Week 154: Crayfish

A week of normality, deep rabbit holes, proxies, good lebanese food, several Whitechapel pubs, bad Zipcars, family visits, wholesome childhoods, country walks, and future holidays.

Posted on by Rowan Manning.
Tagged with WorkFamilyWalkingFood

  • Back to work/normality for two weeks. It was difficult getting my brain back into gear but by Wednesday I think I was back to my normal slightly-too-keen-on-my-job self. We’re at the slightly awkward point between quarters where it’s not the most clear what to work on so I’ve appreciated being on support and putting out little fires.

  • I went down a very deep rabbit hole to try and understand how some of our routing works between the CDN and the individual microservices that make up FT.com. So far it’s resulted in a PR to the proxy we’re using and learning far more than I intended about how the Node.js request–response cycle works. Worryingly, I think I might now know the most about this part of our stack 😬

  • On Saturday we met up with Gallal to make the most of us being neighbours again briefly. We went for some great Lebanese food nearby and then a mini crawl through some of Whitechapel’s excellent pubs. We didn’t get trashed and just had some nice chats. In the Blind Beggar, one of the pub cats recreated a meme for us:

    A comparison of the Smudge meme and a pub cat. Both are sat at a table looking unhappy with a plate in the foreground

  • On Sunday I hired my worst ever Zipcar (automatic, very weird gear shifts, “infotainment screen” broken, dirty) to go and visit my family. I was my mum’s birthday and I spent a lovely day with her and my brothers, with a short visit to see my grandma. It was the nicest family time I’ve had in ages.

  • A crayfish visible at the bottom of a very clear stream.

    We went for a walk around Shillington (where I spent most of my childhood). It’s a small sleepy village – there’s no reason to drive through it to get anywhere so it’s very quiet.

    We spotted a couple of crayfish in the stream that runs through the village, me and my friend Tim used to catch them and annoy our parents by traipsing river mud through our houses.

  • The next month is gonna be super busy, I’ll be writing weeknotes from Melbourne, Sydney, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Phuket 😅 I’m super excited but I don’t feel rested from our last trip yet. Spread out your annual leave, folks.

    The FT allows you to buy up to 20 extra days of annual leave per year for reduced pay, meaning I will have had 50 days off in 2023 (as planned). This is my first year doing it and I’m definitely gonna buy the max every year from now on.

    We can’t afford such a lot of far-away holidays every year though, we’ve burned through a lot of savings (probs inadvisable) and have had to willfully ignore any carbon footprint guilt 😬