Week 70: 🇺🇦

I don’t know what to say about Ukraine. I’m flitting between avoiding news, just to be able to get things done, and doom-scrolling. Alex covered this better than I could. I try to keep these weeknotes relatively news-light because they’re mostly there to help me process what’s going on in my life, but it’d be weird not to highlight the impact this is having. As with Alice’s note, there’s a definite vibe shift below.

I’m enjoying the office. A couple of times recently I’ve had excellent work and personal chats with colleagues that just would never happen fully remote. I might try switching to twice a week soon.

Nobody’s masking up anymore, apart from in the office. Still feels very weird seeing naked mouths everywhere.

Our friend Andy is moving to Finland in March very close to the border with Russia 😬 we went to Birmingham for the weekend to see him off. I love a night out in a city where everything’s closer together, we pub crawled and then did karaoke until 3 am. I managed not to pull my usual stunt of falling asleep in the pub because I need my beauty sleep. The train journey home was not good.

What was good was coming home to our new mattress being set up (well done past Rowan and Charlotte). We both quite like a firm mattress and we splashed out on a Simba Hybrid® Luxe, I had the best night’s sleep since I can remember. Turns out all I needed was ten layers of patented Simba technology.

I spent a lot of my free time this week revamping some of my open-source libraries. Most of them were kind of in a state of abandonment, with hundreds of Dependabot PRs open and upgrading everything felt like a monumental task. I also wanted to simplify my build setup by retiring my old shared Makefile and moving everything from a mix of Travis CI and CircleCI to GitHub Actions.

• In this case, the solution to having too much open-source was obvious to me: create a new open-source tool. I spent a bit of time working out what standards I wanted for my Node.js libraries and codified them into a simple command-line tool that I can run in a repo to validate and then auto-fix a lot of issues.

• I’m super pleased with it, and the little bit of up-front investment means that 16/34 of my Node.js projects have been overhauled with relative ease, and 6 more have been archived because I don’t need them anymore. I’m still at ~220 Dependabot PRs, but that’s down from 500 💪

• I’m really happy with the improvements to my standard way of writing open source JS projects:

  • Everything has a contributing guide and code of conduct

  • Everything uses main instead of master as a default branch

  • My published npm packages are smaller because I have a far better .npmignore

  • I’ve switched away from Make in favour of npm.scripts

  • I’ve disallowed a bunch of dependencies that I either no longer know how to use, or they’re owned by Facebook (bye Jest)

  • Everything has consistent and well thought out GitHub Actions

• Interestingly, now that I look back over the week, knuckling down and churning through a lot of repetitive and well-defined work was 100% me trying to cope with the news.