Manual of me
👋🏼 Hello, I’m Owen Blacker #
I use he/him pronouns and I work remotely from Cardiff. I’ve been working as a technologist for around 30 years now; at the moment I am a lead technical architect at the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales. (Views expressed on my blog, socials or elsewhere do not represent the government, the YJB or the MoJ.)
🧑🏼💻 The main things I need #
- Clear expectations
- Space to focus on my work
- Subtitles on during meetings
⏰ How and when I work #
I aim to start around 0900 and will almost always be online by 0930. Lunchtimes are usually 45 minutes or so from around 1200–1230.
I am not very good at noticing when to switch off; I will almost always still be online after 1700 and will usually be offline before 1900. (All of this is UK time, Europe/London.)
I spend a lot of time in meetings, so I will often put a slot in my calendar called “No meetings” so I can try to focus on other things. Please don’t send me meeting requests that clash with other things — especially “No meetings” times — without checking with me first.
Also, I really benefit from getting to know people as actual human beings, especially if I’m working with you a lot. “Water cooler chat” is an important part of a working relationship and, now we’re generally not in the same place as eachother every day, it’s important to find space for the kinds of conversations we would have had while waiting for a meeting room to become free or when we’d bump into each other in a corridor. It just makes it a more pleasant and productive workplace, I find.
☎️ The best ways to communicate with me #
Message me on Slack or Teams. If it’s a longer thing, then either message me a link to a doc or presentation, or email me. (If you need me to look at it quickly, you might want to ping me on Slack or Teams to say you’ve emailed me; I don’t check email as often as chat.)
If we need to have a spoken conversation, then a Teams, Google Meet or Zoom call where I can put subtitles on works best — I find it much easier to understand what I’m hearing if I can also see the words.
I almost certainly don’t have my day-job Slack or Teams on my phone. My phone number is generally on my Slack profile and you can WhatsApp or SMS me a note to check my Slack messages. (Government work should avoid putting too much detail on WhatsApp; as I’m an managed service provider it can slightly complicate FOI matters, so it’s easier just to not.)
Please help me to respect the boundaries I’m setting working from home by not expecting a prompt answer if I’m showing as offline in Slack and Teams. If something is genuinely urgent, then my phone number is in my Slack profile and you can WhatsApp or SMS me; please only make a voice-call as a last resort.
💖 Things I love #
- Meeting requests that have an agenda on them.
- No Hello
- Background music. Silence is sooooooo oppressive. If we’re pairing, I probably have Spotify on quietly in the background.
- This does mean that my headphones are sometimes connected to a different laptop — we’re not allowed to run Spotify on my DfE laptop, for example. Sometimes this means I can take a moment to spot messages or emails having arrived without the sound prompt.
- Davina being here, but not needing too much of my attention and not getting upset when I set her down to type 🙃
😓 Things I struggle with #
- Staying on top of a to-do list. Remembering things. Especially when juggling too many tasks
- Focus — I have untreated ADHD, so I will often tell MacOS to go into focus mode when I need to concentrate on something
- Sometimes, my health, both physical and mental. Sometimes I need time and space to manage living as a disabled person in a capitalist world that isn’t built to accommodate that well.
📝 How I like to receive feedback #
Prompt, informal, constructive, written feedback is always welcome.
If you need to escalate something, then get in touch with who I report to on my engagement, or the client partner at Made Tech, or my line manager at Made Tech. (Views expressed on my blog, socials or elsewhere do not represent Made Tech.) If you don’t know who those people are, then please just ask; I won’t name them on a publicly-available website 😉
🛝 Outside of work… #
I help run the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group; I’ve been an active Wikimedian for over 20 years now. (Views expressed on my blog, socials or elsewhere do not represent WMLGBT+ or any other organisation I am associated with. Obviously.)
I read and watch films and TV a lot. Like a good little autistic boy, I log everything on Goodreads and Letterboxd; sometimes I also remember to blog about them: Blog tag: Book recs, Blog tag: TV and film
While typing this (in December 2024), I have a 2,714-day streak in Duolingo, switching between different languages a bunch. I am fluent in French and can make conversation in German, Spanish and Welsh. I know a handful of words in a handful of other languages.