Matthew Knott

Last week was one for reflection, this week is all about optimism.

If you read my blog, you'll know I recently lost someone very special to me. They say you should celebrate someones life, but I don't think I was the only one who found it hard to celebrate when it felt so unjust that she was gone.

What I did do is reflect on her life, and compare it to mine in terms of how she lived, her values, and strength of character. One thing I've learned is that out of bad can come good.

Aside from Juliana's funeral, last week we lost one current team member, and one potential team member.

This means more work for those of us left, with training and development capacity back where it was a year ago. Our department manager took me for a coffee Friday and we talked about the challenges we're facing and future directions, and as we discussed the personel loss, we realised that this is a great oportunity to trim some fat. There's plenty we do that could be dome more efficiently, and talking through some of our processes, it's clear we need to sit down and see where we're wasting time doing things that are someone else's job, or where there's functionality we could give the user control of.

In a way it's galvanized us, as is often the case when you're up against it. Capitulate or thrive, right?

This weekend, I've spent lots of time with the kids, on the back of discovering what a truely amazing mother Juliana was. It's been great, Michael and I played loads of football and did other pottering about outside (we now have a tortoise solar light and a cactus he picked from the DIY places we went to). Charlotte has started walking, in the last two days she's really come on, taking loads of steps now. She can walk from the front room to the kitchen without holding on to anything. They've both been a marvel this weekend.

Today was great as well, one of the guys from work came round with his family. This is pretty much the first time I've had a visitor who wasn't related since we moved in (that's not a dig at anyone, I've not been to see anyone since moving so fair's fair). Everything just feels like life is getting back to the way I want it to be, I feel like emotionally I'm starting to heal after the horrors of the last few years.

Tonights been good too, I had some time to myself so implemented php oauth so that I can auto post to twitter again, and converted a ton of code into php classes, which I've never touched before so that was good. PHP classes are on of those things I've been scared to look at, but actually are a simple when you look at it with a clear head.