2025 Weeknote 40 : The journey of 170 miles starts with 30 miles

September 29 – October 5

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

I’m back from a short vacation, catching up. In this weeknote I have a few professional items, but most of it is recounting my recent vacation in California, complete with photo galleries and a couple videos for fun.

Professional weeknotes

• We completed an annual update on disaster recovery planning this week. I’ve had exposure to DR planning for years, and I have to admit, no company — not a single one — has really taken it fully seriously and invested the cash and time required to make it effectively foolproof. It’s super-expensive to do DR “right” and I haven’t met a leader yet willing to spend that much on an insurance policy. Truth is, we have a reasonable ability to respond to typical “disasters,” given the plans we’ve outlined—one I would say is a fair balance of time and money spent vs. recoverability. But I also know if a true and major disaster hits there’s gonna be a lot of frustrated folks that made assumptions and never asked questions about DR. Oh well… that’s been par for the course in my career for 30 years now.
• We had a great culture refresh meeting (of sorts) with our Delivery Services team this past week (that includes project management and business analysis). Got some great feedback on several items, including our Consult > Analyze > Deliver (CAD) model and how to make some “2.0” improvements.
• Had some oddly negative leadership interactions this past week that I’m chalking up to lunar cycles or something. And that was both up and down the chain. Obviously won’t get into details here, but it’s something I’m watching and that may change my approach on a few things. Kinda feel like I had experiences like our teams talk about from time to time—where they have noted leaders can be too negative.
• A conversation on Friday means I’ll be getting dragged into figuring out how to help an agency make good software choices for a major app overhaul that’s been 3 years in the making. While my teams won’t own the product, we want to consult with them on how to make some good choices. I probably should have kept my mouth shut, but knowing the decision will reverberate 10+ years into the future and involve an agency, a lot of taxpayer money, and local vendors… it’s worth the “extra” effort.
• Finally, I’m pushing for a more productive conversation around the work our teams do around construction projects. Basically we’re being asked to hold off on deploying technology into new facilities until later in the process. But we know if we do that it will lead to construction delays and a rash of finger-pointing that will serve no one. So… we have to find some way to hash out an updated understanding around construction projects with the relevant teams. Construction projects are always delayed, so adding more delays won’t make anyone happy. Sometimes keeping things simple is complicated.

Professional links

Not much to share this week, except a couple links related to ongoing thinking / talking about our teams’ structural future.

While reading and re-reading some articles on the squad model, one of them called out how Spotify abandoned the model years ago and there are substantial deficiencies in the model. That writer pointed to 2 alternative resources to consider, both of which made sense to me because I already knew them:

• Shape Up, from 37signals (makers of Basecamp, etc.). This is a “book” we’ve looked at over the last couple years and it resonates for us, but we haven’t put the full model into practice, in part because it’s not written precisely to our situation, with some originally-written software, and some COTS packages we customize. Still, good to see another vote for this resource.
• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology for Fast Flow of Value (second edition). I bought this book a few years back, after it was originally published in 2019. But they just released a second edition last month with updates. This one is a more comprehensive look at how to structure teams around the “flow” of value from your teams to your customers. It respects some of the ideas of the squad model, but appears to be more flexible. I think this book will serve as the root of our planning, and I’ve already asked our HR team to purchase several copies so a reading / working group can come together and thoughtfully design our next phases. This might even work for our entire organization (if any other part of our leadership team is willing to spend time thinking beyond the day-to-day challenges, which can be very hard to do).
  • Amazon listing (paperback and Kindle editions)
  • Publisher website, including assessment tool and training / consulting offers

Personal weeknotes

This week it’s all my California trip updates — from the past 2 weeks — all in one. The trip officially started on September 24 and ended on September 30 (right before the federal government shutdown, thankfully). The hike portion of the trip started on Thursday, September 25.

California Coastal Trail: Day 1

After flying into SFO and transiting over to Half Moon Bay (via BART, Caltrain, and SamTrans bus), we had a nice dinner, settled in, and got some rest. That was basically “Day 0” for us.

The next morning was Day 1 and after a breakfast at our little Inn, where we ended up talking to a retired judge and his wife from Charlotte, NC for longer than expected, we packed up and walked out the door. We walked straight down to the Pacific and turned right (north).

We then walked somewhere over 10 miles on bluffs overlooking the ocean, into neighborhoods, business districts, along the busy and iconic Highway 1, and then up to higher bluffs and through neighborhoods that had been damaged in past earthquakes and slides into the sea.

We ended up at Moss Beach, checking into an Airbnb for the night, pretty tired but energized that we had figured out the trip and made it that far. Day 1 was fairly easy, even though it was the one that had us walking the most miles. It was going to get worse after this, but we didn’t know that.

California Coastal Trail: Day 2

Day 2 was a bit of a “split” day, where we started the hike, stopped at a bakery cafe for a break, then took the bus to get through a section that would have either (a) taken us a thousand feet up the mountains, only to drop us back down again, or (b) forced us to walk directly alongside the highway, with sheer walls on either side—a dangerous proposition.

So a quick 5-min bus ride took us from the edge of Moss Beach to the Devil’s Slide recreation area, created after past storms and earthquakes had repeatedly destroyed sections of Highway 1 that clinged to the side of the mountains. Several years ago California decided to punch through the mountains with a pair of tunnels, then re-open the damaged sections of old highway as a recreation space where people could bike and hike without having any traffic around.

After Devil’s Slide, we dropped into the southern end of Pacifica, grabbed some lunch, and continued along the beach and bluffs, crossing over a big hill to reach Rockaway Beach, where we stayed the night in a refurbished classic motel directly on the ocean.

