2025 Weeknote 18 : Surrounded by water

April 27 – May 4

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, typically focused on work. Learn more about weeknotes here.

Island time

As I write my weeknotes this week, on Sunday morning, May the 4th [insert obligatory Star Wars joke here], I can hear perhaps 15 different mourning doves in the trees and the faint roar of the Atlantic Ocean off in the distance. I shouldn’t be able to hear the ocean, at it’s a few miles away. But the winds are so strong today—20mph baseline winds and gusts to 30mph—that the water is seriously churning.

And so begins two weeks on Ocracoke, a ferry ride away from the rest of the Outer Banks. The wife and I discovered the island during the pandemic (and after 2019’s Hurricane Dorian damaged the community) and this is our fourth trip here. But it’s been 3 years since our last visit. We keep coming back because Ocracoke is less developed than the rest of the Outer Banks, owing to its disconnection from the road system and the higher cost of living. Most of the original island culture, history, and even language are being lost. But there’s a flavor of it still here. And at the very least, the pace of life is slower.

Slower, but not fully disconnected. We still have cell service and Internet out here, but it ain’t fast. I’m planning to work remotely the first week (and parts of the second), and yeah, I can do that in an asynchronous way, but I’m betting Teams or Zoom calls will be… difficult… with a max of 3Mbps down and less than 1Mbps up. Yikes. It was slow 3 years ago, too, and I’m not expecting speedy Internet, but it’s been 3 years, people. I’m already scoping out what free Wi-Fi is in town, in the hopes some of those connections are faster. But probably not.

On Ocracoke, “island time” is enforced. If not by culture, then by Internet bandwidth.

GX Foundry: Season 8 Finale

This week marked the end of Season 8 for the GX Foundry. And rather than summarize everything here on my own blog, I posted (for the first time) a season recap over on the actual GX Foundry blog.

I’ve been meaning to do some variation of this post for probably a year now. But being away from home, with fewer responsibilities this weekend and a rainy day to keep me inside a little longer, I knuckled down and put a post out there.

The teams do a lot of work each 8 weeks, so it’s good to get the word out there for once.

Quick hits from the week

• I spent 3 hours in the dentist’s chair Tuesday afternoon as they worked on 2 teeth—one that had an old filling that fell apart and needed repairs, and the other being a molar that needed to get strip-mined and replaced with a crown. Turns out I have a “delayed” anesthetic reaction, so when the molar started to get the drill I wasn’t fully numb yet. So that was fun. Took more injections and more waiting. In any case, I remain impressed that digital dentistry has come as far as it has, since my dentist 3D designs and 3D mills crowns in-house on a little machine hooked to a PC. Very cool.
• Our Phoenix Project book club continued on Thursday, though this week it had to go online because of a planned protest at the Ohio Statehouse downtown (a lot of teams opted to avoid going to the office). I remain impressed with how this book continues to share nuggets of wisdom 5 years after we first read it. I kinda wish there was a civic tech version of this—some kind of melding of Recoding America, Hack Your Bureaucracy, and The Phoenix Project. That book would be awesome.
• #HIRING — While I’m not hiring anyone for my teams, we are hiring for other teams, and the opportunities are pretty great…
  • We are hiring a Communications Officer. The post is already offline because there was a groundswell of solid candidates when it (briefly) appeared. My hope is we get someone with marketing and communications experience. Our customers do not understand what we do, our funders do not appreciate the value of our work, and we need to change all that.
  • We are also hiring an Enterprise Architect, and this one will be harder to find. We need infrastructure-oriented experience from someone that is a little bit sales engineer, a little bit hands-on infrastructure engineer, and a little bit project manager. You don’t have to have been an Architect already, but you definitely need the smarts and the ability to self-organize while getting jazzed by making a difference at organizational scale. Keep in mind our organization is only 100 people, but the broader county is somewhere around 6,000 people, and our community is over 2 million.

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