I’ve been trying to divest as much as possible from US-owned tech lately so I started trying to migrate Yeehaw from Render to my little EU-owned VPS. Because I’m me, I ended up starting to rebuild the whole thing with some newer Slack features and it’s been fun.

I ate several tomatoes and didn’t suffer from terrible shits 🎉 they weren’t high high risk. I’ve missed tomatoes and now I have all the ingredients I need for a pizza. The reintroductions will continue, next up is either soy or some kind of bean so I can nudge myself back towards a more vegetarian diet.

Work is an equal blend of very fun (big migration, getting to learn a lot) and intensely infuriating (top-down decision-making, AI). I wish the market was better and contained more jobs where I could work 9–5 and take 50 days of holiday.

On Friday I attended a couple of hours of union rep training and it was super interesting. It left me feeling energised and more knowledgeable about employment law. It’ll do for now until I can do the proper two day training and I feel more able to advise our growing membership 👍 (it doubled in the last year).

For my mental wellbeing I have to believe the AI bubble will burst relatively soon. Luckily for me, many economists agree. Not sure what’ll shake out of it, probably something vaguely useful but orders of magnitude more expensive.

Watched the latest Bridgerton, isn’t it silly but lovely?

Adam was in London this week so I saw him a few times. I stuck to shandies and have been very sensible to try and bring my gut back to the good levels it was at pre-holiday. As a result, I haven’t reintroduced any new food for a week, apologies to those who are desperate for news on the condition of my bowels.

Dungeons and Dragons remains one of the best hobbies that exists. I ran session three of my two-part adventure (oops) on Wednesday and it went well I think! I killed off the NPC my players had spent the most time with and then killed another one accidentally 😬 it’s all coming back to me though, I let myself improvise a little more now I’m more comfortable running sessions again.

We went to a space thing at St Martin-in-the-Fields with Luke and it was bang average. We went for vietnamese food afterwards and I was very pleased to be able to eat pho.

Charlotte was in Birmingham on Saturday and I decided to spend some of my day trying to recreate a Sausage & Egg McMuffin. It went astoundingly well first time, I surprised myself, sage and thyme is what makes it taste right and it was so close but also maybe better because the egg was pretty good.

The only thing to improve would be the hash browns, I didn’t squeeze enough liquid out so they were a tad soft in the middle. I have since bought some cheesecloth so I can do it properly next time.

I spent a lot of the rest of the weekend noodling about with Easypanel on my VPS (thanks Kara, it’s so great) and migrating some projects there. I also did some modernising of some of my open source libraries in preparation for dropping Node.js 20 support in April.

Oops I meant to write this weeknote on Monday but I was too busy doing D&D prep. Then I was supposed to write it earlier this evening but I was too busy learning Rust. Staying busy. It’s just turned Wednesday.

D&D is a nice distraction from everything, a chance to step out of a world of AI hype and just be creative for the fun of it.

Learning Rust is a nice distraction from everything, a chance to step out of a world of AI hype and just write some stuff for the fun of it (have we been here before?).

This week I learned that a 13 year old open source project will be made private so that the project can try and deliver things quicker and better with AI. The future!

So that’s been the first half of this week which I’m not even here to write about. Let’s talk about gut health and Germany.

Eating almost solely meat, potatoes, and bread for a week is not great for you. My normal gut issues reversed during my time in Germany and I craved vegetables. This isn’t me throwing shade at German cuisine but more on my poor planning – I introduced mostly meat and carbs before going there.

It was a fun but tiring week. Carnival in Bonn and Cologne is pretty wild but in a fun happy way rather than the intense way I was expecting. We dressed as Bunte Eier on Thursday. On Saturday, I dressed in an inflatable frog costume, an homage to the Portland Frogs.

The frog was a bit of a nightmare to get around in, it fogged up a lot, but I made a lot of friends (frogs and humans). I made fewer friends by sicking up, which I blame on a slightly-too-enthusiastic reintroduction of alcohol to my body.

I finally had an appointment with a doctor and have been referred to a gastroenterologist, so that’s great. I’ll book the appointment in once I’m back from Germany.

I prioritised my food reintroductions around a mix of stuff that will be commonly available but also low(ish) risk items that unlock a lot more dishes generally. I can beef and pork (not that I often do, just low risk), I can eat onions, and I can eat dairy. Those last two are big and I’m pleased they don’t seem to be the cause of my gut issues 👍

Having milk in coffee/tea again sparks a lot of joy, coconut milk just isn’t the same.

On Wednesday I DMed the second session of our little Dungeons and Dragons adventure, I had loads of fun and everyone kinda slipped into character more comfortably. The group fought an Owlbear and decided against killing it (eventually), it was fun to see them resolve a combat less violently but also meant they didn’t feel guilty when they found out the Owlbear was being magically influenced. I love this game.

We’re in Bonn with Gallal, Luke, and Adam and it’s been fun so far. We’re in a weird little apartment where the kitchen is in one of the bedrooms.

Yesterday we took a train down into the hills south of the city and walked through a lot of vineyards. We found a wine vending machine quite far out of town but it had been vandalised. We stopped off in an old monastery that’s now a winery. Delightful. I ate some Flammkuchen.

Reintroductions have been coming thick and fast. I can have eggs now, to no ill effect. Bread and potatoes make me very mucus-heavy for a little while, which is interesting and probably something new and exciting. I looked into the symptoms a little and Candida Overgrowth can cause gut issues (✅), skin issues (✅), fatigue (✅), and excess mucus production (✅) especially when eating starchy or sugary foods. I’m speaking to a medical professional tomorrow about the possibility, I know you’re excited to hear more.

Introducing beer as my fourth item is certainly a look. I’m going to Germany next week and I fully intend on drinking and I’d rather learn now, in the comfort of my own home, if it makes me nearly shit myself.

With the addition of bread I decided it was time to eat one of the fancy tinned mackerels that Charlotte got me for my birthday. Mackerel on toast is infinitely better than mackerel on rice cakes, it made me very happy.

It was a busy week, on Wednesday I popped along to board games in the office after work. It was fun! There were six of us so I bowed out of the second game and carried on writing tests, very lame but I’m really enjoying migrating Jest stuff to Node.js test runner at the mo.

On Thursday I went to Arcadia with Luke and played D&D! As a player! I got into the swing of it pretty quickly, everyone I met was really nice and the little adventure we went on was fun. I’m playing a Tortle Monk named Pimlos.

I’m DMing again this coming week, the session’s gonna start with the party fighting an Owlbear and it should be fun! I’ve had a bit more time to plan out the next two sessions and I’m excited for the players to continue exploring 😊

On Saturday we went to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Live, an immersive theatre show. It was pretty good, I’m not 100% sure immersive theatre is for me – the chance that someone nearby might just break into song makes me feel a little on edge.

I can eat potatoes again! It’s my birthday and I can’t have cake so I’m eating my weight in chips. Chips for every meal: the dream. This isn’t how I pictured turning 38 but here we are. I’ll be sure to let you know if these potatoes make me shit myself or half my scalp falls off.

I ran the first D&D session of a three parter that will likely turn into a campaign. Oh my god it was exhausting but a lot of fun. We didn’t quite make it to the first combat but all the players were really great at the role play bit and introducing their characters. I felt pretty wired afterwards and I’ve been making map/world tweaks to fit their ideas in.

I found my first use of an LLM that I’m not immediately angry with, automated note-taking from Gemini was actually pretty good at putting together a session overview (obvs still with a few tweaks needed). The full transcript is absolute garbage but the bones was there, D&D session notes don’t need to be accurate unlike many of the things people use this junk for.

We met a new cat sitter, the lads warmed to her very quickly so I feel fine going away to Germany in Feb 👍

I have more D&D in the near future, session two of my own game and I’m going to a drop-in session (as a player) at Arcadia Games with Luke this coming week. Fun! Some new dice arrived and I’m going to stop buying more now.

We’re spinning the wheels in Blue Prince at the moment, lots of dud runs where we don’t learn anything new. We’ve found 5 [redacted] but are strugging to work out what all the [redacted] are so we’re trawling through notes and books from across the estate again.

The exclusion diet continues and I’ve been going for two weeks now. I’m fine 👍 better than fine, even. Some of this could just be that I’m not eating anything processed, or maybe there is gonna be a clear trigger food once I start reintroducing. Anyway Charlotte thinks I’m happier and who can blame me – I’m averaging one poo per day which is far more healthy than… well… more than that.

As you can see from my food tracking diary, I have a great gut. One more week and I’ll introduce a new food, I think it’s still quite likely to be some delicious delicious potatoes.

I bought Finspan but haven’t played it yet, excited to try it though. My boardgame group played The Guild of Merchant Explorers, it’s been long enough that they forgot I win every time. I won.

My smugness at winning didn’t last long because I got sick, as did Charlotte. We were a couple of snotty lads for the latter half of the week and I had some time off work to rest and watch shit TV. Feeling just about normal now.

There’s a lot of D&D news, I’m very excited. Firstly I’m going to a group with Luke soon and get to be a player rather than a DM, it’s gonna be great.

Secondly I dusted off my printer and laminator and I’ve been going really hard on my printouts for the session I’m running this coming week. I purchased some sealing wax and dug out all my old pre-aged paper, I hope my players are excited to receive a bunch of letters and paperwork from imaginary people.

Back to work again, and back to the office. It’s fine isn’t it. Really, it’s fine. Nice to see people again isn’t it?

My diet has been surprisingly easy tbh (yes it’s early days), and it’s forcing me to be more creative with cooking. I made some pretty delicious spring rolls and a lot of what I’ve been eating is rice-based. I’ve discovered there’s basically nothing I can eat out and I feel healthy 👍

We picked up Blue Prince again properly and it continues to be really fun and surprise us. Honestly I can’t recommend this game enough.

On Saturday we met up with Tammy and Marcus for a treasure hunt around Soho. It was too easy but still fun.

On Sunday we went mudlarking with Alison and it was loads of fun! It was down in Wapping and we found a lot of Victorian and Georgian pottery with a couple of potential medieval fragments. The woman in charge was enthusiastic and made it fun, I’d go again!

Happy New Year! I’ve been so exhausted since I stopped for Christmas, that hasn’t changed – my sleeping pattern is really broken and I am not looking forward to being ready to work at 9am tomorrow. We’ve been absolute bed-ridden slugs.

We rang in the new year with an excellent pub crawl via 10 different pubs in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green. There were five of us in total, which is about the right amount to keep everyone moving. It’s probably the last time I’ll drink for a while because…

I’m kicking off the new year with an elimination diet. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of my psoriasis flareups and occasional IBS-like gut issues (TMI). It’s time I put on my big boy pants and make some sacrifices to find out some stuff about my body. So for the next three weeks (pray for me) I will not be consuming: alcohol, alliums (garlic, leeks, onions), corn, dairy (milk, cheese), eggs, some fruit (apples, citrus, melon, pears, stone fruit), gluten, legumes (beans, lentils, peanuts, peas), nightshades (aubergines, chilli, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes), nuts, oils (that aren’t olive oil), red meat, seeds, shellfish, and soy.

My birthday (26th Jan) will be the first day when I can start reintroducing things one at a time, and I’ll be back on everything by early March. I’m going to be such a bore talking about all the food I miss, sorry.

We went for a nice long walk from Margate to Ramsgate via Broadstairs. Quite a pretty bit of coast and it was super cold, like far colder than it’s been all year. I enjoyed wrapping up.

I’ll be honest it’s been a more tiring week than a festive one, I’m exhausted. We drove up to Hull on the 23rd to stay in an Airbnb again. The lads were well-behaved and there were no tinsel incidents. I forgot to say it was their second birthday last week 🥺

On Christmas Eve we had a relaxed day, watched The Muppet Christmas Carol, and drank a little bit.

Christmas was nice, I woke up quite early and did a load of veg prep and then we all worked on dinner together. Really the overriding feeling was exhaustion, I took myself off for a little nap after dinner. The lads were shy and didn’t hang out with us loads.

On Boxing day we drove back to London and had an early night, and yesterday I popped up to visit my family. We played Herd Mentality which was fun and I continued to eat a lot of cheese.

One of our presents for the lads was this fancy new drinking cup (they’ll only drink from pint-shaped drinking vessels).

Short and sweet today, because I’ve intentionally done very little. We’re packing everything for Christmas up in Hull and that’s about it.

Way back on Monday we had a Die Hard quiz and then our annual watching of Die Hard. It was low key, felt impromptu again, and I enjoyed it.

