go?

Running

Partly because I knew I was going to move jobs and I wanted to have the stress-outlet of running, and partly because its very obvi that you should exercise, I did couch to 5k again and was quite enjoying 3 5k runs a week until I realised my hamstring was just always sore and getting worse. So I’ve had to slow down on that while I work out why that is. My chatGPT physio says it’s because my glutes aren’t strong enough. I should probably see a real physio.

Some Pics as Proof of Life

Sorry about the broken toe images.

A Review of My 2025 Goals:

1. Get everybody passports and go to France. Eat a baguette! Enjoy a croissant! ✅
2. Continue with the exercise, following a foot-related pause. ✅
3. Keep driving. - ummmmm I mean, yeah but also not as much as I should have done. ✅

My 2026 aims:

Maybe none? Just the obvious ones. Work, happy family, don’t spontaneously give up on running (again).

The End

Here are the rest of my yearnotes: (2024,2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014).

2024 – good for the job, good for the family, bad for the garden, bad for global politics if you’re not an evil maniac.

The Biggy-Smalls

Who even remembers July 2021–July 2022 – the year of seizures? Not me, that’s for sure. Luckily, Google Photos does and sometimes “helpfully” shows me a video to remind me. Even though I have made it very clear that I never want to see those videos. Wee man has now made it to the two-year milestone of being seizure-free, and we are tapering the brain medications that he desperately needed two years ago. Please manifest another incident-free year. If we get to the end of 2025, I will begin to relax.

Wee man also started school this year, and now I am experiencing what I already knew from observing it in E’s year – school is rough for July/August-born boys. Complete inability to sit still aside, he is learning with his peers, and I’m very proud every time he tells me how to spell something.

C’s biggy-small sister becomes more like herself every day, and I love to see it. She’s very patient with her little brother and kind to her friends.

Both children are still primarily powered by peanut butter.

You Better Werk

This year will be my 10th year at the Financial Times. I had a great year at work – found my rhythm in the role, attracted/hired some great people to the leadership team to complement the already smashing Principal Engineers. The total team size will soon be 70+ engineers.

Some of the highlights:

• We replaced our access model (for consented users only) with AI this year, which is pretty wild when you think about it!
• Two high-profile elections! One with only six weeks’ notice! Thanks for that, Rishi!
• Weathered a lot of DDoS attacks. Keep trying, guys 😘!
• Massive improvements to article and homepage capabilities – lots more flexibility for the editorial team to tell stories in the way they want to.

House and Garden

We redecorated my daughter’s bedroom – fresh and beautifully sanded floors and lilac walls. Every time I go in, I feel like hard, boring jobs are worth the effort, even if they take a lot longer than I ever expect them to.

I also paid a man to rebuild our veg beds at the bottom of the garden.

And, of course, then a startled cat ran so hard into a panel of our greenhouse while trying to get out of it that the panel fell out and smashed into at least 100,000 pieces of glass. It took me several months to get all the glass out of the beds and the gravel.

The rebuilding of the rotting beds made it pretty impossible to grow anything except tomatoes, some runner beans, and five cucamelons, making an easy-to-improve-upon target for 2025.

Did get 3.5kg of grapes.

I Passed My Driving Test

In February, I passed my driving test. Unfortunately, I still absolutely hate driving and find it hard to find reasons to do it. However, I don’t want to be a 60-year-old who can’t drive. That has always been the goal. And I have 20 years to meet that goal. This must be achievable.

Class Divide

In September, I started thinking about how PTAs can magnify inequalities between schools in richer areas and poorer areas.
Which led me to a podcast called “Class Divide,” a podcast series about the closure of a secondary school in East Brighton and its lasting effects on the community. I listened to all of it on the sunny days of September while picking broken glass out of gravel.

Then in October, the council announced it would be consulting on some big changes to the secondary catchment areas. Changes that would mean, for me at least, that the kids might end up at different schools to the ones we expected, but also changes aimed at tackling the 40% attainment gap in Brighton and Hove’s secondary schools.

These proposals are really unpopular with parents like me, but I didn’t feel like I was hearing a very balanced view on them in the school WhatsApp messages, so I went to Class Divide and said, “What do you think about these proposals? Are they any good?” And they said, “We’re doing a podcast episode about them… would you like to be on it?” And I said, yeah, alright.

Then Class Divide put out a call for volunteers to help with their campaigning, and I thought, yeah, OK, I’ll do that too, actually. That would be interesting and fun.

So that’s a lot of what I got up to towards the end of the year – helping with comms, thinking about schools, watching council meetings, emailing councillors, and, of course, being on a podcast.

Some Pics as Proof of Life

Here ya go, pal.