This was a shorter day, but still tough, as my wife’s feet began to give her trouble. More on that coming up.

California Coastal Trail: Day 3

This was the toughest day mentally and physically, and it ended our coastal hike 1 day early.

We started off from the motel in Rockaway Beach, heading up the big Mori Point hill just to the north. This gave great views of the north side of Pacifica, and a refreshing breeze from the ocean.

We descended to the beach in this part of Pacifica, continuing north to the Municipal Pier. Once there, we headed inland, intending to catch a bus to head north, since the coastal trail disappears after this part of Pacifica, and you have to get north to Mussel Rock Park to resume the hike (unless you like walking along busy roads and in suburban neighborhoods).

But there was a problem we didn’t anticipate. There was a massive street fair in this part of Pacifica. Called “Fog Fest,” this major even shutdown roads in all directions and made it impossible to escape on a bus. We had to hike out of the “blast radius” of the street fair and summon an Uber to escape. And that took forever, too.

After we got out of there, we took a break to get some excellent fish-and-chips at a local place that’s been around since 1965. Then we got another Uber to make it to Mussel Rock Park, where you can walk down to the Pacific, literally crossing the San Andreas Fault in the process.

Once down to the beach, we hiked north. And hiking on the sand is… a challenge. Plus, it was unclear to me where we could ascend off the beach to get back into town when we were done. All the while my wife’s feet were failing—she was in pain and needed to rest more and just end the hike.

By 5pm we were headed up the bluffs and… she took a hard fall—hard enough to trigger her Apple Watch and ask if we needed emergency services. Sadly, even if we had said “yes,” we were far from any road and would have been nearly impossible to rescue, short of a helicopter.

Anyway… after resting a bit and taking stock of the situation, she was ultimately okay, aside from sore feet and a bruised ego. We mustered on, got away from the beach and bluffs, and caught an Uber into San Francisco.

We didn’t return to the trail after this.

Video: Walking the beach north of Mussel Rock Park

San Francisco: Days 4 and 5

After a tough Day 3 on the trail, and with my wife’s feet failing, we opted to take it easy for a couple days and hang out in San Francisco—a city we visited several times while living in Alaska.

We took a ferry trip to Tiburon. Rode the Cable Cars multiple times. Did a bit of shopping at the (rare) Patagonia store. And like trashy tourists we even ate at what may be the world’s highest Cheesecake Factory, 8 stories above Union Square (forgive us—it was really close to our hotel and we were tired!).

And while in San Francisco, watching hundreds of Waymos drive around the city, we were intrigued and took the plunge (video below). That was a revelation—the software drives really well, easily beating a typical human driver, and the sensors are good enough to “see” everything and even predict what’s coming around a building next. Just a remarkable achievement. So we rode in multiple Waymos over a couple days, and geeked out every single time.

Video: A bit of our first Waymo ride

Summary thoughts

• The California Coastal Trail is a great idea. But to call it a “work in progress” is generous. We walked sections of trail that weren’t even official parts of the CCT yet, but were actually nicer than sections that were official. If the intent is to create a Camino-like experience or to encourage through-hiking akin to the Pacific Crest Trail… oh, man. Good luck, guys. You’re not even close.
• The goal of our trip was to test out our gear ahead of going to Portugal and Spain next year, and confirm whether we are up to this kind of trip. The results:
  • The gear worked out great. Packing videos and articles for the Camino de Santiago were instrumental in getting us to pack accurately and lightly. We have a few adjustments before heading to Europe next April, but not many.
    • That said, I will be getting a different backpack for the Camino. I had to custom-order a Photon pack from ULA due to my unusually-long torso and the need to carry 30L or less on this kind of hut-to-hut hike.
  • This hike was harder than the Camino Portuguese in two ways:
    • First, the CCT we took involved a lot more elevation changes than we will see in Portugal. Yes, there are versions of the Camino (like the Primitivo and the Norte) that are more like the CCT, with backcountry ups-and-downs aplenty. But we’re taking the littoral route out of Porto, which is much, much flatter.
    • Second, the CCT, at least in the section we walked, was poorly marked. The Camino is so popular and so integral to the tourist economy in Portugal and Spain it’s very, very well marked. Being badly marked added stress for us, despite extensive research and planning. Plus, several CCT sections were heavily separated, interrupting the flow of the hike.
  • My wife’s feet were not up to the task. We needed to know this, because now she can work on it in the months ahead and we can do a much better job training.
• San Francisco still has its classic homeless problem, and it’s a little worse than we remember from the early 2000s, but not dramatically worse. My brother—who hears the siren call of Fox News claiming San Francisco was a drug-addled violent hellhole—kept asking whether we felt safe. It was fine. Not my cup of tea for daily life, but it’s manageable if you pay attention and know where you’re going.
• The Waymo cars are a blast! I could ride in those all day. I wish they could figure out how to get them in other cities. But honestly, without Google footing the bulk of the bill, I don’t know how this kind of service begins to make real money, and I don’t know how well the LiDAR would work in rain, ice, snow, and other conditions that San Francisco and Phoenix just don’t see.
• The HOVERAir drone was neat and did a good job, but it’s so noisy I’m a little embarrassed to fly it around any other people. Kinda like how I don’t want to use a selfie stick around anyone, either. I want to blend in, not stand out.

And I guess that’s it for now. We got back late Tuesday of this week, and I was back at work on Wednesday, a bit bleary-eyed from the 3-hour jump from Pacific time.

Meanwhile, my parents visited over the weekend for a couple hours, and we just started to settle back into our routines. I hope the coming week will get things back to normal (more or less).

About this week’s header photo