The weekend was very quiet apart from a little bit of last-minute shopping and wrapping. We’ve been watching a lot of shit TV and lounging around with the lads.

I’m still having loads of fun doing D&D planning. Currently mapping out a not-strictly-necessary mile-wide city down to the street and building level, a ridiculous amount of work. Between mapping sessions I’m making sure there are plenty of NPCs and side scenarios to make the world feel alive.

That’s it for me, see you after Christmas.

I was in the office on Monday this week for a team lunch. We spent ~2 hours eating pizza and it was a delight.

Work Christmas Party #2 was on Tuesday and I had a fairly average time. It was very quiet, I think a lot of people are sick / couldn’t be bothered. I ate and drank plenty and didn’t really need the morning off that I’d booked.

I’ve been doing yet more D&D planning, I have more than I need for a couple of sessions and I have six players in the process of creating characters. I’m excited to get started again in January! Somebody needs to stop me from buying more beautiful dice sets.

On Friday we took a half day to head up to Birmingham to set up for our replacement Champagne Show. The original event we’ve been to a few times has changed and is now lots of events over a month instead of the one excellent tasting. We decided to host our own instead.

Each person brought a bottle with them and a food pairing then presented their drink with tasting notes in our newly aquired embroidered apron. It was a lot of fun!

After a slightly hungover train journey back, we had a chilled Sunday and spent a lot of the day just lounging in bed. We binged season 2 of Nobody Wants This – silly and heartwarming, enjoyed.

Work Christmas Party #1 was on Tuesday and I had the best time. It was at Lucky Voice and I had my doubts but it was great fun, having the main room and all the booths to ourselves meant there was a lot of variety. I didn’t overdo it at all, I had a nice time, and I sang my little heart out.

I had the day off on Wednesday but I didn’t really need it. It was still nice to have a long lazy day in bed and on the sofa.

On Friday I played board games in person with Charlotte’s old group. We played Ark Nova which is still easily in my number one spot. Having dinner and a few drinks in an office meeting room made me feel very nostalgic for our old D&D sessions.

Saturday was Christmas Pizza day. We had a few drinks at a Wetherspoons, went to a really weird Christmas show thing in Waterloo, left that early, and had our Christmas Pizza at Rudy’s. #1 Christmas Pizza so far, no notes.

On Sunday we had Luke and Alison round to do our final Christmas cake decoration with royal icing. I cooked a full Christmas dinner and it was excellent, I’m a semolina-on-roast-potatoes convert, they were perfect. We also watched a couple of new Christmas films, I highly recommend both Champagne Problems and Jingle Bell Heist which had more plot than I was expecting.

I had a lovely time in Edinburgh, it was cold but festive.

We stayed in an Airbnb that had no central heating but a small electric heater and an abundance of blankets. It was cheaper than the very expensive hotels at this time of year. There was a power cut on the last night which was fun 👍

We did a bunch of Christmas shopping, occasionally stopping for a drink to reward ourselves for going in shops.

On Wednesday we went for a very belated meal for Charlotte’s birthday. We got the tasting menu at Purslane and it was incredible – easily one of the best we’ve done, everything was delicious.

On Thursday we went on the most polished whisky tour I’ve ever been on, it was expensive but fun, and it was interesting to see the 3,384 bottle collection.

On Friday we walked along the Water of Leith, 13 miles of pretty countryside and interesting bits of the city. After that we decided that we deserved a munchy box. I’ve had Sunshine on Leith in my head since the walk.

On Saturday we got a train down to Huddersfield to attend L&A’s Christmas party. Karaoke started very early, it was a fun night! I ended with a pretty great (I’m told) rendition of Candy Man by Aqua, which is probably not one that I’ll pull out at our work Christmas party this week.

It’s good to be home. The lads have learned how to break into their food drawer to chew on pouches, I’m proud of their ingenuity but annoyed.

This week’s poor decision was overdoing it at some leaving drinks on Tuesday. Oops.

I’m doing a lot of world-building at the moment for D&D and having such a great time with it. I finally decided to shell out for Inkarnate and map-making has been a joy. I have a world map, a calendar system, an extensive cast of non-player characters, and a loose plan for a couple of sessions. I’m excited! What I want to do is share my excellent battle-maps here but a couple of players read these so no spoilers.

I think I’m enjoying the 2024 D&D rules, now that I’m reading through the books more. Character creation makes a little more sense to me and I think you end up with a load more interesting options.

Popped down to Brighton over the weekend. I hung out with my sister for a while which was delighfiul, we had a few drinks and I met her new boyfriend. Then Charlotte came down and we stayed at her brother’s new place.

Off to Edinburgh and Huddersfield next week, looking forward to the time off.

I had a lovely time on Tuesday meeting up with Andrew, Ed, and Dan. Just a casual catch up, a few pints of Jubel and then home for dinner. Woke up bright and early on Wednesday, I’m so sensible nowadays!

I had a lovely time on Thursday for Alice’s leaving drinks (😢). Just a casual leaving drinks, a few pints of Jubel, then a few more pints of Jubel, then a few wines, then a Jägerbomb or two, and then home. Had to drag myself out of bed on Friday, why am I like this?

On Friday, after aformentioned dragging, Charlotte and I met Luke in St Pancras and we got the train up to Matlock for a second viewing of a very lovely house 👀 the train is really easy, I think people would happily come visit! It pissed it down with rain the whole day, we sampled some tea rooms and pubs and it feels nice there.

On Saturday, Charlotte and I got to Room 46 in Blue Prince after a real blend of skill and luck. It took us 21 in-game days to get there after solving many funa dn rewarding puzzles. Love this game, now for some other challenges.

On Sunday we drove down to Canterbury to visit Charlotte’s grandparents. We took a veggie lasagna which was delicious and spent a wholesome few hours chatting.

I’m planning a couple of D&D sessions at the moment and I’m having such a lovely time with it. Hoping to run a two-parter with some of my old group with the potential for it to evolve into a full campaign. Getting back into world-building feels like coming home.

Oh my sweet Shrimp Jesus I nearly forgot: in Matlock we went into a tat shop and found a display of AI-generated posters which is wild. I keep wondering how many actual humans were involved in the process to get these things designed, produced, purchased, and then displayed IN A SHOP. And nobody questioned them!? We are truly living in the future.

This week was very Union-heavy! On Monday we had a members meeting and discussed shared issues ahead of our company’s feedback survey. On Tuesday the reps had a useful meeting with the FT’s new CEO and then another chat with our HR rep, all pretty good things.

Because of various meetings and commitments I was in the office four days this week. Exhausting, I have no idea how I used to manage this.

On Wednesday, Lee, Sam, and I went to The Ned for a roundtable with one of our vendors. It’s fancy, great buffet lunch and was good to talk to some other news organisations who share our pain when it comes to bot scraping.

We moved our usual after-work drinks to Friday, I was being very sensible but I did participate in shot roulette, which was horrible.

On Saturday we drove up to Daventry for Dan and Jen’s wedding. It was a lovely day, didn’t chat to the bride and groom much (standard) but I got to catch up with my old Brighton D&D group. Lots of reminiscing!

I was extremely sensible (for me), I had two beers over the seven hours and drove us and a few new friends back to our hotel. Woke up feeling great, I’d like some applause please.

Blue Prince continues to be the best puzzle game I’ve ever played. Charlotte’s fingers ache from all the note-taking, we’re at a very healthy 16 pages of a moleskine to keep track of all the information and puzzles.

No spoilers but the Celebrity Traitors finale eh!? Great TV, I highly recommend it even if you didn’t like the normy version.

Blue Prince is so good, it’s very rewarding finding lots of little secrets and solving puzzles that span multiple rooms across the house. We’re playing a little bit most nights and we quickly realised we’d need a physical notebook to write down all the clues and information. It’s too early to say but this could easily jump to the very top of my list of puzzle games.

On Friday we headed to Richmond to see Misdomer Murders on Stage and it was great. Daniel Casey did a good job of stepping into John Nettles’ shoes 👍 the staging was excellent, and they replicated flashbacks and memory sequences in a way that was so true to the TV series.

On Saturday, Charlotte and I went to Blackheath fireworks via a curry. Despite it being ridiculously crowded the show was actually amazing, not complaining but when did we start doing fireworks along to music? I just don’t remember it from childhood. We made ourselves feel very ill on a spinny ride, never again.

I’m feeling more invigorated about the union again now that we’ve got a new officer and we’re able to focus more on growing membership instead of casework. It’s why I joined and it’s more suited to my skills. Our last newsletter was full of information and we’re ready to start increasing numbers again.

I’m a bit obsessed with a new lunch at home, it sparks a lot of joy, Charlotte thinks it’s disgusting. It’s a tin of mackerel fillets in tomato sauce on toast, and it’s wonderful. I’m craving fish and I wonder if I’m deficient in something.

After a couple of weeks of treating it with suspicion, the lads (well, Tom Barnaby) have finally accepted their new radiator bed. It’s cute.

The Celebrity Traitors is pretty good TV, isn’t it? I’m enjoying it a lot, it’s far less stressful and fraught than the regular series though just as infuriating how wrong everyone is. I’m living for Alan Carr and Cat Burns.

On Friday we went along to a pub quiz with a few friends at a Squash club where one of their dads plays. We came a respectable fourth but, more importantly, the kids table beat the parents table 👍

We attended the counter-protest in Whitechapel despite UKIP being sent off elsewhere already, it was a lovely community-spirited day where people from all over the borough came together to loudly tell the fascists to fuck off.

We made Christmas Cakes with Alison. We had some wine, listened to Christmas music, and had a lovely time. We grabbed some impromptu arepas with J&C in the evening, what a nice chilled Sunday!

Charlotte and I started playing Blue Prince which is a really fun little puzzle game. I expect it’ll quickly frustrate us but so far it’s great, we’re enjoying exploring a large manor where the rooms change each day. It comes highly recommended and so far I can see why!

I’m trying Apple Music to see if I can finally ditch Spotify, I have a three month trial. So far it may be convincing me that it’s better, I think the auto-playlist stuff is better and I’m also happy that artists are paid a little more. I was also able to move all my music across easily 🎉

We took the day off on Wednesday so Charlotte could go and look at a house. It was kind of perfect 😬 second viewing this week maybe? We took our (shared) car up which meant my day off was just 7 hours of driving, but it was fun!

Had a classic “Rowan & Arjun get carried away” evening on Thursday. We both should have gone home at the same time as everyone else. We did not.

Over the weekend we stayed in Huddersfield with L&A and attended “Bottomless Crunch”, 90 minutes of unlimited crisps from a huge variety. We tried a lot of different crisps; I felt so oily afterwards. I think I prefer an ROI Tayto to an NI one.

Charlotte’s not drinking in October so we went to an ideally-timed alcohol free drinks tasting. Some of the alternatives are pretty impressive nowadays; some of the wine didn’t just taste like juice and there was an 0% whisky that kinda astounded me. We followed it up with delicious pho in Viet Garden.

On Friday my evening plans were cancelled due to COVID (not mine) but I was quite glad to have a restful evening because…

I bought myself a new laptop! I spent Friday evening setting it up, realising my dotfiles no longer work on a fresh machine. It’s an M4 Pro with a 14-core CPU and it’s just so fast. My old Intel machine lasted me a good 6 years but was really starting to show its age. I continue the trend of having a better home Mac than work will give me the next time I get an upgrade.

On Saturday we popped to Waterloo to hang out with Scott, Lowry, and their baby who we had yet to meet. Very chill baby, my favourite kind. Little bit of shopping on the way home and then an early night ☺️

Sunday was a LOT of fun, we were part of a very extravagant engagement of 40 people (it was a yes) and now hopefully we’ll get to go to a three part wedding in the UK, Nigeria, and Jamaica. It was a fun day!

You can tell it’s getting a little wintery because the lads are being extra cuddly. Tom Barnaby has re-remembered how nice it is to be under a duvet ❤️

Because we missed his party, we went for a birthday meal with Luke. We went to Abeno and had excellent okonomiyaki.

The week has been quite quiet. I played a new (to me) boardgame, A Feast for Odin; it’s a really fun worker placement game with an overwhelming number of options. Other than that I’ve continued to expand Greater Cornwall in CK3 – France, Germany, Poland, and half of Italy are now under Cornish rule. I unseated the pope to help spread a religion that allows women to rule 👍 I’m an equal opportunities tyrannical conqueror.

