Week 93: Good Little Cog
The last time I spoke about the trial (I’m supposed to be a witness) was in January this year when it got pushed to August. The time before that was February 2021 when it got pushed to January. Well, it’s now looming and I’m finding myself in the now-familiar pattern of worry. Re-reading my witness statement and wondering whether it’ll get rescheduled at the last minute again.
I don’t find out what days I need to be in court until the working day before the trial which is really not great for planning what time I take off. Luckily work is great about all this. Anyway, it’s gonna be shit whatever happens 🎉
Despite all that, I’m feeling relentlessly positive about work. My team’s been working on several things that I think will massively improve the observability and reliability of FT.com. Feeling useful and productive is one of the keys to me feeling mentally healthy; I’m such a good little cog.
We’re working on some internal tooling for our team called Reliability Kit (blog post coming soon for you FT people reading 👀). I’m really proud of it.
I started designing a logo for Reliability Kit. I’m not sure if it needs one, it almost certainly doesn’t, but we kinda want to make stickers for the launch and I was really craving doing some drawing one evening. It’s been a long time; I’m out of practice but slowly iterating. Feedback welcome!
On Friday we went to visit Adam, who’s staying in an enormous house in Ealing. He cooked some incredible food which I’m still thinking about. I knew he used to be a chef but, like, wow. Also, I want his knife skills.
My Rust learning is going OK, I’ve slowed a little but mainly because I’ve hit some concepts that I don’t have much of a parallel to map to in the languages I already know. Ownership seemed quite complex at first but I think I’m getting it now. I went off-exercise before reading that chapter and now I know why my attempt at fizz buzz and a few other coding exercises were horrible failures.
As mentioned before, there’s now a book club at work and we’re reading The Pragmatic Programmer. Alice is blogging about the process and wrote up a useful guide on how to do the same at your own company. I really enjoyed our first discussion about Chapter 1 and I made some notes that I might share somewhere on this website later.
Arjun, Alex, and I accidentally ended up going out with Daisy and FT Strategies. It was fun but also maybe a mistake; they know how to drink and I’m glad I saw sense and went home instead of following them to karaoke. Valuable lesson learned: tequila and coke does not make a good replacement for a Jägerbomb.
BeReal has been picking up a lot among people I know. I enjoy it loads! Getting once-per-day unfiltered and uncurated peeks into my friend’s lives feels like social media done right. Seeing images flood in is one of the little joys in my day lately. It does like to go off immediately after I’ve done something interesting and/or I’m exhausted though.
