Week 6: Pointy Tree
We started making a Christmas cake! Yes I know it’s a bit late, but really it already smells delicious. Also when you feed a Christmas cake it’s wrong not to have a little bit of the brandy.
I released a beta of Audrey, which is the first useful side project I’ve worked on in many years. It’s a feed reader and I’m really proud of it. What’s a feed reader, I hear some of you ask? Well I also wrote a little blog post which explains: I like RSS. I built Audrey to encourage me to read more, and it’s working.
I’m trying to do Advent of Code this year, it’s a daily code challenge leading up to Christmas. I’ve managed six days so far and it’s a nice way to kick my brain into gear in the morning. Some of the puzzles are a joy, some are horrible and probably far easier to solve if you have a Computer Science background. I just go ahead and nest 3 loops.
That's a lot of point It’s definitely Christmas when you put up a tree. Ours is really really pointy; the point is like a good third of the tree. We couldn’t find the coloured lights I bought last year so there’s a more muted gold/green theme going on. We listened to Christmas songs, which masked the cursing from many pricked fingers.
I said I was reading more, here are some good things I read this week:
Making Moves: How These Black Women Made The Switch from Junior to Senior Engineer - thanks Keran and Jennifer for the POCIT recommendation.
Meet The Black Women Trying to Fix AI - good overview with lots of further reading. I read this just before finding out that Google fired Timnit Gebru, which is infuriating.
Engine Room 2020: going virtual - Sarah writes about running our internal tech conference fully remote for the first time. The conference itself was amazing this year and there are some good tips in this post.
I didn’t watch a single Christmas film this week, maybe I overdid it in late November 🤔
Next week is my last week at work before I’m off for Christmas. I didn’t intend on saving so many holiday days, but it’s just how this year worked out. I’m feeling a bit of last week panic, mostly because I still have 12 peer reviews to write as well as making sure the more important things on my to-do list are ticked off. I need to get better at dropping things that aren’t important.
I wrote “Christmas” 10 times in this weeknote. Goodbye 👋 I’m going for a walk.