My mouse’s scroll wheel stopped working and, like the PS5 controllers, I decided to take it apart and try to fix it instead of adding some more plastic and precious metals to landfill. I took it all apart, gave everything a good clean, put it back together and it works again! It was gross in there.

For her birthday a while ago Charlotte was gifted a novelty photo shoot and, friends, the result is pretty great 😂 it’s going on our wall.

We’ve had a rotating cast of cleaners since Vanessa, our regular, moved back to Italy. There have been ups and downs, I’m probably always gonna feel slightly awkward about having a cleaner and so I’m quite bad at explaining what I want and providing feedback.

A particularly notable clean involved towel animals, furniture moved into jaunty angles, and every loose item in the house being placed indiscriminately into the nearest drawer.

On Wednesday we had a goodbye dinner for Gallal on Brick Lane. The Pride of Spitalfields is a nice little pub and I ate an unreasonable amount of food.

This weekend we went back to Butlins in Skegness for another 2000s Weekender. Once again, it was really fun. The lineup wasn’t quite as good as last time but we did get to see Gareth Gates again. He’s refined his set list to be all covers except Spirit in the Sky, not sure how I feel about that. Tinchy Stryder was pretty good.

No hangovers 👍 partly because we played it a little safer than usual but mostly (pretty sure science would agree) because our final drink of each night was a Berocca.

Back in London and there’s not a nice walk from my doorstep which is sad. You know what there is though? An abundance of takeaway food and internet that’s good enough for me to play Crusader Kings III on. We’re back, baby.

The Cornish people have reclaimed the empire of Brittania and I’m slowly getting rid of all that nasty Anglo-Saxon culture 👍 The richest and most developed cities in the world are Constantinople, Rome, and Exeter.

Work’s been fun, we had a Platforms day where all our platformy teams got together and talked about our similarities and shared challenges. We have a lot in common, surprise surprise, and will hopefully talk more in future.

Work change and gossip has really stepped up this week. I probably can’t share anything but folks, some class A conspiracy move announcements and conspiracy theories dropped.

I’ve had a busy weekend. It’s been a while since I was a little hungover on a Monday but here we are. We went to a pub quiz yesterday and got a bit carried away. Oops.

We had a couple more days to ourselves this week, we took it easy with a few small walks. On Wednesday we drove into Yorkshire to view a house that Charlotte was thinking of buying, it wasn’t quite right but we have more of an idea what she’s looking for now.

Charlotte and I finally got around to playing Ark Nova, a board game I bought a while ago. We played twice over two evenings (very wholesome) and won a game each. It’s firmly one of my favourites now.

Luke and Alison arrived on Thursday and we got boozy enough that I couldn’t stomach a Full English the next day – unheard of. I spent a lot of the next day enduring waves of nausea. In the evening we managed to cook a healthy dinner and I felt a lot better after a vegetable.

Obviously we walked to Thor’s Cave several more times, with different variations on how we got there. I didn’t realise how deep it went, we barely scratched the surface last time.

On Saturday we drove to Matlock to see what the town’s like and also another house viewing. Again, not quite right, but we both love Matlock – it’s just the right size of town and is easy to get to from London. We spent the rest of the day walking and visiting tea rooms.

Towards the evening we drove over to Matlock Bath which is like a seaside town by a river, odd but fun. We played mini golf, looked around an aquarium, and ate fish and chips.

On Sunday we walked to an excellent pub a couple of villages over and ate a roast. In the evening we played Ready Steady Cook. We split into teams, bought ingredients for the other team, and then had to make several small plates. Charlotte and I made a cassoulet which won it for us 🎉 it was fun but a bit of a nightmare with four people cooking at the same time in a rental kitchen.

We’re up in Staffordshire for a couple of weeks, working part time and enjoying being in the countryside. It’s been a good balance and I’m feeling quite happy and relaxed up here.

The internet has been good enough for video calls which was our only work worry!

We’ve walked over to Thor’s Cave multiple times; from here you can head in either direction along the Manifold Valley and stop off at pubs or tea rooms.

You can tell we’re not used to living in the middle of nowhere because we did three separate 30 minute drives to the nearest town to do shopping. I think we’re into the swing of things now but it’s definitely different not having a shop right around the corner.

J&C came to stay for a few days before the weekend which was nice, we had wine and visited Alton Towers in absolutely torrential rain. Despite rides closing constantly we managed to get on all the rollercoasters we wanted! Waterproof trousers are a revelation.

On Saturday we picked up Ari from Stoke and walked along The Roaches, one of the best walks I think I’ve done in the UK. Not too difficult with some excellent views along the way. The most fun part was the initial scramble up to Hen Cloud.

A packed lunch at the top and a scone afterwards felt very wholesome.

Wetton, the village we’re staying in, at least has a pub and a tea room that are open kind of when they want to be from what I can tell. Both are great and means we have a lazy option if we can’t be bothered with lunch or dinner.

The lads seem to be enjoying themselves. All normal behaviour and they’re both cuddly and chill.

A lazy lazy week of lounging around and doing not much. Obviously I progressed a lot with Crusader Kings – one game where I nearly united India under the Sri Lankan banner, and another where I kept Cornwall independent for a good 500 years (mostly by destabilising England every time they got vaguely powerful).

Over the weekend we stayed down in Faversham for Hop Festival and hung out with all of Charlotte’s old friends. It was a lovely time, I drank a lot and we avoided most of the big crowds.

We’re off up north for a couple of weeks, working part time and staying near the peaks so we can go for lots of nice walks in the countryside. We’re taking the lads with us so their travel crate is out. They love it until we force them into it.

Earlier in the week my board game group met in person for the first time since Scott had a baby, always a great time. We completed level 12 of The Mind which we didn’t think was possible. We just got so in-sync and you can’t beat the dopamine of placing an 8-card sequence 👏

The highlight of this week was the long weekend. We went to Camp Wildfire for the first time with a few friends, it’s advertised as “summer camp for adults” and we weren’t 100% sure what to expect. It was so much fun and we’ve already booked next year 😅

OK it’s quite intense but so much fun if you lean into the bits that seemed initially cringy to me, e.g. earning points for your chosen patrol (badgers, foxes, hawks, or squirrels). The website makes it look very much like it only caters for big extroverts, but there was loads to do and we all had a lot of fun. The day time is for booking activities and the night is for music, comedy, interesting talks, board games, and sports-day-like games.

It was really friendly and welcoming. I chatted to a lot of people despite picking completely different activities to the rest of my group: axe skills, kintsugi pottery, geocaching, wood whittling, fire lighting, and a scavenger hunt, all set in beautiful woodland.

For me it was also an experiment to see if I can handle camping. Being dragged to a few festivals with my family as a teenager had kind of killed it for me, but I enjoyed it a lot and I’m kinda tempted to buy a tent and do it more over the summer. The excellent weather probably helped!

Anyway, despite having one of the most fun weekends I’ve had in years, I’m glad to be home, properly clean, and in a real bed.

Maybe I don’t hate working as much as I thought, dragging my motivation back was hard this time though. Now I’m having fun again which is a luxury.

I really love a pub crawl, especially when it’s impromptu on a Friday and we end up very close to our house. There are some excellent pubs in Aldgate and we finally tried the £2 pint place. The pints were Stella but can you complain for £2?

Crusader Kings III was a terrible choice for “a game I can just put down”. I’m obsessed and the game keeps surprising me in fun ways; for example Thomas Becket turned up in my court, wrote me a military journal with some nice stat boosts, and then promptly got murdered by one of my rogue aunts before I even had chance to take him to Canterbury. The great grandchild of my lowly starting character rules the empire of Britannia and I’m keeping myself busy by fighting the French and Irish – a problematic tradition for sure but they started it tbh. I’m going to become a history bore, I can tell.

The lads are very needy at the moment which is cute, not complaining. We’re taking them away on holiday with us soon, up to Alton, and I’m excited to see if they enjoy it.

Over the weekend we went to Tammy’s mum’s birthday again. Excellent food as always and we managed to avoid too many tequila shots.

Weeknote 250! Only 10 more to go until we’re at the five year mark. Have you noticed I switched to Mondays? It’s because I really can’t be bothered on a Sunday any more, too many fun plans and good videogames to play.

Speaking of, I finished Baldur’s Gate III, it’s hard to overstate how much I loved this game and seeing the ending for each of my companions was very heartwarming. Not quite ready for another play through but I know I missed a lot and I want to try some different decisions/companions/endings.

As a less story-driven game (I thought) I picked up Crusader Kings III in the Steam sale and I’ve barely scratched the surface of just how wildly complex this game is. I keep making rookie mistakes like forgetting to switch to Primogeniture and having my realm divided into tiny counties for each of my children 🤦 anyway it’s less casual than I expected.

I joined a different gym, very boring but it’s closer to home so I’m more likely to go 🤞 it has a badminton court so I might try that.

There was some drinking after work, drinking in Whitechapel. Then there was a large protest and we saw a lot of people get arrested. Then we did some more drinking in Lambeth. Not all on the same day, all very nice.

My motivation’s back at work which is nice. Doing some interesting stuff around bot management which is scratching an itch of mine (building an API) and time at work has been passing quickly.

It’s been a nice week, starting with meeting Anna and her kids for lunch. It was good to catch up! Lots changes but nothing really changes was my takeaway.

On Saturday we went for an excellent BBQ at Tammy and Marcus’ place, many many great side dishes were consumed and we had a few cocktails. The Corona Colada tasted good but could definitely have done with a proper shake - floating lumps of coconut cream were offputting.

They introduced us to a fun new party game, Herd Mentality where the aim is to answer subjective questions the same way as the other players. I bought a copy because too many of our boardgames are long and serious.

On Sunday we had a wee bottomless brunch at The Dixon near Tower Bridge. Great food, great prosecco, and set in a fancy old courthouse. Would recommend. We headed back to ours with J&C and had a few more bottles of wine and some games.

I’m getting really close to completing Baldur’s Gate III, which is an incredible game. I’m going to have to stop myself from starting again immediately with a different class / play style because it’s that great. I’m just constantly impressed with the level of depth in the story and how much your choices can influence things in the world around you.

After ~24 hours of travel I’m back in the UK. Slightly sunburnt and exhausted, trying to ease myself back into work.

The lads were delighted to see us: Tom Barnaby has been demanding a cuddle every hour or two and Douglas Fir has been adamant about sleeping on the bed. I’m pleased that they don’t really sulk and demonstrate that they missed us so readily 😭

We’ve had a quiet week apart from a little joint birthday picnic for Arjun and Gallal. We had a few drinks and snacks near Kings Cross and it was lovely.

I read Project Hail Mary on holiday and really enjoyed it, might try The Martian next as I’m trying to ramp up my reading again after a very lazy few months.

We flew to Cambodia from Signapore this week. It’s a beautiful country and I’m really glad we came. The people have been so welcoming and the food has been excellent.

We spent the couple of nights in Phnom Penh. It was fun but quite intense for a first intro to the country. When will I learn that I always prefer the smaller towns and countryside? It was still a lot of fun though.

We met up with Euan and Adam who I haven’t seen for well over a year, bringing our group up to six people. It was still surprisingly easy to organise things.

We visited S-21, now a genocide museum, and it was suitably harrowing. I had a vague knowledge of Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge but the museum did a great job of highlighting the brutality and scale of the regime.

For the journey to Siem Reap (and later for the journey to the coast) we got an overnight “hotel bus” which was quite novel and more comfortable than you’d expect. Both times it arrived super early though so we found ourselves being woken up and waiting in bus stations at 4 in the morning.

Siem Reap was my favourite stop on the trip. It’s beautiful, everyone’s very friendly, and there were lots of opportunities for little day trips to interesting places. We visited Angkor Wat straight from the bus and were the first people there. We watched the sunset and got the same picture as millions of other people.

My favourite temple was Ta Prohm which is still very much part of the surrounding jungle, with parts of the structure being held up by the trees that grew through it.

We filled our days with activities and then spent the evenings in the hotel pool. We visted the Hero Rats who safely help detect land mines and we went zip lining in the jungle.

The last leg of the trip was taking another bus down south then a ferry out to Koh Rong. After all the activity it’s been bliss drinking cocktails on a tropical beach, occasionally walking into the sea.

After an uneventful start to the week, on Wednesday we flew to Singapore. We lucked out and had an empty seat in our row so the 13 hour flight was comfortable. My foot is still painful but less so, I’m very slow and dosed up.

We landed early on Thursday, headed to Alison’s friend’s house where we’re staying and slept until midday. We had a little swim in the pool and then set off to fill our day and try to combat jetlag.

