August 2026
It’s been a busy month - with family events, a date night, a meetup, a camping trip and reading. I delivered some client projects, so now have some client availability, and an exciting new research project on forestry to share.
We started the month with a trip to Kirkcudbright to visit my parents. It was nice picking fruit and veg in the garden and relaxing. Jack had the nursery stuffed toy “pet” with him, so we took photos of our trip to stick in the scrapbook.
Back home in Edinburgh, I took Jack up Blackford Hill to watch the eclipse. It’s great to be able to share events like these with him. He’s now at the age where he is interested in the world and starting to remember facts. We’ve spent a fair while this month discussing the basics of volcanoes.
I was pleased to take Jack on his first camping trip over to the Pillars of Hercules Campsite. We recently bought a Tern cargo e-bike to ferry both kids around. I removed one of the child seats, stashed the tent and some clothes on the back, then cycled a 140km round trip to Fife. It was a lot of fun, and hopefully the first of many more trips. I consider this a proof of concept, and it worked well! I added photos, links to stops and the GPX to my journal.
At the end of the month, H and I headed to The Waterboys gig in Glasgow. Just under a year ago H had been listening to The Waterboys whilst pacing around the car park at the maternity unit. Rory arrived a short (and dramatic!) twenty minutes later. It was good to bookend the first year of his life with this music, and nice to have a date night. We celebrated Rory the next day with family - it’s been a year of relentless sleeplessness and joy!
Telaco and StandingWire
Over the past few months I’ve delivered work for two main clients, the products are now in a sales phase, so I have availability for new work. I have been updating my LinkedIn, tapping my network and going to events like The Founders Meetup. I’ve always appreciated introductions and referrals from my network, so please do give me a shout if you or someone you know is in need of a technical audit, prototype or fractional CTO work. More details of what I do are on my business website at telaco.com.
In July I decided to look for new opportunities in addition to client work. I usually spend a lot of time talking to software people, so now I want to spend time talking to non-software people. I also have a preference for local industry, so I can physically meet people and see how things are done. To start, I needed to develop something small that I could use as a conversation opener, or proof of concept.
I made a list of significant Scottish industries that had some form of open data, and forestry stood out to me as an industry that had some potential opportunities. I built StandingWire - a new interface and enhancement of the open Woodland Creation and Felling Register. I posted on LinkedIn asking for contacts, and have already had research calls and meetings with people working in different roles. I have posted a first set of questions to the Telaco blog and will do more as the research calls progress. I am starting to hear some patterns in the complaints and frustrations that are discussed, with some ideas in the pipeline. People feel the register interface is clunky, data is often hidden in case file PDFs, and it’s difficult to track. I’ve updated StandingWire to extract hidden data, and provided a nice search interface with bookmarking. Across the acquisition, planting, maintaining, felling and selling pipeline there seem to be several pinch points where it takes several hours to assemble data, which could be improved by better workflow tooling.
A big thank you to everyone who has spoken to me so far. If you or someone you know works in forestry and would be willing to speak to me for 30 minutes as part of my research then please do give me a shout!
Reading
This month I finished:
- The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann, really enjoyed this as part of the Ten Historical Novels reading list I’m working through.
- You Can Just Do Things, Cate Hall
…and started:
At some point I might post some notes on Goodreads, but most of my focus this month has been on StandingWire.
Until next month! 👋