A Review of My 2024 Goals:

1. ❌ Leave the country for a holiday. I haven’t been abroad since 2018, and I am super embarrassed about that. I think we’ll take a little family holiday to France if everyone’s annual leave will allow it.
2. ✅ I know I say this every year, but I do need to move my body more, somehow. Probably a class that I feel too much peer pressure to not do…?
3. ✅ Go to a dentist.
4. ✅ Pass my driving test.

This Year:

1. Get everybody passports and go to France. Eat a baguette! Enjoy a croissant!
2. Continue with the exercise, following a foot-related pause.
3. Keep driving.

Less is more.

The End

Here are the rest of my yearnotes: (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014).

Unlike weeknotes, I don’t actually like writing these and when I re-read them I find myself a bit insufferable. Only a yearly chore though and you know I love a streak. 2023 was good, an 8/10. Wee Charlito had no more seizures - thank you to everyone who manifested that with us per my 2022 yearnotes request. I got a new job at the FT as Technology Director, which I am enjoying mostly because I am learning a lot.

The smalls

The kids both continue to make my brain smile - just two silly little geese going about their silly business. I am deeply, deeply, into life as a craft mum, E and I do all kinds of making things together. We go and look at art and talk about what it means, we paint, draw, print, sculpt, prototype and build. C’s interest in cars is really out of control. He just IDs every car we go past at this stage like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. “Tesla mum! 3 door hatch back mum! vauxhall mum!” every car must be acknowledged by me.

C hasn’t had a seizure for over a year, so we are beginning to slowly taper off his medication and if we make it to September (ie two years seizure free) we might be able to take him off it entirely. This will coincide with him starting school.

Everybody work work work work work work

In June I started a new job as the Tech Director for FT.com and the apps. Interim at first and then officially in November. It’s been an interesting six months as I figure out the role and the new colleagues. I’ve learnt a lot about proper leadership, rooted in actual theory rather than what I had been doing before which is just going by gut instinct. I think I have great instincts but that’s really not helpful when explaining to anyone else why I did something: “er because it seemed like the right thing to do? just try and be like me and magically know things, off you go, good luck!”

I’m finding it hard to write about the job without sounding too self-important, or smug, or haphazard, or like I’m writing for the linkedin-crowd. Most of the things I’m proud of in the last 6 months are not fit for the blog but are basically some form of improvement through raising the bar a few millimetres.

In June I gave a talk at the first Staff Plus conference in the Barbican. This was my first talk in ages. It was about how we rebuilt the rendering pipeline for FT.com so that we can have better separation of concerns and fewer APIs (“going from spaghetti to lasagne” to quote Kara). The talk was very well received and I had a really great time at the conference, attending the talks and in the hallway track, though I was totally wrecked by it too. Like, spontaneously crying wrecked.

House and Garden

We got an air source heat pump installed so we are now off gas. Excluding installation, heating the house in this way has proven considerably cheaper than gas.

I’m decorating the house in a very haphazard way. I’m a bit worried it will never be done. Maybe that’s what owning a house while also being veryyy uh… well whatever the specific and mild form of brain-rot I have is.

🍅

I expanded my tomato growing enterprise this year to eight plants, the max the greenhouse can fit. We had some really delicious Skyomish heirloom tomatoes which I will grow again. The Red Zebra were OK but some got bottom rot, and the Gardener’s Ecstasy were fine but not as good as the Sungold from the previous year.

🎃

I had some good success with the Hokkaido squash, definitely going to plant them again in 2024

💐

The dahlias (Arthur’s doorstep collection from Sarah Raven) survived last year’s snow and did even better this year so we go again in September 2024!

I still can’t drive

It’s weird looking back that this didn’t make last year’s yearnote, but I’ve been learning to drive since May 2022. In June 2023 I took a nice little 3 month break while I settled into my new job, it was a very pleasant 3 months. Then in September I resumed the lessons with a new instructor. I really don’t enjoy driving and can’t imagine ever enjoying it, but I don’t see a future where being able to drive isn’t extremely convenient, so I will continue to have the lessons and do the practice until I pass a driving test. I hope that’s in 2024 or I’ll have to resit the theory which would be incredibly annoying!

Some pics as proof of life

Here ya go babe

Shall I make a plan for 2024 then?

Last year I couldn’t say anything about what I wanted to do in 2023 because I was feeling quite depressed. This year has been better, so I’m going to go ahead and suggest:

1. Leave the country for a holiday. I haven’t been abroad since 2018 and I am super embarrassed about that. I think we’ll take a little family holiday to France if everyones annual leave will allow it.
2. I know I say this every year but I do need to move my body more, some how. Probably a class that I feel too much peer pressure to not do…?
3. Go to a dentist.
4. Pass my driving test.

That seems like enough I think.

Bye!

The End

Here are the rest of my yearnotes: (2022, 2021,2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014).