We visited Gardens by the Bay and walked around the cloud forest which was beautiful. We got misted a lot. We managed to push through and not fall asleep during the evening light show and went to bed at a sensible time.

Woke up normally, no jetlag 🎉 on Friday we spent the day at Universal Singapore. We managed the first couple of rides without queues but then spent a lot of the rest of the day standing and sweating. It was fun but it hasn’t been great for my foot standing all day – so much for my plan to lounge around. We got home in time for a quick dip.

On Saturday we had a lazy morning then spent the rest of the day in central, mainly around Chinatown. We had a few drinks, had lunch at a Hawker market (all the food’s been great so far), and then watched some practice fireworks for Signapore’s 60th birthday. A Singapore Sling and then bed.

Yesterday we took the cable car over to Sentosa island which is beautiful, perfect tropical beaches juxtaposed with masses of container ships out at sea. We spent the day on the beach (and in beach bars) before grabbing some late night dim sum.

What even happened this week? It’s been a blur, trying to drag my head back to normality temporarily.

We had our monthly Unite members meeting, growing steadily in attendance as we increase membership and people realise that stuff is happening 🎉 my focus on comms has paid dividends and we run a monthly newsletter now.

Otherwise it’s been quite quiet, trying to prep for our next trip and make sure my team’s work is covered while I’m away. Due to some staffing changes I will return to a much more pleasant and productive working environment.

I hurt my foot, lots of pain in my first metatarsophalangeal joint which means walking is very annoying. Not even sure how it happened tbh but I definitely wasn’t drunk this time. It’s improved a lot but this is less than ideal ahead of a holiday where I expect to be out and about a bunch. Oh well, maybe I’ll just lounge about while people fetch me things 🤷

On Sunday we ticked off a few nearby recommendations, we went to Satan’s Whiskers with J&C for excellent cocktails which I think deserve the hype, I highly recommend it. Afterwards we had pizza at Sodo which is also great, easily one of the best pizzas I’ve had in London.

Our homegrown cat grass died so I went to buy some more seeds before realising you can just order it pregrown in a pot, far less waiting time and the lads are very happy.

On Monday we attempted to hike up Beinn Bheigier, the highest point on Islay, but the wind was a bit much when we reached the first summit, we decided not to continue on but we still had some amazing views. We ate our lunch in a little hollow near the top and then nearly broke our ankles in a few boggy holes on the way back down.

On Tuesday, before catching the ferry, we drove over to Carraig Fhada Lighthouse the Singing Sands, easily one of the prettiest beaches we saw on the trip. Possibly the nicest I’ve ever been to in the UK, it was so picturesque.

We didn’t hear the sands sing. It was windy but not in quite the right way to whistle through all the rocky outcrops that line the beach. We’ll have to go back another time.

The journey home was long - 12 hours in total via car then ferry, car again, plane from Glasgow, a train, and a night bus. I was pretty glad to fall into bed.

We had Wednesday off to recover from the travel. I played Baldur’s Gate III for a lot of the day, well into Act 3 now and still enjoying it a lot. I’m astounded at how detailed this game is and how each choice alters the story.

Back to work on Thursday. I slightly overdid it in the pub and felt pretty worse for wear later on that night. I somehow managed to kick most of the hangover by the afternoon and we still made our reservation at Bread Street Kitchen (very much not worth it).

I’ve enjoyed a lazy weekend. We did a lot of lounging around and staying cool, with a small outing to the National Maritime Museum to see the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition.

I’m on Islay staying in Port Ellen and it’s beautiful. It’s a really small town of ~800 people and everyone’s very friendly. We’re here with Charlotte’s brother and his girlfriend.

We flew up to Glasgow on Thursday, picked up a car and drove to Stonefield Castle where we stayed for the night. We went for a short walk around the grounds and had an excellent dinner overlooking Loch Fyne. A few whiskies and then bed.

Friday was Charlotte’s birthday, we caught the ferry over to Islay. On the journey we saw some dolphins leaping alongside the boat. A great birthday treat. Once there we went for a tour and tasting of Islay’s only rum distillery to make up for the fact that the rest of the holiday was going to be quite whisky-focused. A little merrier we checked into our Airbnb and went for dinner and several drinks.

On Saturday we checked off one of my bucket list items - walking the three distilleries pathway from Port Ellen. We stopped off at Laphraoig, Lagavulin, and Ardbeg distilleries and had a few drams. The staff in the last one invited us to a 70s night. Everyone’s very friendly and I’m so glad we decided to visit (see distillery rankings below).

Today we switched up the pace and drove across most of the island. We visited Bowmore, Bunnahabhain, and Port Charlotte with a few distillery stop-offs. They cater very well for drivers, bottling up my tasters for later.

I know it’s easy to say this when you’re in holiday mode, but I think I could actually live here. Tomorrow we’ll be doing a long walk up Glas Bheinn and Beinn Bheigier, the highest point on the island, weather permitting.

Pitbull was one of the best gigs of my life - I’ve never been in a crowd that was so hyped to be there. There were crowds of bald-capped fans all over the place near the O2 and on the tube there, many with speakers.

What a great time, would recommend if he comes back to the UK.

We took Monday and Tuesday off but I felt fine so I spent the whole day playing videogames. Baldurs Gate III is incredibly detailed and I’m playing a lot of it. I’m nearly done with Act II and I’m astounded at how well done it is.

Relatedly I bought all the 2024 Dungeons & Dragons core rule books because I’d like to get back into it, maybe running a one shot or a premade adventure with my old work group.

We’ve been enjoying the great weather, on Saturday we spent most of the day in London Fields eating and drinking and having naps in the sun. Perfect.

I’m finally gonna go see an allergy specialist. My psoriasis flare-ups are getting a bit more frequent and I have occasional breathing issues at night, and occasional bowel issues (overshare). Having exhausted other options it’s time to see if I have any secret allergies or intolerances that are exacerbating things.

Tom Barnaby got in a full on fight with the cat from week 239, there was fur flying before he ran inside. He’s fine, seems normal but less keen to go outside 🥺

Customer Products Day again on Wednesday meant seeing everyone in the office, drinks were fun and I was out far too late with Arjun, Glynn, and some of our new Sofia colleagues. Thursday was less fun but I lined up lots of boring repetitive work to tide me over.

Lambeth Country Show was fun and really quite quiet due to the rain. We managed to get around and see everything except the vegetable sculptures. Some of the regular veg was beautiful but it’s a shame not to see any giant specimens. We got rained on a lot but I ate a lot of great caribbean food.

I have Monday and Tuesday off for Pitbull (Mr. Worldwide himself). We’re going full dress-up, you’ll get to see me in a bald cap next week. I’m very excited.

I love a short week, let’s also do a short weeknote.

We drove up to just outside Birmingham on Friday and spent the weekend with Charlotte’s uni friends. We had a great time catching up, drinking, and enjoying the hot tub. It felt effortless and relaxing.

On Sunday we went for a little walk to a nearby brewery, then back for mexican food and more hot tub.

The Airbnb came with a very friendly cat named Kevin and a good amount of weird taxidermy.

This week my boardgame group tried out Heat: Pedal to the Metal which is a racing game with some great mechanics for engine overheating and corners. It’s more strategic than I was expecting and I’d recommend it as a fun quick game.

I finished the Red Dead Redemption epilogue which could have been a little longer, a nice end to an exceptional game. I picked up Baldurs Gate III, my next in a long line of games I paid a lot of money for but then didn’t play. I’m 7 hours in and I can tell this game is gonna keep me occupied for a while - I wonder if I’ll beat my recent 434 hour Factorio playthrough.

Birthday drinks for J on Thursday after a few on the roof at work. Feels like summer is here doesn’t it?

More birthday celebrations on Saturday for Charlotte’s nephew who is two. He was jetlagged and wasn’t really feeling it but we had a nice time regardless.

The lads met a local cat and there was a lengthy standoff before they chased it away. Well done boys, good yowling.

Our trip to Rome was lovely but actually a little too short. Rome’s beautiful and we had perfect weather. I didn’t think it was possible to eat too much spaghetti carbonara but, it turns out, it is.

We crammed a lot of sight-seeing in: we had a look at Vatican City, The Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum. Actually name an old Roman building and we probably had a little look. I’d happily go back for a longer visit another time.

The more world cities I visit, the more I’m convinced that reviews like “It’s very busy / dirty / sketchy” are written by people who have never left their small village in the countryside and send panicked messages to the residents Facebook group when they spot a youth they don’t recognise.

Apart from Rome I didn’t do much during the rest of my week off, which was delightful. I just lounged around and played video games - I finished the main story for Red Dead Redemption II (excellent) and now playing through the epilogue.

On Saturday we did the Race Across the World experience in London and it was so slick. Easily in my top three scavenger hunts, challenging enough but everything made sense and was doable without hints. It also takes you through some interesting bits of London (side streets, small parks etc) that I otherwise wouldn’t visit.

We went to a Eurovision party, I wasn’t really feeling it due to one country’s continued involvement and I think I might be done with it now - time to boycott. It’s a real shame but it feels hypocritical of me to support it while dutifully checking the origin of my avocados, you know?

I kinda forgot to mention in the relief that Grandma’s surgery went well and she’s back home now, doing a lot better. They had to put a balloon inside her artery which is risky for a 91 year old and it was playing on my mind.

Short week at work, still tiring. I’m on the edge of burnout which is why I booked a week off to rest - I kinda forgot to take any holiday so far this year and I can feel myself being annoyed by things far more easily. We’re going to Rome for a few days and then I’m doing nothing in London for a few more. It’s going to be great.

On Saturday we had a picnic in a park near home and invited a few people for drinks. It was a lovely day and we had a good turnout from all our Whitechapel friends. I love summer weather in London. We met Artem’s dog who’s tiny and very cute, big fan.

Tom Barnaby learned how to climb on top of the door, he’s so clever ❤️

What a beautiful week! Sun, shorts, feeling happy, Psoriasis clearing up a little.

I wasn’t even that pissed off when we had another leak from upstairs. This time it was their boiler leaking through the kitchen and bathroom 👍 not gonna fix anything until after July when our upstairs neighbour is giving their plumbing a much-needed overhaul.

We had our first closed Unite meeting on Wednesday and I feel pretty happy about how it went and the direction we’re moving in. I’ve put my name forward to be a rep so I can work on our membership data and a comms plan, areas that interest me (and I’m good at if I say so myself).

We took the lads for their vaccination top-ups, we’ve completely failed at preventing them from hating the carrier 🤷 the new vet was very nice, and by very nice I mean she lavished my cats with the appropriate amount of praise.

I had a two day hangover which wasn’t great. What was great was the joint Unite and NUJ drinks for International Workers’ Day. Meeting more colleagues and organisers from Editorial was excellent, as a far more established union they’ve been so friendly and helpful.

On Saturday we met up with Charlotte’s family to get through all our Christmas gifts. We did a Hidden City treasure hunt around Marylebone and Mayfair and then had dinner at Dans le Noir. It’s an experience eating in pitch darkness, gonna be honest I switched from cutlery to hands very quickly.

What was really interesting is that we talked loads more. Chatting to people is far less exhausting when you don’t have to move your face, gesticulate, or look like you’re paying attention.

We caught up with Gallal and went for a lovely long walk through some Oxfordshire countryside, a good mix of woodland and fields and not too hilly. Exactly what I needed to end the weekend and make me feel more wholesome.

A very quiet week. After last weekend Charlotte and I independently decided to be more healthy, it’s far easier when both of us are trying. I did some more exercise than usual (nearly nothing) and we’re suddenly cooking healthy lunches and dinners again. I feel better.

Gin doesn’t make me as happy as beer, but what’re you gonna do. Gin and tomato juice is a good way to stop myself drinking too fast.

Our weekend plans fell through so Charlotte and I walked up to Walthamstow Wetlands and didn’t get lost this time. We took a route through London Fields and Hackney Downs, mostly via side streets, and it was lovely. We had a little pub dinner by the river and then home. The weather was perfect - sunny but not too hot. We saw some goslings.

On Sunday we wandered down to Shadwell to watch the London Marathon for a little while. Our friend Ari was running and it was fun waving as she passed the half way point.

Two Point Museum continues to be great, we’re into a good rhythm and re-learning how to compromise on our differing design styles.

Look at this lad. Not a care in the world.

