The quiet weeks

Building in public. Ten weeks in, six to go.

It has been a strange couple of weeks for me. I am trying to figure out why.

I have been quietly working on the Socialheads platform, and the progress has been great.

But it is a bizarre little world I have fallen into. I am here in my kitchen, creating these really cool features (in my eyes at least). Attaching images or documents to messages, safeguarding mechanisms and compliance dashboards. I get super excited with a huge grin on my face. And I look around, and there is just Tony, our rescue dog, glancing at me from the corner of his eye.

I want to explode and explain to everyone how cool this is. Yet it is just me in my little world with Tony.

Many may not relate to it or appreciate it. And don’t get me wrong, that makes sense. It is not flashy, and I get it.

I am thankful to have a great support network. My wife has supported me through every idea and every turn life has taken us through. She still believes in me, and I genuinely would not be the person I am today without her. My son, who lights up my day, my brother, Breda, my sounding board, and many others, including Tony.

Then once in a while I have conversations that kind of jolt me.

The other day I spoke with a registered manager who explained that one of their practitioners builds amazing relationships with young people in care. And once the young person leaves the service, that relationship just ends.

Why? Because often there are no support mechanisms or platforms in place to nurture relationships after care. It is heartbreaking.

Imagine having a support pillar like that in your life, at such an early stage, someone you trust and confide in, only for them to be ripped away from you. It does not make sense.

Now, why has it been strange for me? Perhaps because these things I am building all have a story behind them. Each one is researched, planned and developed to help create new and better stories. Perhaps it is because I am learning to settle my excitement and expectations. Or it comes with the territory, because it is messy and complex.

One thing I can safely say is that what I am building is based on real problems and real people with their stories, the good and the bad. I would like to think this keeps me grounded.

What we built

• Attachments. Photos and documents now travel inside the same safe space as the conversation. Last update I wrote that file handling in a safeguarding context is genuinely complex. It was. It is done, the safe way.
• Flagging. Anyone can raise a concern about a message, in the moment. It goes to the right person, with a full record of what happened next.
• Data requests. A person can ask for a copy of their data from the app. The request lands with the service’s data protection officer, who decides what goes out, and the one month statutory deadline is tracked for them.
• Exports. Supervisors and practitioners can pull records in minutes. Case reviews, inspections, court work.
• Reports and compliance. Managers and data protection officers see what is happening across the service without asking anyone to compile it.
• The site. A refreshed socialheads.co.uk, with our plans and pricing out in the open and the road to onboarding in Q1 2027.

Challenges

The sprint closed at 100 points, against 121 last time. The number is smaller, but the work was the deep kind. Everything this fortnight sits close to the heart of the product: evidence, records, and people’s rights. That work gets the time it needs.

What’s next

Six weeks to go, and time is running short, so priorities are key. This sprint: notifications, My Documents, and localisation and internationalisation, which is a big one. There is plenty more on the list, and the focus now is getting the bulk of the work out.

It is feeling a lot more real now. I am very excited about the stories we might change with Socialheads.