Garden

This year I learnt how incredibly challenging the planting conditions in our garden are. It is dominated by a huge beautiful 40ft cedar tree, but underneath is dry shade. I don’t really want to be watering things in the garden. I have enough to do without giving myself the hassle of a load of plants that can only survive with daily attention.

We did have broad beans and sweet peas in spring, tomatoes in summer and dahlias in autumn. The strawberry and raspberry yield was terrible.

With our first spring I spent a lot of time staring at the pond which initially was full of frogs pulsing and rolling around, then there was the frogspawn, and then finally thousands of tadpoles that made the surface of the water shimmer constantly. I hope they’ll be back next year, along with the newts I was very pleased to find.

House

The house we moved in to was fine, totally livable. But some things needed doing. They are all boring but here’s a list:

• Cavity wall insulation
• Plastering over the artex
• Removal of mold cupboard / replastering of mold wall
• Repainting of main bedroom and hall (where the artex had been)
• Repainting of fascia boards
• Cleaning gutters
• Solar panels
• Curtains for three bedrooms
• Re-covered one conservatory chair cushion
• Bought a bed for our room

There is much more to do. There is not a single room that I am completely happy with, although my office is pretty close.

Work

I’m still employed as a Principal Engineer by the Financial Times. After being tech director for seven months in 2021 I went into last year determined to lean into the bits I missed of the principal engineer role when I returned to it. I ran a book club, started having skip level meetings with my report’s reports and introduced the team to weeknotes for talking about work and team bonding purposes.

I also:

• Oversaw the launch of the FT Edit - the first of what I hope will be many products the FT launches to make our writing available at a more affordable price
• Pitched for, set up and oversaw a team of 5 engineers rebuilding a core part of our content pipeline.
• Gave a talk about the journey the apostrophe in Sarah O’Connor’s name goes on from being typed to somebody reading it in a byline.
• Did some other massive Engineering Management jobs that I probably shouldn’t put in a public blog post.
• Was in this video about the raspberry pi which I had forgotten about but was actually pretty neat?
• Spoke on a panel about career progression

Family, life events, some good photos.

C and his dodgy wiring

At the beginning of this year I wrote:

This year we discovered that Baby C has seizures, probably just the kind that young children have. So we’ve spent a lot of time in A&E, and assorted other bits of the local hospitals.

The optimism! It turns out he has something more complicated than febrile seizures. In April he had an enormous one, lasting 40 minutes, that left him temporarily unable to walk. It happened while he was at home but I was working and Lachie came into my office holding him while I was on a work call which I immediately hung up on. In July he had one at nursery and I had to put birkenstocks on and sprint the 300 metres down the road to him. He was on the floor still seizing and next to him was a circle of 15 little water bottles where all his classmates had been enjoying a snack before they were escorted out of the room. All of the women who work there were calmly following their protocols but when I saw them at the end of the day to pick up Edith it was clear some of them were still in shock.

After the April seizure I took six or seven weeks off work. For the first bit it was because he was too sick to be in nursery but then he went back and I realised I was too shattered to be in work. People sent presents and flowers and whatnot and I cried at every single gift.

The weather was just getting pleasant so some of the time I pottered around in the garden. I think I watched a lot of telly? Or did I read a lot? I can’t remember. I did make a small tapestry of a landmark local to Lachie’s parents out of found wool from the same area. How very cottagecore of me.

I called the Employee Assistance number and talked to a nice lady in Blackpool who I wanna say was called Linda? Talking was helpful and eventually I got on a call with her and said “I don’t have anything to talk about this week, shall we call it quits?” and she was happy about that.

Either from the medication, or getting older, or having fewer illnesses (which cause inflammation which cause seizures, the theory goes) C appears to be getting better. Let’s all manifest a zero seizure year for 2023 people.

Bean machine starts school

No idea why I call my eldest “bean machine” but here we are. She doesn’t even really like beans? She started school this year and is very into it which is a relief. I’m fairly nonplussed about all the admin schools think I have time for but there we are.

Holidays

Another year at the Yorkshire farmhouse with all the family. Thankfully finally we got a holiday where nobody got really sick after last year’s very cursed family holidays. We went directly from that to a week in glorious Broadstairs where I ate ice cream every day and Lachie and I got out for a couple of evening drinks without the kids. Heaven.

Some good weddings

Helen and Chris finally had their covid delayed wedding in a very well heated barn. It was absolutely beautiful and I danced until 1am.

Carrie and Ben had a second wedding (the first being a remote zoom covid wedding) in a fancy house in Hampshire and I was deeply happy to be with my school friends, together, celebrating “Ken and Barry” as Carrie’s dad mistakenly called them in his speech.

Here are some photos

The End

Here are the rest of my yearnotes: (2021,2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014).