I did a few quick illustrations for a presentation at work, which was fun and scratched a creative itch. Maybe I need to nudge myself to draw more regularly again or break out the paints, embrace art. Those LLMs aren’t gonna train themselves amirite?

Over the long weekend we drove up to Lancashire to hang out in Morecambe and the surrounding area. We spent Friday evening in Blackpool, saw the sights, played the arcades, ate the chips, sang the karaoke, and stayed in a £40/night hotel (breakfast included). It was fun! It’s less grim than I was led to expect.

On Saturday we dragged ourselves back to Morecambe. We did execeptionally well at being living humans - some shopping, a walk along the prom, and making a couple of pavlovas. Early night.

Sunday involved a long walk around Arnside and Silverdale, the weather and countryside were beautiful – it was a perfect morning for a walk. We sat and admired 120 square miles of mud flats with our lunch.

Later in the day we went to visit Alison’s friends for a Sunday roast, which was incredible. The pavlovas went down a treat too.

Today we drove home. It took 7.5 hours instead of 4ish because every single motorway had issues. I’m very tired, I deserve the bed now. The lads were pleased to see us after their first weekend with intermittent visits from a cat-sitter.

We have had ants in the kitchen. Unpleasant and my first time having the honour in London. Back home we used to get ants and mice and stuff all the time because our house backed onto fields. Anyway for a while the lads enjoyed watching the small ant columns.

I bought Ark Nova while it was on sale, having played it a while ago. It’s a really great board game and supports two players. I spent a satisfying 30 minutes popping carboard tokens from their sprues.

On Saturday we attended a mural unveiling around the corner and it was so lovely. There was a big party held in some nearby gardens, lots of music and food and chatting to strangers. It felt more like a community than I’ve ever experienced in London. The guest of honour was Ian McKellen and he stood very close to give a speech.

We had a little party at Alison’s afterwards. I had a few Jägerbombs and fell asleep on the kitchen floor. This meant I missed a trip to St Christophers and I’m pretty glad because I felt OK on Sunday.

Gallal cooked us a hangover gratin which was very good, and we admired his recent flat decoration.

Hello April. Either I’ve managed to purge all the brands from my online life or they’re having too tough a time to bother with bad April Fools jokes. Either way’s a win in my books.

Not much went on this week. I met a new catsitter for when we’re away over easter. We have a good set of friends and family to ask but we don’t want to take the piss, occasionally we suck up paying a stranger.

On Friday we had a fun neighbours evening, a few of us starting at Alison’s to help finish her balcony decorations, then on to ours so Charlotte could bake a cake. We cooked together and spent no money (previously-bought house booze is free). It was lovely and exactly what I want from living so close to friends.

On Saturday we took the car down to Canterbury to visit Charlotte’s grandparents. They’re having a small struggle at the moment so we took a large shepherds pie and a cake so they have meals for a few days. They’re looking after a pretty sweet and nervous dog named Biscuit who we took for a walk. Wholesome vibes all round, apart from the traffic through Blackwall Tunnel.

I’m still playing a lot of videogames, more consistently than I have in years; It’s been nice. I’m playing my way through Red Dead Redemption II, I tried it years ago but didn’t have the patience so I restarted and it’s a beautiful game. Like aside from all the murder I’ve been spending a ridiculous amount of time riding my horse, Jane McDonald, around the countryside, soaking in the vibrant world that Rockstar created. Very glad I picked it up again 👍

I managed not to catch Charlotte’s gross illness at all, which I’m very pleased about. She’s all good now, so we’ve had a more busy week.

In week 203 we won a pub quiz at The Parakeet, which is a nice pub. Well this week, on Tuesday, we finally got together to go back and spend our £75 bar tab. It was a fun night and unfortunately we now have a new £75 bar tab to spend so I guess we’ll have to go back again 😏

I won us a bonus 5 points again in the drawing round, this time drawing the best “Parakeet doing the caber toss”. We also came second in the newspaper tower building contest and got 20/20 on the noughties bangers music round.

Thursday was Luke’s leaving do. It was super well-attended and I had fun. My aging body decided to take things into his own hands and made every drink give me heartburn, so I didn’t have an awful lot. Too many highlights to mention, a good send-off.

We’d booked Friday evening in for hangover food and TV, only Alison was well enough to make it to ours and we started watching The Residence which I loved (Charlotte and I finished it over the weekend).

On Saturday we went to Thai and Pie, a local place that is (you guessed it) a fusion of Thai cuisine and Pie and Mash. We’ve been slowly working through a very long list of restaurants to try.

It’s not really fusion, pretty standard pie flavours/accompaniments and also everything you’d expect from a Thai menu in the UK. It was all great but I was kind of hoping for Pad Thai in a pie or something equally horrifying.

We used some bonus money to book flights to Singapore and Cambodia in July. It’s actually happening now which means I can get excited about it.

The lads (well, Tom Barnaby, who is more adventurous) have worked out they can use the counter and fridge as springboards to get up on top of the kitchen cupboards. They did it to shame us - it’s so dusty up there and they’re walking feather dusters. Douglas Fir was sad about not being up there and we had to show him how, the adorable little airhead.

Tuesday drinks again because it was sunny and Emma’s out of the country for a few months. A shandy in the sun is a beautiful thing, the sunny socials remind me why I love living in London. Both of my office days this week were without a coat, it’s so freeing ❤️

I’ve been working with AWS CloudWatch RUM a bit lately. It’s quite good. I think I’m already the authority on how it works 👍 Gonna build some tooling around it which will be fun and allow us to roll this out to teams quickly and effectively, giving us better visibility of client-side errors. IMO it’s a really excellent idea to have a team dedicated to site reliability.

I took a very last-minute day off on Friday to go and visit Grandma who’s still in hospital. She has carpal tunnel in both hands and is waiting for surgery on a heart valve, all very worrying for a 91 year old but I’m glad I visited and trying to stay positive. She’s still in good spirits despite being a little bored, we went for a coffee and did a crossword together. The staff at L&D are wonderful.

Our main Saturday plan, a treasure hunt, was cancelled due to injury (not ours). We went for lunch with Charlotte’s mum instead and regretted being near Tottenham Court Road.

On Sunday we popped over to Alison’s to help with some DIY stuff. A washing line, bathroom lock, mirror, and (with help from a local dad) long curtain pole went up. I finally reclaimed my drill which has been over there for about six months.

As a reward, we did a taste test of 6 new baked bean flavours from Heinz, stocked in our local Iceland. It’s a mixed bag. My ranking from best to worst was: Peri Peri, Tikka, BBQ, Chilli, Cheese, and Jalfrezi. Don’t they look appetising?

Customer Products Day at work this week, it was really fun and in a completely different format. We had a day-long hack day and I had a great time working with some people who I wouldn’t normally have chance to. I also got to write some PHP for the first time in years and I’d forgotten less than I expected.

Charlotte’s sick again with something that seems like flu or COVID, she can’t catch a break this year! I’ve managed to avoid so far and have been forcing meds and vitamin C on her. It’s been a lazy weekend as a result.

My grandma’s in hospital which is worrying, but glad she’s getting the care she needs. Hopefully nothing too serious but a bit of a struggle breathing and carpal tunnel mean she’s not up to doing much by herself. Intending on visiting ASAP and trying not to stress about it.

With Charlotte sick we bought Two Point Museum which is really fun, a nice twist on a familiar format. We’ve been playing sporadically between naps.

The lads have been enjoying us both being here, we’ve invented a few new games (treat-based of course). One is putting treats under upturned plastic cups, they’ve kind of worked out how to consistently tip them over and we may regret this. The other is easier - put treats in cereal boxes and watch them hurl themselves at the very narrow boxes to get in.

Pancake day this week! We invited Alison round and I made far too many pancakes but they were excellent. Pizza pancakes (oregano-marinated tomatoes, cheese, crispy bacon) were the best.

On Friday we went to see the Old Dirty Brasstards do pop-punk. It was excellent, just a big singalong and they covered most of the greats. I’d definitely go and see them again, maybe 00s hits next time 👀

It turns out Charlotte had never been picked up from an event by a boyfriend which meant me driving to pick her up from a wedding on Saturday was a big exciting event. We got a McDonalds drive through on the way home. It was weird and nostalgic being able to do this now we have access to a car; it was fun despite the entire 40-minute journey being in 20mph zones.

At work, our new product manager (Lee) joined properly this week and it’s been excellent already. Our previous PMs were good, though they started fresh at the company – it shouldn’t surprise me how much more organised and smooth things can be when a new team member already knows how the business works. He’s already succeeded in making me interested in some SEO work instead of slightly dreading how we manage all the stakeholders.

Also at work, I’m having to suck up helping our teams navigate a revised incident review process despite believing that it didn’t need to change. Silver lining: I get to practice giving difficult in-person feedback and at least I get to prove that I can get on with work I disagree with, pretty uncommon for my team 😂

I completed Astro Bot which is maybe the best platformer I’ve ever played, I can understand why it got such great reviews. Every level introduces something unique and it’s really fun and charming, I’ll almost definitely play through it again and it’s nice to see new levels still being added. I’m not quite at 100%, few more things to collect and I actually will because this game is a delight.

Arjun and I did an impromptu jägerbomb crawl on Thursday which was quite nice. An old colleague used to swear that a jägerbomb at the end of the night cancels out a hangover. It’s not true, folks, he was just 20 years old. Despite it not being true I had the kind of hangover on Friday where I’m somehow really productive, possibly just a lot of residual redbull in my system.

On Friday evening we went to Six by Nico and had six courses of murder-mystery-themed food. It was good, however a large plate of chips would have probably suited me better. The wine pairing did help though!

Smashing it at work at the moment lxds, having a good time with several different projects at once and being very productive

Also being more active with Unite, seeing increased membership and we have an outside-of-work communication channel now 👍 I think we have it on semi-easy-mode because Unite is already recognised and the business has a productive relationship with the NUJ already. Maybe I’ll become a rep?

We got tickets for Pitbull, Mr. Worldwide himself, at the O2 😎 buying a bald cap

On Wednesday I went to a private view with Scarlett, who I haven’t seen in ages. The exhibition was for a collective of artists who have stayed with her a few times (Mawwdach Residency) and it was an experience! I’m still not sure what I witnessed but it was fun.

We went for Japanese food at Tenshi which has been on my list for a while, it captures the vibes of an Izakaya well and the food was great!

Over a long weekend we took a trip back up to Skegness, this time it wasn’t for a Butlins Weekender but tbh the first night was just as messy. We accidentally drank three bottles of wine each in the hot tub and didn’t feel great the next day.

The house we stayed in was a work of art, and the owner was… I know this is a loaded term… a character. We could overlook the occasional impracticality because it was like living in a fever dream, kind of in a good way? It was also probably an electrician’s worst nightmare.

On Sunday we managed to drag ourselves out into town. I think Skegness gets an unjustified bad name - I’ve been to far more run down seaside towns, I dare say it was charming. We had a fry up, wandered along the beach, played crazy golf, and ate fish and chips.

We broke up the drive home with a little walk near Anglesey Abbey and got quite muddy. I’m enjoying driving and London isn’t scary any more, which is saying a lot - I learned in small villages and country roads.

The lads were pleased to see us, and we were pleased to sleep in our own beds in a less intense house.

Heart-Shaped Food Day was this week. I didn’t get stressed this time because I picked a bunch of elements I already know how to cook well. We had heart-shaped tostadas with refried beans, roasted sweet potato, guacamole, pico de gallo, and pickled red cabbage. Turns out that cutting tortillas with scissors is way easier than trying to chop heart-shaped veg with a knife.

I’ve been playing Astro Bot for a couple of weeks and it’s really picked up since I completed Factorio. It’s one of the most adorable games I’ve played and it’s so joyous, I really love it. Obviously I’m gonna have to 100% this one. Thanks to all the people who recommended it!

My PS5 controllers have been really showing their age, with batteries barely lasting an hour. I decided to have a go at replacing them and it was susprisingly easy. It cost me £30 and half an hour of my time to have two good-as-new controllers, which is a lot better than £120. Obviously, YouTube provided the instructions.

I paid for a Now TV subscription so I can watch The White Lotus season 3 (very excited). Unfortunately there’s really not a lot else on there I want to watch, any recommendations? We started Veep and enjoying it so far.

Veep though, it’s definitely suffering in that it’d difficult to make political satire nowadays. I’m sat back thinking “hmm this version of the US government feels pretty kind, efficient, and not scary in the slightest”. I think we might be cooked.

If you’re doing a presentation on a potentially-divisive subject, should you include anonymous Q&A? Asking for a friend.

