Week 97: Engraving

There was a lot of hanging out with Charlotte’s family this week, as her brother is moving to Iraq for a year. We went out to visit her dad’s new house, which needs a lot of work but has “good bones”. We had a BBQ from paper plates which was lovely.

We binged the second season of Never Have I Ever in one sitting. I’m still enjoying it a lot but S2 was maybe slightly less relaxing.

I started reading Tender Is The Flesh, got as far as the end of the Kindle sample, and am not sure if I want to carry it on. It seems great but genuinely quite disturbing, and I’m not a big horror fan. Maybe I’ll pick it up during the day sometimes rather than immediately before bed.

On Thursday I had the best lunch; Glynn and I got falafel and had a very long grumpy old engineer chat. It’s really great to have a good old moan now that we’re back at the same level of seniority, I’m not overseeing his team, and we can just chat shit 😄❤️

Over the weekend we travelled down to Faversham to hang out with Charlotte’s mum. It was also Faversham Hop Festival for the first time since the pandemic, which is always a fun weekend. However, Charlotte got put on antibiotics and was told very explicitly not to drink, so we did the weekend sober.

It was a nice change. We still hung out with a bunch of her school friends but spent more time with her mum. We broke out her new engraving pen and played several games of Scrabble (I won the first with “equal” on a triple word).

We ran our first “Intro to Reliability Kit” session with one of the FT.com teams, I think it went pretty well! The session involved a short presentation, which I’m told was the right level of detail. Then we spent about an hour pairing on one of our systems to see where Reliability Kit could help it be more stable and easy to debug. It’s exciting to see all our hard work start to roll out and benefit teams 😊