The Family

My children continue to delight me and make me extremely stupid with love every day. E is nearly four and regularly says things like “are needles real?”, “‘mmm mmm mmm mm mmmm’ - That’s how worms say ‘I Love You’” and “has anyone ever tried chocolate on bread?!”. Her brother C is one and a half and does a great deal of chuckling and squealing. He’s very good at football for someone who can barely walk. E and C are obsessed with one another still, and C often sits on his big sister’s lap for a cuddle. rip me.

This year we discovered that Baby C has seizures, probably just the kind that young children have. So we’ve spent a lot of time in A&E, and assorted other bits of the local hospitals.

The work

When I came back from maternity leave in April, I started a new role as Tech Director for [the team that runs FT.com and their apps] as Anna Shipman’s maternity cover. I interviewed for this job while I was on leave. It’s a big role but I had a lot of support and I ended up really enjoying it. I did it for seven months, and then returned to being a Principal Engineer in November.

The return to the Principal Engineer role was welcome despite enjoying the bigger job because having small children and moving house had left me quite fried.

When I returned to work I also got to resume my place on the Next Generation Board. Our tenure had been extended because of the pandemic so I got to do another nine months! The NGB had made a lot of progress since I’d gone on leave and some of the people on the board, especially the more junior members had become so much more confident in their own ideas, which was incredibly nice to see. The NGB as a group had also settled into a well bonded team which wasn’t an especially obvious outcome when I went on leave as we were still all sussing one another out.

We moved to Brighton

In my last yearnotes I said at the end that we were thinking of moving to Brighton. We did that in March. Selling a house at that stage of the pandemic was tough because we had to be out of the house, it was January, and most people wanted to view the property at about 6pm. So we spent a lot of time in the car park of a nearby Sainsbury’s. After about 10 viewings though, we did sell. We had about four weeks from exchange to completion, which meant four weeks to find a place to rent in Brighton. The result of this was that we ended up living in an utterly absurd house. Not one to waste a #content opportunity I made some fun Instagram stories which I’ve now stitched together into ten minutes of lols for you here. I have removed the ones that show my kids, so you’ll just have to imagine my daughter repeatedly getting her arm stuck in the banister.

In our first week in the rental we made an offer on a proper house to live in which was, mercifully, accepted. Four months later we moved into that house. Normally I try and sort of tease out categorisations of events for yearnotes, but the move into this new house crashes into several other events which I will cover now.

The confluence of several stressful events in July

In a period of three weeks, from the middle of June:

• Lachie went back to work from three months of paternity leave
• Baby C started nursery and immediately caught the first of many viruses, as is usual with starting nursery
• E and C both caught a fever and were discharged from nursery in line with Covid guidelines, meaning Lachie and I were back to juggling childcare and work.
• Just after turning 1 Baby C had his first seizure. An utterly terrifying event which I wrote about at the time. Since then he has had a bunch more seizures, some of them have been kind of fine and some of them have been really really distressing. In between these brain-farts he is what doctors call “developmentally normal”.
• We moved house

Anyway, because there was no alternative, we got through all that, moved house, E got back to nursery as did baby C.

Holidays

Lol read on to find out how cursed my holidays were last year. Oh my god.

In January we spent a month (1, 2, 3, 4) in the Peak District with Lachie’s parents. Lachie was working and I was on maternity leave. What I remember of this was some amazing walks with my daughter, getting really into geocaching, a lot of snow, trying to get down the side of a very muddy valley with baby C in the baby bjorn and E holding my hand. This quite enjoyable period ended with Lachie’s dad breaking his leg in a fairly dramatic way and me spending a week trying to stop E running headlong into him as he tried to recover.

We had a couple of good camping trips to Brakes Coppice.

We went to pickering for our holiday that was postponed from the previous year. This should have been very relaxing, Lachie’s whole family distributed across a bunch of farm houses, however C had a seizure the day before we left, and I unknowingly brought norovirus to the holiday and infected three of Lachie’s family. So I spent the week being sick or looking after sick people.

Then we went to Norfolk for a week and that was the week that both kids got the shits.

I took up running

As the daylight hours dropped I realised there was really no opportunity for me to leave the house in the light so I downloaded the Couch to 5k App and put on my runners. Working from home makes it easy to go for runs because you can fit them in in the mornings, or over an extended lunch break, or however you like. Excellent.

Time for a nap

2021 was a year in which a lot of things happened to me, and this year, I’d like fewer things to happen to me thanks. This year I would like to get more people over for dinner, grow better tomatoes, decorate more bits of our new house, and make some progress on some crunchy work problems that I did the set up for in 2021.

The End

Here are the rest of my yearnotes: (2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014).

So that’s really the main thing that happened this year, which of course, you already knew.

