Week 190: Lads' Weekend

It’s been a quiet week post-holiday, I’ve not done a lot at all. While trying to remember what I did this week, I looked at my photos; it’s all cats now so they offered no real clues. We’ve been letting them explore more.

I spent the work week doing some bot management work as well as implementing OpenTelemetry metrics collection in a shared library, it’s been quite fun and the days have flown by.

OpenTelemetry is really cool and it’s going to massively simplify the way we do metrics at the FT. We currently hand-roll all the instrumentation and send metrics manually to Graphite and it’s so much code, I’m excited for the time when we get to archive it all.

I’ve had a lads’ weekend (just me and the two small lads): Charlotte’s gone up north. It’s been nice and relaxed, I had a few local drinks on Friday, went for excellent Yemeni food on Saturday, then chilled out and read most of Sunday.

This week I read The Binding by Bridget Collins which I enjoyed, it’s a romance with some fairly light fantasy elements and it was quite an easy read. Then I read the first book in The Quantum Curators series by Eva St. John. I wasn’t enamoured and found it quite difficult to get into – the switch in character perspective and between third/first person was jarring and didn’t feel well done/intentional. It picked up a little bit but ended flat for me, really just a set up for some more books that I may not read. I’m gonna start The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin after I hit publish on this weeknote.