Alex has been off this week and Ahmed left which means we’ve been an extra small team. That hasn’t stopped us getting a lot done, we’re very close to having a complete migration path ready for some of our apps and I’m excited about it.

Charlotte’s been out a bit this week and I used the opportunity to complete Factorio: Space Age finally. Honestly one of the best games I’ve ever played, I spent an embarassing 434 hours optimising my factory, the equivalent of 62 full work days. I could have completed it in half that time or less but didn’t want to 😁 anyway here’s my Galaxy of Fame entry, I’m particularly proud of the city blocks on Nauvis.

On Thursday we had what I’m counting as a first “proper” after work pub. Proper in that I got merry and bought a kebab on the way home. It was a fun time. Managed to dodge a real hangover.

On Saturday Charlotte and I had a wholesome day. We went to watch Following Faraday’s hint: The search for quantum gravity at the Royal Institution. It was super interesting, Jim gates is very engaging. We went for Korean food nearby afterwards and had an earlyish night.

On Sunday we popped for a roast with Alison and not much else. We’ve been watching Grantchester which is a little bit cozy and silly.

Still no yearnote for my fourth year of weeknotes. The year happened, I’m sure I’ll get around to it.

I think the January blues are over now. I’m feeling a lot more like myself, I’d dare to say I’ve been chirpy this week. My guess is that it’s a combination of not being sick and not being sleep-deprived.

I’ve been doing some interesting stuff at work around tooling for a large migration. It frequently moves at a snail’s pace but it’s worth it for the occasional little flurries of activity which leaves my team feeling super productive. Something I enjoy immensely about my team is that, when the main thing is quiet, there’s a near-infinite pool of interesting side work to pick up.

On Thursday, Charlotte and I went to a light up thing in Shoreditch and spoke to some strangers very successfully. The lights themselves were a bit naff but we had food and some cocktails afterwards.

Saturday was nice, we went for a walk with the Whitechapel crew (plus Luke) out in Abbey Wood. Then we came back towards home and tried out a few new local pubs. We ended in the Hospital Tavern drinking Long Island Iced Teas then crashed Harry Styles’ Birthday Party (karaoke) upstairs.

Just obsessed with these perfect angry lads.

They’ve grown a lot in ~10 months.

Still a bit under the weather, still tired all the time, January eh? I had a pretty quiet week.

On Friday, Charlotte and I went to Rogues in Bethnal Green. The food was excellent and it was pretty reasonable. Their menu changes daily depending on what’s available at markets nearby, ours was quite bovril and kohlrabi heavy so I guess bovril was on offer.

On Saturday I went for a few birthday drinks with some friends, we spent most of the evening in The Hungerford Arms which is my new favourite pub. Less than £5 for most pints, it’s a bit of an old man pub which suits me. Then we went for some food at Needoo.

On Sunday I turned 37, it was quite a relaxed day, I intentially did nothing. As is tradition, Charlotte made me lemon-based birthday treats; every year is better than the last! I’m obsessed with cinammon buns at the moment so she made me Lemon and Cardamom buns, they’re incredible.

I’ve been sick all week, exhausting. It’s been a while since anything hit me or Charlotte this hard, just gross. Not a lot to write about really

I took Monday off work and then half-worked for the rest of the week, just doing boring and repetitive things (e.g. dependency bumps) to keep me occupied. It was about the right speed.

Sickness has meant a lot of TV. Skeleton Crew was so great, the Disney+ Star Wars series have been a little mixed for me but this felt simultaneously new and exciting but scratched a few nostalgic itches. Think “The Goonies in space”.

I wasn’t gonna watch The Traitors but binged it all in one sitting because I ran out of other stuff. It’s alright isn’t it, like it’s entertaining but I don’t get the massive hype. I’ll probs watch the rest now though.

I had the weekend alone because as soon as Charlotte felt well enough she escaped off to the Lake District. It’s been nice hanging out with the cats and doing my own thing.

On Saturday, feeling a lot better, I went to a housewarming and it was a lovely time. I had a few drinks, ate excellent food, and was home early enough to play some Factorio.

We’ve got some nice January sickness going on. Charlotte and I both spent most of the weekend sleeping and feeling awful, lots of cancelled plans. I blame the office - it’s pretty much all we did this week and people love uncovered coughing there. COVID taught us nothing.

This is going to be a boring weeknote as a result tbh.

In Factorio news I’ve played 350 hours so far on this save and have finished a third rebuild of Nauvis into city blocks. Trains everywhere, it’s glorious. At this point I’m fully capable of completing the game but I’m having too much fun still.

That’s all I’ve got in me this morning I’m afraid. Back to bed.

Happy New Year! We rang in the new year down in Brighton where Emms had a little party. It was a fun time and their new house is lovely. We were going to swim on New Year’s Day however it was too rough, we walked along the seafront in the rain instead.

I’ll write a yearnote soon probably. Just over four years of weeknotes now; the most consistent thing I’ve ever done by a long way.

A caveat that generally I like my job however I hate being back at work so very much, friends. I’d like a small commune where I get to grow vegetables and only write code when it suits me for fun, I don’t know if I’ve got another 30+ years in me tbh. I’ll get used to it again, I’m sure.

We did a rubbish escape-room-in-a-box. We couldn’t work out the final clue so we cheated by looking at a hint. We still don’t understand it and neither do most of the reviewers online.

The plans have not slowed for January, it’s looking like a busy one! We went to Fairgame in Canary Wharf and it was a lot of fun - fairground games with a leaderboard and stats, sign me up.

I turn 37 in a few weeks. Uncharacteristically I might fancy doing something, maybe a pub crawl?

It was another Christmas in Hull. Driving was fine on my ankle and we had a nice time. Nothing was very relaxing though - Charlotte and I made the dinner and we were keeping an eye on the cats a lot.

Tom Barnaby is an idiot and he’s obsessed with tinsel. This would be fine if he didn’t keep trying to eat it (very bad). Our house is now a tinsel free zone but the Airbnb had plenty, it was stressful tbh.

The lads did love the stairs. They kept racing up and down them and walking along the top of the bannister.

We drove back to London on Boxing day then up to my family on the 27th. No time for rest!

The 28th was supposed to be a chilled day but we ended up having to do a lot of prep for the second Christmas dinner on 29th.

I’m very tired heading into new year. We’ll be spending it down in Brighton with a few friends 🙂

My ankle is finally on the mend and I’m getting around without a crutch, albeit slowly. I managed to get some Christmas shopping done and it’s been great to be in less pain.

The 19th was Tom Barnaby and Douglas Fir’s first birthday! We celebrated with a few drinks and made them cat-friendly tuna pizzas. They’re spoiled lads. They’re technically adults now!

They’ve also been enjoying terrorizing our baubles.

Tom Barnaby spent Sunday being sick. A lot! It was quite worrying and we ended up forking out for an emergency vet. He was given some anti-sickness meds and has been improving since but it was a worry for a while.

Just continuous drains on our festivity eh?

I’m at 250 hours of Factorio since Space Age released in August 😅 at least half of that has been December but hey it’s Christmas, and I’ve been a bit house-bound.

Hello. We’re not in Austria, as planned. Charlotte still had COVID at the time we were supposed to fly and I can’t walk very far so staying up a mountain probs wasn’t the best idea. Currently discovering that claiming through travel insurance is considerably harder than purchasing travel insurance 👍

Life goes on. It’d be nice if we were feeling more festive but we’re not. At least I’m off work for the rest of the year and we’re managing occasional Christmas films and Whisky Macs.

Work Christmas Party #1 (the whole company) was alright, I managed it on a crutch and discovered that everyone wants to know what you did. I’m going to assume at least some of the enquiries were out of care and not schadenfreude.

What was excellent is that I didn’t have to queue at the bar once. Thanks, friends, for looking after me 😄

I sat down and made a slightly naff Christmas decoration in the quiet/craft room to give my ankle a rest.

Christmas Party #2 (my department) was great! It was at Rio Cinema which was easy for me to get to and it started with a showing of The Muppet Christmas Carol - one of my all time favourites. This got me feeling festive: I had a lot of nice chats, an attempt at dancing on my crutch, had a few Jägerbombs, and told plenty of my friends/colleagues that I love them.

On Tuesday we had some leaving drinks at work for a couple of tech directors who are leaving. It kicked off a quite boozy week and I had some regrests on Wednesday. Christmas time!

Still ready for a break. After this week I only have two days left before I’m off for Christmas ☺️

On Friday, Luke came round and we watched Hot Frosty, the new Netflix Christmas film. Gotta say I loved it. The premise is basically: snowman comes alive, is ripped. It’s all there in the name.

On Saturday we went to an escape room with a few friends then to Christmas Pizza which is a yearly tradition now. It was a fun time until…

I stepped off a curb because I was texting and not looking where I was going. Friends, my ankle is pretty fucked (luckily not broken) and I’m gonna be on crutches for our work Christmas parties which is less than ideal. Just gotta hope it’s better for our trip to Austria in a few weeks 😅

Bad news, friends. I didn’t win the EuroMillions.

On Friday I accidentally went to work despite having the day off. Alex asked half way through standup, “wait, why are you here, Rowan?”. I don’t remember why I booked it off so I played Factorio.

On Saturday we went for a long but quite flat/boring walk in Manningtree. The country air was nice, and we saw a couple of good weirs.

When we got home we started playing Cult of the Lamb. I didn’t know anything about it but saw it was co-op, it’s so much fun! Just slowly building our cute little cult and taking care of heretics.

On Sunday we went to Costco. What an exciting yet exhausting place eh? I bought some shit I don’t need, as is tradition.

It’s been a nice week off, we didn’t overdo it on the plans.

We spent two separate days visiting grandparents. I drove Alison’s car properly for the first time and it’s great - both sets of grandparents are pretty annoying/expensive by train and it made everything easy.

This also meant that the lads went on their first big car journey up to see my grandma. They kinda hated the journey up but they were quite relaxed once there and my grandma enjoyed meeting them. The way back they just slept the whole way 🎉 they’d never experienced stairs before, they were fans.

Alex W is leaving the FT and the country. On Thursday I popped along to his super well-attended leaving drinks and had a great time. It was a parade of old faces.

Lovely news: we have another leak in the bathroom from upstairs. The light fitting has been flooded again, joy. I sent an uncharacteristically stern text to the leaseholder upstairs and he’s been very apologetic and said he’ll actually get the wider plumbing issues fixed this time. We’ll see. I’ll chase.

Lovely to shower in the dark again.

On Saturday we went to Abba Voyage for Charlotte’s mum’s birthday! It was pretty good; the holograms are excellent from a distance but I wish they wouldn’t show you larger images of them on the screens – very uncanny valley and I kept catching myself watching them in horror instead of listening to the music. The live band was great!

On Sunday Alison cooked a roast, excellent, and we finished The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. WILD.

Ark Nova is a really great board game. I can see why people compare it to Terraforming Mars - good level of complexity and a lot of cards + replayability. I enjoyed it!

Charlotte and I played It’s a Wonderful World a couple of times to test the waters with the cats. I expected them to be very interested / chaotic but they were well behaved! Great that we can play at home 👍

I had a three day work week that felt like two weeks 😂 but now I’m off for a week. We’re visiting various grandparents and chilling at home. Maybe a bit of painting.

Over the weekend we visted Sherborne with some friends. It’s a cute town, I ate a lot of baked goods. We were staying in a beautiful house with no central heating, there’s something quite nice about hot waterbottles and huddling round electric heaters though.

Charlotte’s mum stayed with the lads and they had a great time ❤️

What the fuck, America? Guess I need another news break.

Let’s try and focus on the nice boring things happening in my life instead? Like on Monday I helped swap the direction a fridge opened. We made the lads a large fort with the boxes and they played in it all week.

Work was fairly smooth over the election coverage except we found out that there’s been a bug in our barrier pages for ~1.5 years and we’ve been intermittently not giving Google our content 👍 Alex and I spent nearly 3 days on it; I’m very grateful he was there

Saturday was wholesome. We made food, played a board game, hung out with the cats, and generally had a nice chilled day.

On Sunday we went to Brighton, hung out with Charlotte’s brother, and then went to see Jane McDonald. She was excellent 👏 the Cher medley was the highlight for me.

I need to get a handle on how much Factorio I’m playing. My god it’s a good game but such a time sink. I have shit to get done.

It was a very social week. Lovely, but it really ate into my Factorio time.