Fambo

The big one hit 2 this year. I feel sad for the things she has missed because of the pandemic, seeing friends, playing with other children, spending time with her grandparents and cousins. She doesn’t mind at all and accepts what is happening freely. The first lockdown - March to June - was incredibly tough. She was at home because nursery closed and Lachie and I were both working full time and looking after her, which we did in shifts (7am-1pm or 1pm-7pm). I was also in my final trimester which made me more tired still. The parks were shut and so we pretty much stayed in the house and didn’t see anyone. I did a lot of crying and a lot of running the washing up water slightly too hot so the pain of feeling would be replaced by the pain of my hands burning.

In June the nursery opened back up and my maternity leave started.

And then, in July, just after the lockdown eased up, baby C was born. He’s a chucklehead, especially for his big sister. Imagine being born during a pandemic. Unlike the first birth, this one was easy and we were in and out within a few hours.

Baby C is now 6 months old. He has my dimples.

Getting to spend so much more time with my immediate family this year has been special.

More weaknotes

Despite… all this… I still wrote weaknotes every week, although some of them were pretty grim. In my head only a handful of people read them but then every so often someone surprising will mention they’ve read them and I think “oh christ did I say fuck or bugger or reveal anything too embarrassing recently?”.

We still vegetarian over here

Something that made being vegetarian a lot easier was working from home. Since I haven’t been into the office since March (March! Can you even believe it) I don’t have to look at a pulled pork sandwich and then choose the cheese one. It’s only cheese sandwiches.

Everybody work work work work work work

I was only at work for 6 months this year as I had a baby in July. I think the main thing that happened with work was I got onto a thing called the Next Generation Board. It’s 12 people from around the FT getting together every month or so, working on some self initiated projects, and mentoring the actual board members. I was assigned the editor, Roula Khalaf, to mentor. The project I worked on with 3 other people was defining the FT’s environmental strategy for the next 10 years and getting the board to sign off on it. By the time I left for maternity leave it was going quite well, the strategy was agreed upon and the first step (an audit by the Carbon Trust) was about to begin. It was a fascinating piece of work and I’m looking forward to getting back into it when I return to work in March. As for work in Customer Products, the biggest most memorable thing was the mid-march scramble to get everyone out of the office and working from home. I can’t remember anything that happened January - March. Presumably just doing the crossword with Edds and the gang and eating Japanese Canteen spicy tofu. That radio show was great craic too.

Did we have any time for making things?

Not a bumper year for making things, between the pandemic, the pregnancy and subsequent baby, the pre-existing child, the job, there wasn’t a lot of time for craft. The things I did make and have photos of are here

Holidays

One holiday got cancelled, but has been rescheduled for next August (welp). The other, a trip to Norfolk with my parents, happened in September. We had hire bikes, and strapped baby C’s car seat to the back of a bike buggy trailer. Then the six of us pootled along quiet country lanes to various beaches, it was heaven. Take me back to rural Norfolk where the roads are empty and the blackberries are abundant.

The garden

Last year I said I was going to try harder this year, and so that’s what I did. The tomatoes were especially good, but I also grew lots of flowers and enough strawberries to feed a toddler. Though the pandemic meant lots of things that would have happened didn’t, it did mean I formed relationships with my neighbours that would never normally have had the time to grow. My row of houses have some quite low back fences, so you can talk to your neighbours but also your neighbour’s neighbours. I had chats, almost daily, with Marlene, Trish, The Other Alice, and Dave and Dangerous Dawn during the March-June lockdown.

Thassit

And that’s that. My 7th year of Yearnotes. The rest are here if you wanted to remember the beforetimes. (2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014). In 2021 I hope we’ll move to Brighton but I want to do it so badly, and there are so many parts to it that are outside of my control, that I’m almost afraid to say it out loud. I’m also going to try and regain some core strength this year, which I gave away freely to have babies but now I’m done with that it’s time to take the long view of my corporeal form which I think means do some exercise.

What’s that baby up to?

Edith is nearly 2. She’s very good. She likes to hold my face and say “look at me mummy…?” and then arrange my fringe for me and kiss me on the forehead. She’s tall for her age. She loves singing and being sung to.

I stopped doing some bad things

This year, maybe more than ever before, I tried to stop doing some things that are objectively bad.

Meat

Oh? Did I mention I’m vegetarian now? [YES YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT IT CONSTANTLY - everyone] I stopped eating meat in July and god I miss meat. I think I’ll stick with it. The facts for me giving up aren’t going to change (it’s unjustifiably bad for the environment), I hope I’ll forget how much I like it one day.

Facebook

I deleted my facebook profile properly and fully. I was only really using it to look up people that I went to school with, which I wasn’t doing because I like them, I was doing because my upbringing in 90’s Britain is so steeped in neoliberal competition that even now, even 20ish years since I left school, I’m still in competition with every single one of my classmates. When I realised that Facebook was basically enabling this behaviour it was pretty easy to delete it.

