Andrew Doran
Andrew Doran
Andrew Doran
I write here in order to work things out and understand myself better. I write here in order to put things down that I have been carrying around in my head, so I don’t need to carry them around anymore. I write here in order to capture a moment and have something that I can look back on, remembering what I thought and felt at the time.
Latest Posts
Waiting for a train at Chesham tube station. It’s always a bit surreal to jump onto a Metropolitan Line train so far out of the capital. Despite last week being filled with illness and unexpected jobs that consumed me for days, it felt...
Thanks for the tip. A week off work, dominated by having a streaming cold for a few days and a catastrophic failure of my home network drive, resulting in multiple days of effort to get it up and running again. All last week I had felt...
Came across this wonderful video from 1969 with Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross. The performances of the songs are superb, and there is such a lovely warmth between the two of them.
Slide from Hannah Fry’s presentation at the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum A really tough week, mentally and physically. I spent the first two days at the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum, an event that I really like as it is relatively small,...
My first five-day work week for a while, and it was a tough one. Despite twenty years of following GTD and working on simplifying my workflow, in busy periods I end up falling back to a simple list. A mental sweep of all of the things I...
Flying into Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The start of the week was spent travelling back from Kingsville, Texas. Saying that it is 5,000 miles away from Berkhamsted isn’t doing justice to quite how long it takes to travel between them. I was...
Having watched this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix, I have to say that I am loving this version of Formula 1. There is a narrative that the racing is ‘fake’ due to the 50/50 internal combustion engine/battery split and the existence of an...
Kleberg Avenue, Kingsville, Texas A hectic week of travel. On Monday I came back from Austria where I’d spent a long weekend in the skiing town of Kitzbühel with colleagues. On Tuesday I worked from home, with my day packed full of...
Finished reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. A good collection of positive reflections on human nature, debunking many negative apocryphal stories about how people tend to behave in specific situations.
The town of Kitzbühel, Austria, from high up in the mountains. A four-day working week with a long weekend away at the end. I needed it. At the start of the week I noted that I felt as though I was going through a tough period, but one...
Stopped to photograph this phone box on my walk to work, as the construction work means that you can’t open the door. Then I noticed that it’s due to be removed. Last week was tough for no reason. This week was hard, but in a different...
A big chunk of my final year at university, studying for my Computer Science degree, was spent working on a project. That last year counted for 60% of my overall grade, and the project contributed half of that. So the mark that I...
Spotted a cheeky jackdaw sitting on the sign, looking at the passersby. It flew off as I pulled out my phone to take its picture. Note the blue sky in the background — a rare moment of spring amongst days of near-endless rain. A tough...
Having a proud dad moment. On Friday, our eldest son broke his college’s mile record, and later that day ran the 10th best time in school history in the 800m.
This week, multiple people sent me a link to Matt Shumer’s post that Something Big Is Happening. In the post, he sounds the alarm that AI is coming for most white-collar jobs. It’s definitely worth reading: If you extend the trend (and...