On Monday we got some work news that had a negative impact on my productivity. It’s fine, our jobs are fine etc, but my advice (as ever) is to join a union. Join a union, my dudes.

In more positive news we’ve merged 400 dependency bump pull requests with no intervention from a human 📈 one of the projects I’m most proud of in my time at this company because it reduces a lot of toil for our engineers.

Tuesday was Ako’s leaving drinks before he went off travelling. A nice time 👍

On Wednesday I met up with Andrew & Ed, where does the time go? We had a few drinks, talked about sad news, and got dinner. We talked about Factorio.

On Thursday I went out after work, the usual. It wasn’t too late because I’d already been out twice in the week so far.

On Friday we popped over to J&C’s to watch some fireworks from their balcony. They have a great view of Alexandra Palace. Riley doesn’t care about fireworks. Neither do the lads.

On Saturday I rounded off my five-days-in-a-row drinking with a housewarming at Alison’s new place. I nearly fell asleep, it’s been a long week.

We’re back on the Vitamin D, lxds.

It’s a Wonderful World arrived, plus expansion. We haven’t played it yet, this week maybe? It’ll be the first time we try playing a board game with the cats, it may not work out.

I’ve been reminded this week how quickly time passes when you’re playing Factorio. Space Age is amazing, I love it. I love it enough to have spent 55 hours on it over the course of my week off 😅

I made it to Vulcanus, I’m astounded at how much bigger this game is now. I probably need to cool off a bit before I burn out.

Alison has moved nearby (like literally a minute’s walk away)! It’s been great having a new neighbour and we helped her put together furniture and clean the place a little. Maybe we don’t need to buy a car after all – Alison has offered to insure me on hers which will save a lot of car hire money.

On Friday we went to see some comedy with Alex and Christina which was a lot of fun. Union Chapel is amazing and I’m annoyed with myself that I never visited when I lived right around the corner.

The squirrels around here are quite belligerent. There’s one in the trees near our flat that frequently YELLS at me and the cats if we’re in the car park. When walking past the park this week another one followed me down the road.

On Tuesday, Charlotte and I went to eat Vietnamese food and watch Rose Matafeo who was excellent 👍

It’s been a heavy board game week with Euan around.

I had games with my regular group on Wednesday, mostly playing smaller party games. Then on Saturday we met up with Euan and played Photosynthesis.

On Sunday we headed over to JPD and David’s and played a very long game of Twilight Inscription. It’s fun but pretty involved - by the end of the game I knew just about what I was supposed to be doing.

Guess why this weeknote is lacking in detail? I’ve got a week off. I’m doing nothing and it’s glorious, I don’t even want to be writing this weeknote. I’m going to download Factorio: Space Age as soon as it’s available and rot in front of my screen but in the fun way instead of the work way.

Oh one thing I did which I’m pleased with - I made it possible for 78 of the FT’s Node.js apps to reduce their dependencies by ~100MB. Don’t install AWS SDK v2 folks.

Euan’s back in the country for a couple of weeks so we’ve been extra social. We went for curry on one evening and then drinks on another, nice to have him back for a bit. I’m very tired, these weeknotes won’t be detailed.

It’s a Wonderful World is a really nice board game, we tried it out this week and I’m a fan. Quite a few nice mechanics and fairly easy to grasp, also with four rounds it was really fast.

It was mum’s birthday this week. Over the weekend I took her and my sister to Mallow (my sister is vegan and my mum is mostly). Once again the tasting menu was excellent, however it’s just too much food. I need to remember this for next time and just order from the regular menu.

We had cocktails again at J&C’s, mostly focused on Whisky-based ones. Riley (cat) was very friendly and chill.

Charlotte’s wanted me to play The Witcher 3 for ages so she can watch. I’ve been avoiding it because it seems like an awful lot of game to commit to. Cut to a few hours after starting and we’re doing all the side missions 😂 it’s quite fun, though I still doubt that I have the energy for this level of depth. There are so many systems and upgrades and modifiers and things to keep track of 💤

It’s been getting colder and so our two lads are especially cuddly. They want to be on top of us all the time and I’m not anti this at all.

This week I started The Rings of Power, I ignored it until now because of poor reviews (did I read them online or did someone I know not rate it?). I’m actually really enjoying it, enough that I finished season 1 in about two days and am having to ration season 2. I need to remember that my bar for fantasy is probably lower than some people and I’ll enjoy most things at least a bit.

Back to work, it took a while to get back into it tbh but got lots done at the end of the week. We’re really close to announcing rolling out a new tool that’ll really reduce toil for our engineering teams. I’m excited about it.

On Thursday we did a little pub crawl from the office back to Whitechapel. There were a few jägerbombs involved and I regretted that decision on Friday. However Tim and I got 24/25 on the Joe pub quiz despite neither of us being at full health.

Saturday was very nice. I got a load of jobs done then Charlotte and I went for a meal then for cocktails. We tried out Eve Bar which was amazing, not exaggerating when I say they might be the best cocktails I’ve ever had. We even spotted Adam Handling having some post-work drinks. Tempted to try the tasting menu at Frog upstairs but it’s edging towards the obscene end of expensive.

I finished Dune Messiah and picked up Children of Dune immediately afterwards. They are pretty excellent sci-fi and it’s interesting spotting how much it’s influenced more modern media. I think I’ll have a break from Frank Herbert after this one though.

My board game group tried out Terra Mystica for the first time this week and I really liked it. We didn’t quite finish the game due to running late but would definitely play it again now we know the rules.

Tom Barnaby has started a slightly worrying habit of getting onto this 8 foot wall and then struggling to find a way down.

The place we were staying this week was on the Tarn and the river dominated the week overall. We spent most of our time by it, on it, or driving the length of it.

It’s a really beautiful part of the world, lots of quaint little villages that I couldn’t live in but enjoyed holidaying in. The roads are tiny and very windy but there were barely any other people driving so it was fine.

We did some kayaking along the river. Our accommodation was between two dams so it was basically a lake – fairly easy paddling. We also swam but it was a bit cold.

We spent a little time in Lincou, Brousse-le-Château, Millau, Saint-Affrique, Réquista, and Plaisance. Every restaurant we tried was excellent. Every cake I tried was excellent. All the cheese I tried was excellent.

We did touristy things like going to look at some dinosaur footprints and viewing the Millau Viaduct from every possible angle. It’s the tallest bridge in the world if you measure it in the correct way.

On the drive back to Toulouse we visited Albi again, this time for longer and to do a tour in the little road train. It’s a really lovely town and I’d go back for a proper stay, we didn’t have time for the Toulouse-Lautrec museum.

I’m glad to be home, the lads are pleased to see us and have been extra cuddly ❤️

It’s been a nice quiet weekend apart from going for a few drinks for Luke’s birthday. It was nice but I’m glad we didn’t do a late one.

Fun news this evening: another leak from upstairs just after we got all the insurance work done. It’s not a big one but it’s in an exciting new place above our bed. This is the fifth leak, the fourth caused directly by my upstairs neighbour’s shoddy plumbing. They turned the heating on and apparently the radiators can’t quite cope with that 🤦

This week we met a new cat sitter who lives nearby and introduced her to the lads. I’m pleased they’re generally not scared of strangers once they have a few minutes (or treats). They’re now getting on well with her, following her between rooms and being their normal selves from what I can tell.

We needed a cat sitter because we’re in France for a week, having a restful time. We flew into Toulouse and spent the night and morning there; I had one of the best omlettes of my life at brunch with Luke’s mum who happened to be nearby.

After brunch we set off in the car. We had a brief stop-off in Albi to grab a coffee and look at a cathedral. It’s a pretty town. No terrible driving mistakes so far, just a wrong turn or two. It’s normally harder to switch back to driving on the left once home.

We arrived in Lincou (beautiful) where we’re staying in a château. So begins my diet of cheese and bread. It’s very picturesque, we’re going to do several hikes, kayaking on the river, and drink plenty of wine.

I slept most of today because we overdid it a bit on the first night 😬 probably needed the rest though tbh. I was feeling burnout creeping up on me towards the end of the work week.

Alison stayed over for a few days this week, was nice to see her. Excited for when she finishes buying her place round the corner. More people in Whitechapel 🎉

On Tuesday we went to a pub quiz at The Parakeet in Kentish Town. It was me, Charlotte, Tammy and Marcus and we came first! We won a £75 bar tab so now we have to go again at some point. I won us 5 bonus points by drawing the best parakeet doing balloons, proud moment.

Towards the end of the quiz Charlotte started feeling a little sick. Towards the end of Wednesday evening I started to feel it too. We’ve been mostly in bed since. I’ve mostly improved but Charlotte’s still coughing a lot and feeling terrible.

We started watching Whitechapel because we wanted something easy and it’s where we live. It includes all my favourite things about modern Whitechapel: dark and smoggy alleyways, gangs, cockneys everywhere, people dressed like they could be in the 1800s, serial killers, various Southwark landmarks, and literally every single person being white. Feels like home, you know?

The decorator came! We’ve had horrible stains on our ceilings and down our walls since MARCH and now everything’s nice again ☺️

The insurers decided that they weren’t going to paint the kitchen but, due to them not telling the decorator this, he bought the paint anyway. He didn’t care at all and gave us the paint so we can do that ourselves.

This really got us in the mood to properly finish off all the decorating in the flat. Charlotte bought a nice new rug for the bedroom and we tried a bigger patch of a peachy colour that us and the cats have decided we don’t like.

I’ve literally just realised that it’s basically FT Pink and we don’t need our bedroom to remind us of work.

Boring, but we’re going with a dark cream that we already have just to get it done for now. It’ll be nicer than the very patchy current walls.

My board game group played Wingspan and I killed it. All that time burned on the mobile game was worth it.

Inspired by strangers on TikTok I tried making some Ramlets (Ramen Omelettes) and honestly they’re really delicious. You cook instant ramen without the flavour sachet, mix the powder into some eggs, make an omelette but distribute the ramen before it cooks so it’s kind of an eggy noodly slab. Then you fold it over filled with stuff like spring onions, fried bacon or spam, and sriracha. Gonna try a veggie version with kimchi 👀

On Sunday we met up with Luke and went to see Come Dine With Me: The Musical. It was fun and silly.

We’re having a very flat and lazy week. Lots of bed, lots of boredom, lack of motivation. Maybe we’re just tired and ill? Maybe we have a carbon monoxide leak? I should check the batteries in the alarm.

On Tuesday I had in-person boardgames for the first time in ages, got some exciting news from Scott, ate burgers and drank rum 👍

On Wednesday Charlotte’s mum came round for dinner and to hang out with us and the lads, it was nice and chilled.

On Friday I had the day off work to go to my cousin’s wedding. I had such a nice time, caught up with a lot of extended family in a deeper way than I have in ages – I think it helped that there was a bouncy castle to distract all the kids. I got home super late because Rebecca lost her phone and we had to backtrack a lot.

It’s quite possible I’m just doing too much at the moment.

I started Dune Messiah, but part of my motivational struggle is reading.

I did a spreadsheet of our car hire and train costs over the last four years to see if it’s worth buying a second hand car instead of hiring them all the time. Without data from Charlotte’s bookings we’re at £5,229 so far 😅

Look at this little asshole.

Here we are at another arbitrary milestone, 200 weeknotes 🚀 I’ve written nearly 72,000 words of them so far. That’s roughly the same as Treasure Island. Feel free to spend ~7 hours reading them all.

It wasn’t a very eventful week really. I thought it wasn’t eventful but, after writing all the stuff we did, it was quite busy!

I’ve been playing Shapez 2 quite obsessively, it’s in early release at the moment but it’s really polished and such a fun factory builder.

On Thursday we went to Not Another Quiz Night with Tammy and Marcus which was a lot of fun. I think we came 5th out of 25+ teams 👏 we went to Grasso in Soho before and tbh I wouldn’t bother again, pretty underwhelming considering the price.

On Friday we popped over to J&C’s for cocktails. Due to hand injuries and general laziness I made all the cocktails and thoroughly enjoyed it. The aim was to try and find uses for the Cognac in the cupboard, turns out there are plenty of great ones: Ampersands are delicious, Burnt Fuselages are delicious, Sidecars are delicious, and Landing Gears are delicious.

On Saturday we had a fry up in Cafe Donatella and then lazed around a lot.

Douglas Fir pissed on the bed again. At least the duvet fits in the washing machine. It’s our fault, we left the litter trays a few days longer and they didn’t smell good; bad cat owners. We’ve resolved to be better, not just because pissy beds are a pain.