Disposable plastic

This one turned out to be really hard! I gave plastic free veg a good go but spending half a day a week food shopping just isn’t practical for me, much as I love the dual benefit of no-plastic with supporting Fresh and Fruity in Sydenham. It’s been easier to give up shower gel in favour of soap but really the extent of my lasting changes.

Another year of great content

I still enjoy writing my weaknotes, and some people are regular readers which is so so nice, because I hope and imagine they are getting as much enjoyment out of reading my little blog posts as I do from reading Nat’s, or Phil’s, or Russell’s, or Dan’s. I am using weaknotes to put things somewhere online that isn’t Twitter. I’d like to stop using Twitter entirely as it is, on the whole, making me unhappy. But I haven’t worked out how to stop reading it but still keep my account for occasional work related things.

Making things

There is a google photos album of things I made or grew here Not all the things yet, because I am behind on photographing things. This year I made a TN31 Parka, a pair of cigarette pants, a Wool And The Gang Ruby Rabbit, two Kalle shirts, Mittens for me, Mittens for E and four hats, one jumper, one vest and one skirt which I haven’t written up yet.

Is there anything better than gardening?

God I love gardening. I also love Gardener’s Question Time and Gardener’s World. In the horrifying political landscape is there anything safer, or more comforting, than planting something and nurturing it and enjoying it as it grows? This year the garden was in recovery from last year’s building work, I did manage some strawberries, tomatoes and sweat peas along with a very nice flowerbed in the front. Plenty of room for improvement next year. My bigger house now accommodates more indoor plants which I have tried to be good to, with varying success.

Everybody work work work work work work

I continued my job as Principal Engineer in the Customer Products team at the FT. Within the team, under Anna’s leadership we set out to get a grip on some very flappy undefined things - the out of hours rota, our principles as a group of engineers, bug duty, the feature led team structures, the architecture…

Much of this was very successful. A real testament to telling clever well motivated people: “Make this thing better if you can, figure out some outcomes, actually spend time on it, and see how it goes”. Our out of hours rota was my assigned baby. Maybe content for another blog post, but it took a year and it’s definitely better now and many more people are on it, all of their own choosing and without any pressure from me or the leadership team (I just improved the things around it - on-boarding, publicity, incident resolutions, co-ordination)

I also did some work outside of Customer Products. With a small working group we defined and published our engineering progression framework, which is still not finished but definitely usable.

I also worked with the FT Embrace committee to show a screening of the lecture “White Fragility” which went really well and was HIGHLY NERVE WRACKING.

And finally I worked with the CTO to get him to publish the pay bands for all our engineering roles. I think my input here was gently prodding him over the course of the year, and then in the home straight, working with HR to make sure the comms around it wasn’t too dripping in management speak. Getting those pay scales ready took 2 years. The CTO et al had to work out what they were, and then move everybody who was outside of them (in particular below) up into them. Anyway. Well done everyone on that.

Did u write any code tho?

Oh yes there was some code. About mid year I realised I was quite unhappy with work - I just felt like it was an endless stream of important but, on some level, quite boring tasks. The solution turned out to be spending 10 hours a week doing “technical oversight” tickets, which often involves fixing bugs, assessing third party suppliers, reviewing pull requests.

Holidays

This year was the year of UK holidays. There was Hythe, Sussex, Robin Hood’s bay, Green Man.

I gave a talk

In November I gave a talk at FFConf about Git. It was very fun. Great audience. Loved writing it. Good times. Would be happy to give it again if anyone wants it.

Thassit

There we go then. Another year in the bag. My 6th year of year notes(18,17,16,15,14). 2020 looks like it’s going to be another horrifying and painful year as the UK rearranges itself to get out of the EU. I’ll be working out the balance between doing good things where I find them, reading less twitter, and pottering in the garden.

There were a couple of big things that happened this year. I had a baby! We did some serious building work on our house! I changed roles at the Financial Times!

Let’s get the baby thing out of the way first

Edith was born in January at 3:57am weighing 8lb 11oz. She arrived after a six day long inpatient induction. In an almost dream like twist of events one of my best friends from sixth form college (with whom I had lost touch) turned up as my anaesthetist. After she was born we spent another five nights in hospital because of a suspected infection.

I treasure the memories I have of her birth. I replay them and as they get further away I feel them morphing and becoming fuzzier. Luckily because the induction was so long I had some time to write some really long emails to the few people who knew I’d gone in for it. One day I’ll re-read those and remember it all again fresh.

From the get-go, Edith was perfect. Full of life, furious, soft. So soft. She’s now nearly one and loves climbing, hiding behind things, being chased and eating blueberries.

Her arrival has turned Lachie and I into very emotional people. We have the internal consistency of cottage cheese. From the moment she was born we both just turned to mush.

