2025 Weeknote 23 : Buen Camino

June 2 – June 8

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

5 CISO interviews

We completed 5 first-round interviews this week for a new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), plus 5 follow-up chats. Security is a hot field and people jump around a lot, so I’m surprised we haven’t had to do this until now. But our CISO is leaving for a faster-growing county further south.

There were three frustrations with the interviews:

• We were not effectively prepped for the interviews, so we bumbled a bit on the first couple in approach and in terms of themes. I’m a stickler for hiring processes, so… I noticed.
• The interviews were only 1 hour long. I know these are first-rounds (and we do at least two rounds), but it’s an executive position, so… let’s spend some extra time. My preference is for 90 minutes in both interviews. (Again, I work the interview process pretty hard.)
• Finally, who the hell thinks they are so important they deserve a 5, 6, 7, or even 8-page resume? WTF? All the finalist candidates did this! You want me to read all this crap? Yeah, I know you’re writing for keyword-focused AI-driven platforms. But we hand-review all applications—no AI tools involved. I don’t care what your experience level is, get your resume down to 2 pages max. And if you can’t, that suggests you don’t know how to get to the point and/or you don’t care about my time. Not cool.

We’ll continue interviews in another week because our chief HR person is out of office for a bit. Hopefully we’ll have a new CISO on board in late July.

Boardroom drama

Ugh. Our board of elected officials made the first bit of hiring trouble in 6 years this past week, standing in the way of hiring 1 position that we very much need. All because they didn’t understand what a communications person does—and we failed to explain ourselves up front.

I was reminded of the recommendation from Hack Your Bureaucracy to “do the work outside the meeting.” We didn’t do it, and now the hiring is delayed a month (because the board only meets monthly). Feels kinda like an unforced error.

We’ll get it fixed in July (or if we don’t… whoo boy that’ll be some real drama), and hopefully our new comms person can start sooner than usual.

Why would we need a comms person?

By the way, our communications needs are… unusual compared to most of our agency peers. They all provide services directly to the public, so they have promotional needs and often hire “Public Information Officers” to deal with the public and press. We don’t do that.

But those agencies are our “customers” so we need to “market” to them in a couple ways. First, we need to explain to them what we’re doing all the time—they deserve to know where their money is going. Plus we need them to raise their own tech game as our core technologies keep changing. And finally, we actually have to win them over as customers in the first place. Our agencies can drive a lot of independent action that can run counter to our goals. We need to keep them on board as customers. To do that, they need to know why we’re a good source of tech talent and services.

Dental distraction

Had fun at the dentist this week again! This was another crown on the left, plus some touch-up work on the recent crown on the right. (It is unnerving to have a dentist use a drill to touch up a crown’s shape without applying any local anaesthetic.) This time I did the appointment in the morning (usually I go for the afternoon), then went to work after that, with a numb left side of my face. But as the anesthesia wore off, I ended up in a lot of post-op pain, and couldn’t concentrate by the early afternoon. So I just headed home to take pills and sit quietly. I’ll stick to end-of-day appointments from here.

Oh, and by the way… we have excellent health insurance overall. But no one has good dental insurance. I’ve dropped $1,300 this year, post-insurance, for one filling correction and two crowns. Yeah, it could have been worse, but still… it would be nice if dental stuff was covered like medical expenses.

Future thoughts

I’m still thinking about the future of our teams, and want to engage everyone on staff to collect their thoughts and ideas. It feels like a refresh is needed, and I think that feeling is spreading.

We’re still waiting on recommendations from of a volunteer crew from USDR, too. Those will be very interesting. Though I do wonder whether we might change our focus a bit before the results come back.

Meanwhile, I and a colleague had a good discussion this week with a key vendor of ours about some upcoming AI-based services we might add to our public-facing web properties. We’re not ready yet, but we know the political pressure will grow to add “chatbots” to things, at the minimum for public optics (a press release). But if the AI tools can be developed in a truly meaningful way—and there were some interesting ideas shared with us—they could actually be pretty great. We’ll see.

2026: Camino de Santiago

Speaking of the future, my wife and I finally made the decision this week: our next major vacation will be walking the Portuguese coastal version of the Camino de Santiago in spring 2026. We will fly to Porto in northern Portugal sometime in April or May and start our Camino there, walking roughly 170 miles to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.

This will take a bit more than 2 weeks to walk, and then we need prep and recovery time, so a total of about 3 weeks away. We don’t have time to walk the most popular route (the Camino Frances), which typically takes 35+ days, and we didn’t want to just section-hike parts of the Camino del Norte. My wife, it turns out, is a completionist so we need to walk one of the major routes start-to-finish, and the walk from Porto to Santiago fit the bill. We will use the Coastal variant of the Portuguese Camino mostly for the improved scenery.

We have watched countless YouTube videos (and will watch many more) to learn everything, and now we’re studying websites and getting a book or two. At first I thought we might use a tour company, but it’s not that hard to plan and book your way through the Camino, and it will save thousands of dollars doing it ourselves.

Though we want to fill up our Camino passport start-to-finish from Porto, we are not doing the fully classic experience. We will forgo staying in albuergues if we can avoid it, instead spending extra cash to stay in private hotels, pensiones, and so forth. We’re just too old for the dormitory / bunk bed / hostel experience. 🙂

For the rest of 2025 and into 2026 we’ll start physically training, trying out different gear and doing test-packs, and just keep dreaming about getting back to Europe and participating in what has become a major cultural touchstone in the West, with nearly 600,000 people walking some form of Camino each year.

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