Andrew Doran

andrewdoran.uk

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Last post: Sep 20, 2026
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Did it do the work?
Sep 20, 2026 · original
Whether you love it or hate it, I don’t think there is any denying that generative AI is an incredible technical achievement. I use Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot multiple times a day for all kinds of different things. But I’ve been struggling with questions about the technology that nobody around me seems readily able to answer. Worryingly — I think — I also rarely come across anyone else asking these questions. In a work context, there is pressure to get on and deploy this technology everywhere in order to unlock business value, but I do wonder how many people who are doing this have a good mental model of how it all hangs together and what’s going on behind the scenes. My background in technology I think of myself as a technologist. I have a degree in Computer Science and have worked in Information Technology in banking and finance for nearly 30 years. From a very young age, wo
Weeknotes #394 — Gordon Brown
Sep 16, 2026 · original
In the middle of this week I got some clarity at work about the process we are following for a significant upcoming change. It put my mind at ease to hear that we’re doing all the right things. It’s still going to take some time, but I’m happy to know what we’re planning to do. This was a week in which I: Learned what a ‘ capstone course ’ is, and started thinking about what projects at work might be a good size and shape for a group of students to tackle. Helped a colleague to start to put together a RACI matrix to try and get a common understanding of who does what among a diverse group of people for a critical business process. Continued to plug away at getting on top of my task backlog, reviewing tasks captured in meetings as well as on our team’s Kanban board. Met with a colleague at a sister company to talk about our approach to audio-visual meeting room technical support and the t
https://andrewdoran.uk/blog/2026/09/12/14055/
Sep 12, 2026 · original
What fresh hell is this?
Weeknotes #393 — Compressed timeline
Sep 9, 2026 · original
Looking back, I’d forgotten that Monday was a bank holiday. It certainly didn’t feel like a four-day week. We’ve known for months that the end of an era is approaching at work, but it still isn’t clear as to what comes next. So while there is plenty to do, and everyone is getting on with their initiatives, there is also a sense of treading water until we know what direction to swim in. This was a week in which I: Continued cleaning up tasks from old meeting notes, getting on top of the backlog. Thought about ways in which we can improve resilience in our team, despite the challenges of the wide geographic area that we cover. Met with our executive committee to hear about the strategy for one of our regions. Had an excellent meeting to talk about the ‘ways of work’ in our team, and changes we can make to try and become even more effective. It was the kind of conversation that leaves you f
https://andrewdoran.uk/blog/2026/09/06/14032/
Sep 6, 2026 · original
Finished reading Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig. This was perfect to read just before bed to take my brain off to another time and place; undemanding but poignant. I love his writing.
Weeknotes #392 — Stealing windscreen wipers
Sep 3, 2026 · original
With this many crisps, it can only be an Album Club. August has been a strange month to work through. The office has been quieter than usual as people have been off for their summer holidays. Unintuitively, the emptier the office is, the harder it is to concentrate, as your ears tune in to individual conversations. I’m hoping that things will get bustling again as the calendar flips to September. This was a week in which I: Got plugged into an AI forum and turned up with a bunch of questions on the status of various initiatives. It got me thinking about how AI is still not being treated as a normal technology, and what we need to be concerned with when an AI feature suddenly shows up in a SaaS application. With consumer tools such as Claude and ChatGPT, it isn’t sufficient to take them through a one-time approval process, as the applications, the models, and the terms and conditions of u
Weeknotes #391 — Road rash
Aug 27, 2026 · original
The temperature dropped by about ten degrees, bringing clouds and even a little bit of rain. I went in search of a pair of jeans for the first time in a couple of months, putting away the shorts for a while. I promise I’ll never complain about regular old ‘mildly warm’ British weather ever again. It’s lovely right now. Work-wise, this week was a challenge. There are some big changes happening that bring some uncertainty, and by the end of the week I felt that I was even further away from knowing what’s coming next than I was at the start. It’ll all get resolved soon. My evenings and weekends feel a little gummed up. I’ve got lots of personal projects that I need to make progress with, but time seems to slip by. “Okay, I didn’t get it done tonight but it’s the weekend soon and I’ll do it then” quickly becomes “I ran out of time this weekend so I’ll have to try and get that done in the eve
https://andrewdoran.uk/blog/2026/08/20/13990/
Aug 20, 2026 · original
Finished reading Steve Marriott: All Too Beautiful by Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier. I’ve been a big Small Faces fan since I was a teenager in the 1990s. I knew the basic story arc of Steve Marriott’s life, but this filled in lots of the detail. The book makes the point that if Marriott had survived a few more years beyond his horrible death in 1991, he would surely have had a big renaissance through the Britpop crowd. An informative read, but I found the writing style really grating in places.
Weeknotes #390 — Garbage can
Aug 19, 2026 · original
I’ve been thinking more about these weeknotes, pondering whether it’s time to explore a different format. Six years ago , I made a note that I was inspired by Ton Zijlstra ’s format, and it’s served me well. But I’ve stopped looking forward to documenting my week as much as I used to. Part of my reluctance to change is that I feel like I have less time than I did before, and that writing more freely will take more of it. Somehow — and I don’t know how — I used to sit down to write, edit and publish on a Sunday night, whereas my routine is now to try and write on my commutes at the start of the following week. Sometimes I don’t finish things off until Thursday. I want to keep up the practice as I enjoy writing; a weeknotes routine forces the discipline of putting sentences together and exercising the writing muscles, and I suspect that my writing is better elsewhere because of it. I look
Weeknotes #389 — Accidental half marathon
Aug 13, 2026 · original
Back to work after being out of the office for a couple of weeks. I’d left myself a reminder to go to the right location, as we’d had a seating shuffle while I’d been away. We had an extraordinary number of people saying that they were cold at their new desks, but, weirdly, the complaints were distributed across the whole office. From the data, we could see that it had been gradually getting colder everywhere in our space over the past few weeks. I’m not sure what the opposite of ‘ boiling frogs ’ is (‘freezing frogs’?) but the desk move seemed to be the psychological trigger for people to notice the temperature dip. A lot of my week was spent catching up with the team, meeting with senior colleagues about various strands of work we need to do, and developing ideas on how we can do things differently and more effectively. On Wednesday night I said goodbye to my eldest son, who was gettin

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