This was a year of new experiences. At each stage (the birth, being off work, going back to work) I was bracing for it to be awful and it just… wasn’t? The birth was objectively quite bad but at each stage there were lots of nice and proficient people around, and of course Lachie, so I quite enjoyed it. Then being off work with Edith turned out to be a piece of cake and very much aligned with things I already enjoy (loafing around, cuddles). Then going back to work was extremely empowering (more on this later).

Lachie and I did shared parental leave, which I’ve written a whole other blog post about.

House! House! House!

During the summer we spent eight weeks living at my parents house while we had some building work done on ours. We now have a much bigger kitchen and a loft conversion. Getting that done was quite tough going (especially on Lachie who still had to go to work in London). Our house is mostly back together now, and having a kitchen that fits more than two people in is really excellent.

Great content

I started writing weaknotes. These are really for me to help me remember things. There is a small group of friends that I hope are interested in me personally enough to find anecdotes like “Edith did a poo as long as her whole arm” interesting. Though, on reflection, I doubt even my most loyal of friends is interested in that.

I also started doing Instagram videos while pushing Edith around in the pushchair. These came about because I was a bit bored on maternity leave and missed my grown-up friends.

I gave a talk about Tampon Club for International Women’s Day when Edith was about 2 months old. Tampon Club has slowed, largely because I’ve been busy with a baby. But I really should get back to it. Write some blog posts. Send out some stickers. Bulk buy some tampons on Ali Ba Ba.

Making things

This year I didn’t get much sewing done as for most of the year I didn’t have a room to sew in.

I did have a very rewarding foray into screen printing and made some nice, if a little wonky, tea towels. I did this largely while Edith was napping.

I did quite a bit of embroidery, probably because it takes up much less space than machine sewing and is far more portable. I made a mobile for Edith’s room (a lot of which was done in hospital), a picture of a toucan (a lot of which was done while we were away over the summer) and some hanging toys for Edith.

At the end of the year I bashed out two Jack Tar bags for Lachie’s brothers for Christmas. This is such a delightful pattern I’ll probably make it many more times.

There is a google photos album of things I made here

New job

In October I went back to work after about 10 months away for having and looking after Edith. When I went back to work I took on a new role as Principal Engineer in the Customer Products team (that’s the team that looks after FT.com and the apps). I had been leading the Origami team for a while and I was worried I’d be bored when I went back so I wanted a new challenge.

The new role has been very enjoyable so far. Having a baby has changed my approach to work as it has left me much more focussed. Because I have to leave on time I don’t faff around as much as I used to.

I have a new manager, Anna Shipman. Being managed by Anna is pretty amazing to be honest. She strives to be the best she can be at all times and it forces me to try my hardest too.

Pics!

As usual I’ve made a photo album of the best things from 2018, but it doesn’t include any photos of Edith (except one of the back of her head) because we’re keeping her off the big old internet for now. Obviously she was a huge part of my year and also extremely cute, but unless we’re friends on Instagram you’ll just have to take my word for it. The album is here

Being away from work is fine. At first I checked some emails to see what was happening but actually the most stressful way to experience work is through email only because you read things and then cannot take any sensible action to resolve them because that’s somebody else’s job now and they’re probably doing great at it, so you’re just left with the residual adrenaline with nowhere to direct it.

I haven’t signed into Slack at all. Sometimes I want to message a colleague (friend) with something that made me think of them, but then I realize the only way to get hold of them is via Slack so I let it go. Nothing is worth signing in to Slack.

Work

My job this year was really fun. I think a lot of things at the FT finally came together after a lot of people’s hard work in 2016. The Origami team shipped some big changes to our components as a result of some excellent collaboration with the design team and the results on FT.com speak for themselves.

I got promoted to Principal Engineer which I was really happy about. As usual with promotions (for me anyway), I wasn’t really aware that I could be a PE until several people expressed surprise that I wasn’t one already. My mum seemed very proud when I told her which cool.

The Origami team continue to do work that makes me feel extremely good and after a few questions about how exactly we function I wrote about it (at length) over on the Financial Times’ tech blog: Tips for in-house teams in a free market software culture.

Through work I have been enrolled in a mentoring scheme called the 30% club. The scheme is aimed at getting more women into board rooms. My mentor and I talk once a month and so far the conversations have been interesting and helpful. As my relationship to work has just changed drastically it’s good to have someone outside the FT to talk to about what that means and how to navigate maternity leave.

[Now for an incomplete list of things the Origami team did in no particular order…] Shipped new typography and colors, hiring runbook, switched off some old services, all services now multi-region, started rebuilding the registry, many new polyfills in the Polyfill Service and a ToS and Privacy Policy.

Talks

I gave three talks this year, all in the UK. At All Day Hey! in Leeds and Patterns Day in Brighton I talked about how the Origami team works and what tools we provide for people at the FT to use our stuff.

I also gave a talk about the Origami Image Service. The Image Service resizes, crops, filters, whatever, images on-the-fly and practically every image on FT.com uses it. Last year the team re-wrote the service bringing in a third party SaSS to do the heavy lifting of image processing. The talk was about how we did that and how it was working out for us.

Other life things

I turned 30 this year and it was probably my best birthday ever. My team surprised me with a cake with the Origami logo on it, I went away with my friends to The Long Barn in Norfolk and we ate really great home cooked food and played board games, my twin brother sent me a sweater from China with a photo of himself wearing a t-shirt that said “Are we really 30?” on it. Tom got me a subscription to Teen Vogue (which is now out of print)

For my 30th I decided it was time to take up knitting, so Lachie bought me some Wool and The Gang kits (Julia Jumper and these mittens). Turns out knitting is excellent though I’m still not very good at it.

Kyle, Alan, Lachie and I played the whole of Seafall. I don’t recommend it but it did take us about 11 months to complete so worth mentioning.

Nat and I did a course together at Ray Stitch. The best bit was getting to do this kind of thing with a friend. I now have a bright pink pair of trousers and a long coat. We went on to make another jacket together as a gift for @russell, however my main memories of that are getting extremely bad morning sickness towards the end and having to sit down a lot.

I took some holidays too. I visited Hong Kong. It was full of terrible British ex-pats, but I liked the heaped up feeling of the city and I did eat some very good food and go on some very nice hikes. I visited Spain. I had very severe morning sickness and threw up in the sink of the hotel room kitchen a lot. I remember eating some nice crisps though. Lachie and I drove the North Coast 500 in a camper van. There are some nice things to see along that route - dolphins, extremely beautiful beaches, posh castles, run-down castles. Good if you’re out-doorsy but hate packing up a wet tent.

I’ve made an album of the best bits of this year. It’s here on Google photos.

Of course, 2016 wasn’t exactly a brilliant year for the world. I cried when Trump won and I cried when we voted to leave the EU. For me personally, there were some very good points (spoiler alert: got married, got promotedish) and some real lows (after an exceptionally stressful day at work I felt so anxious I threw up in the dark in a car park onto my shoes).

Work

I’m still at the Financial Times. I’m now leading the Origami Team over there which is a brilliant job. The people in my team are all extremely talented and so easy to work with. The remit of the team - to reduce time spent repeating work and standardise design across the FT - still gets my brain fizzing with ideas for long term projects as well as shorter term stuff to help people out around the company. I still get to write a fair bit of code too which I feel very lucky for.

Talks

I did less public speaking this year than in 2015, mostly because in my new role my priorities have shifted a bit and I think there’s less benefit to me doing lots of conference talks.

The best and most fun talk I gave this year was at UXBrighton. It was an explainer on what Git is, and why developers use it. People responded well to the talk and I’d love to give it again as it wasn’t videoed. The slides are here.

I also gave a 7 minute talk at Russell’s Interesting about Tampon Club. This was also really fun to deliver. I love talking about Tampon Club, there are so many funny stories to tell about it. You can see the audio + slides here.

Other life things

Lachie and I got married in February. We did it without telling anyone except our four witnesses. It was extremely fun and deeply unsentimental which made it feel very special. We did it in Lewisham Registry Office which is a grim little building on the main road next to the Hospital. I sewed my own wedding dress obvs. At Lewisham, before the wedding, they give you form to fill out. It’s a bit like a choose your own adventure but for a wedding. Each choice is “how much do you want us to say for this bit” and the options are:

A. Say as much as you can. I want baroque metaphors for love. Turn the solemnity up to 11. This is my one true everlasting union and I need everyone to know it.

B. We’re normal people but please leave in some decorative turns of phrase for my grandmother who has travelled in from Tunbridge Wells.

C. Please keep it as short as possible. We’d have done this online if we could.

Of course we went for option C at every point. The resulting ceremony was so short that we had to sit and chat for a bit at the end because the assistant clerk didn’t have sufficient time to copy our details to the marriage certificate.

After the wedding we phoned all of our relatives who were all somewhere on the spectrum between “pleased” (my parents) to “thrilled” (Lachie’s parents). I didn’t change my name because “Alice Murray” isn’t a significantly more interesting name than my own and I get really great SEO for “Alice Bartlett”.

Other highlights.

(Here’s a Google Photos link to some of these highlights)

Went to Canada for the first time. Was best woman at my best friend’s wedding. Got the bathroom re-done. Made another coat, two shirts, a pair of trousers and a wedding dress. Went to Hythe, Rye and Dungeness. Had a short honeymoon in Robinhood’s bay. Played Pandemic Legacy with Kyle and Alan. Formed Warsaw’s baddest girl gang with Brenna and Mariko. Had an away day in my house. Pizza floatie. Hikes in the Canadian Rockies. All those games of poker. All those Shepherdess breakfasts.