On Sunday Charlotte and I went to Searcys because we had a gift voucher. We went for bottomless champagne and a roast, we managed a bottle each which is reasonable. Then we met Luke in Mr Fogg’s for cocktails; we bumped into another FT person, small world eh? We went to a few other bars and I fell asleep in my clothes 👍 this is what bank holidays are for right?

We don’t talk about Monday.

We were in Great Malvern from Sunday until Wednesday, and most of our time was spent doing long walks across the hills in slightly too-hot weather. It was a lovely time and it felt great to be out in the countryside. You’re never super far from a tea room or pub in the Malvern Hills. We still managed about 20 miles over three days despite the heat.

We were very pleasantly surprised to pay £4.20 for two drinks in the Wetherspoons there. It’s like going back in time! Yes yes, Wetherspoons is bad etc but £2.10 a pint!? I would not be surprised to pay double that for a single drink near work.

It was a delightfully short week at work. Sod the four-day work week, I could get used to two-day weeks.

On Saturday we attended not one but two parties. Did you know that we’re so sociable and young and in demand as party attendees? The first was Tammy’s mum’s birthday, lovely. The second was a big house party, there was a smoke machine and lasers, it was fun. I miss house parties.

The Insurance company keeps sending people to look at our flat. The drying is done (phew) and now we need to choose paint colours for the hall, bathroom, and kitchen. This might take us some time – we still have several years’ worth of paint samples on the bedroom walls 😬

I’m pleased they don’t have to rip out all the plaster or rewire lots of things 😌

I finished Base Notes by Lara Elena Donnelly and really enjoyed it but definitely couldn’t handle reading it at pace. It gripped me more toward the end though! Then I picked up Piranesi by Susanna Clarke and literally couldn’t put it down; I finished it in about a day and a half. Beautiful worldbuilding IMO.

It’s been a quiet and lazy week which I think I needed.

At work, I’ve been replacing our eight-year-old Heroku-based monitoring systems with a suite of lambdas. It’s going to cost considerably less to run. It’s also going to be a lot easier to work with – far fewer dependencies, a lot less boilerplate, and simpler code.

On Thursday we had a first visit from the contractors that work for our building insurer. He’s a drying specialist?? We’ve been left with two very noisy industrial extractors to help dry out the walls and ceiling. The good news is, because the leak happened in March, we should only need them for a week. There’s no lingering dampness that he was concerned about 😌

The lads are warm and they’re finding innovative ways to deal with it. Douglas Fir has worked out he can jump up and sit on the frame of the open windows to get a little breeze. Tom Barnaby hasn’t managed it successfully yet.

I said I wouldn’t because the producers have been getting desperate and more exploitative in recent seasons of Netflix shows, but we started watching Love is Blind UK. It’s still wild as a premise. All of them seem slightly more normal aside from the walking red flag that is Sam.

We’re off to Malvern for a couple of days now, having Monday–Wednesday off work. We’re going to do a lot of walking in the hills. Charlotte’s brother and his girlfriend are looking after the cats which is lovely of them.

We were full into No Plans Week this week, it was quite busy but not too busy and was nice to be spontaneous.

On Monday we went and got food with Korn who was visiting London with his partner and a friend. We got tacos and caught up after quite a few years.

On Friday we headed into Soho to get ramen with Nikita who’s visiting London, was lovely to catch up. Then Charlotte, Luke and I went to the Royal Opera House to hear Brian Cox talk with an orchestra accompaniment, it was interesting and lovely.

On Saturday we met up with Luke and Gallal again and walked from London Bridge to the Thames Barrier along the Thames Path. It was a good day for walking - not quite as scorching as it has been lately. We stopped off in a few pubs en route and then got food in Woolwich as a reward. We saw the Gravel Works again 👍

Sunday was quite relaxed but we did go meet up with Alison who’s visiting London. We ate pasta and drank wine. Officina 00 near Old Street is probably some of the best pasta I’ve eaten in London, I highly recommend it.

During bits of downtime, I’ve been playing Minecraft again on our server. Luke and I beat the dragon one evening and I’m managing not to spend so much time on there that I burn out.

I picked up watching Mr & Mrs Smith expecting something fairly mindless and easy. It’s really good! Less of a spy thriller and more of a focus on two people’s relationship, I’m enjoying it a lot.

It feels like I spent a bit too much of this week hungover. On Friday after morning standup I had to go back to bed - the first time in years I’ve been that bad on a work day 😅 I’ll make up the time, mostly out of embarrassment.

It’s now No Plans Week. It’s a week where a few friends have agreed to have nothing booked into our calendars so that we can be spontaneous. This spontaneity is partly responsible for my hangovers. The rest I’m blaming on the several good friends who decided to have birthdays on the same days. Lovely times though.

I built a new open source library that works out which Node.js versions a repo claims to support. I found that I’ve repeated this code in many different places both on personal projects and at work, makes sense to publish it.

I generally like work but I’ve been struggling slightly in recent weeks with the pace of change – tech improvements can feel glacial. Right now we’re steering an oil tanker. I’m under no illusions that we’ll ever be a speedboat but I think Thames Clipper is a reasonable stretch goal.

I think a little part of it is convincing people to take technical risks and be OK switching something off even if “it might be useful if X”. Once I’ve got past the moaning phase I’ll try and do something more about it.

I started the week dropping off a friend’s artwork at a gallery where she’s exhibiting. It was a long trek out to South Kensington but I rewarded myself with a Ben’s Cookie.

Work was fun, we’re finishing off a few tasks for our Insurance Policy, a tool to help us recover from large infrastructure outages and make sure we can still serve article content if there’s a large outage outside of our control. It’s exciting to get it ready for launch! The only shame is, fingers crossed, we’ll never have to use it.

On Friday we took the lads to the park near our house and drank a few Pineapple Spritzes with Gallal. It was delightful. A Pineapple Spritz (the way we do it, please tell me if there’s another name) is elderflower liqueur, pineapple syrup, prosecco, and a dash of soda water over a lot of ice. It’s very refreshing.

On Saturday we went to a little party/BBQ at Remi’s and had a nice time in the garden. We saw Charlotte’s nephew again who’s walking around now. The M&S Smoked Pineapple Daiquiri in a can is delicious.

We walked from Charlton to North Greenwich via the gravel works, one of our favourite places. The O2 was kicking out so we took the cable car instead of trying to navigate the station. Fun!

I had to double-check that I hadn’t yet named a weeknote “pineapple” before and it turns out I’ve never mentioned a pineapple on this website. Now I’ve said it 8 times. I wonder what other fruits have been getting a terrible deal? Anyway, pineapple is an excellent flavour even if you’re mildly allergic. Now it’s 9 times.

I finished The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and loved it all. Excellent read and I’ll investigate more Claire North. This brings me to 24 books in 2024; double my original target but, now I think about it, a more fun goal to have had.

I started Base Notes by Lara Elena Donnelly because it was cheap, turns out Charlotte has read it and loved it. I’m excited to see where it goes (gonna go out on a limb and predict that it’s more sex and murder).

I picked up Cities: Skylines II again this week and played a little bit in the evenings. The latest patches have made the game feel a lot more polished and I’m enjoying noodling about in my new cities.

Still not getting anywhere near my holiday reading speed, I picked up The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. I’m 75% of the way through and loving it so far; It follows a man who, whenever he dies, returns to his birth with his full memory. It’s been good adding several women in Science Fiction to the list of authors I like: I noticed I kept picking up stuff written by men because it’s what kept getting recommended.

On Friday we went to listen to Sean Paul from Finsbury Park and drank some champagne on a bench. The sound wasn’t great but then I suppose they don’t optimise for “people sat way behind the wall trying to get some free music”. Then we headed to a party nearby, met lots of people, and drank Sambuca.

When we got home we found that the cats had pissed on the bed and shat on the sofa. We’ll chat to a vet but normally this’d be a sign of anxiety at their age. I think we’ve increased the time they’re by themselves a bit too quickly and will readjust to spending shorter times with nobody in the flat. Poor pissy lads.

They’re doing a cute thing at the moment where they love being in the bath. If I shower then they’ll rush in afterwards and sit in the wet bath very still until the motion-activated light turns off. They don’t seem to mind being damp.

On Sunday I popped up to see my extended family to celebrate my grandma’s birthday in a park. As usual, it was nice to see everyone, however, these large group things mean I barely feel like I caught up with anyone. I was originally going to hire a car and drive up but, embarrassingly, I booked it for the wrong weekend. I only found this out after the person at the car hire place spent 15 minutes trying to find my booking 🤦

What a week! I’ve been able to vote for 18 years, 14 of those with the Tories in power, it’s felt pretty disenfranchising. I’m really pleased, I’m under no illusion that Starmer is going to be perfect but, for now, I’m celebrating a long-overdue change.

Before the election fully took over all my brain space, my sister finally came over to meet the cats. We went for some excellent Ethiopian food nearby and caught up a bit. The lads were well-behaved obvs.

My board game group is experimenting a little with video games and this week we set up Drehmal Apotheosis. It’s a Minecraft-based RPG and it was fun! It’s a little less free-form than regular Minecraft but the added story elements are great and it’s a beautiful custom map.

OK back to the election: I volunteered to be on tech support overnight on Thursday. I was down for the 5–11 pm slot but I decided to just push through and pull an all-nighter. It was a lot of fun! The site held up nicely aside from a few minor blips so it was mostly chatting and doing little bits of low-risk work.

It was also exhausting, there were several moments where I wondered whether I should just go home to bed but I’m glad I didn’t; the atmosphere in the newsroom was quite buzzing and loads of other engineers stayed for the whole night.

At 6:30 am, tired and wired, a few of us went to the Market Porter for opening time. I had some champagne and I had some jägerbombs. Then we wandered over to a nearby Wetherspoons for breakfast at 9 am. We got home around midday after quite a lot of shots and passed out immediately. It’s weird to be celebrating something happening in politics.

The weekend has been very lazy; we’ve barely left the bed but I think I’m about back to normal now sleep-wise.

I used some of my waking hours to finish Station 11 which I enjoyed a lot. The jumping of perspective between the before times and post-apocalypse was great and helped invest me in the characters. It’s quite interesting reading pre-2019 books that include epidemics/pandemics (this one and Doomsday Book).

Oh, I also did a really cool thing (IMO) after learning about GitHub Actions Reusable Workflows. I now have a single actions repo where I keep shared workflows and actions; these are then pulled into my individual Open Source projects. This means I can make changes in one place and each of the repos is reduced in size and complexity considerably!

I also used the opportunity to get myself back down to zero dependency PRs 💪

Short weeknote, I cba to add a lot of detail because I’m trying to watch We Are Lady Parts at the same time.

We went to Zoo Nights at London Zoo, it was a gift from Charlotte’s mum and it was nice! It’s a lot less busy and chilled. We saw lion cubs. We watched armadillos run after a keeper with a pot of crickets.

On Sunday we walked from Seaford to Eastbourne along the seven sisters. It was perfect weather. We had to take our shoes off to cross a river.

I finished The Left Hand of Darkness and really loved it by the end. I struggled a little with the first half but binged the second half in no time at all. I picked up Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel and it’s a delight to be back in a nice comforting little dystopia.

I spent a bit of time (on personal projects and at work) migrating things to use TypeScript 5.5. It was boring. Migrating to Node.js native test runner was less boring, getting rid of some dependencies.

This week was the annual FT rounders game where several teams from Product & Technology either ran around Regent’s Park or sat on the grass and ate/drank. It was a fun day as always but my bag got stolen at the pub afterwards. The joke’s on the thief: there was nothing in it except a jacket, some suncream, and a bottle of water. Shame about the bag though.

I released an updated OpenTelemetry library for internal FT use which will stop us from having to copy the same boilerplate (10 dependencies and 60 lines of code) across 200+ repos. I’m really quite excited to get a blog post written and start getting our teams to try it out next week 👏

We had Thursday and Friday off work because it’s Charlotte’s birthday! We didn’t do a lot on Thursday except make it to a local greasy spoon. On Friday we went to a food festival in Chelmsford, drank some wine, and danced to Symphonic Ibiza.

On Saturday, all our plans fell through so Charlotte and I had a lazy morning and then went for the tasting menu at Mallow which serves incredible vegan food.

On Sunday we went for a roast at Charlotte’s dad’s and spent the day with family. Somehow my first time having rice and peas with a roast, great addition. Charlotte’s nephew was there and being cute, he’s nearly walking.

My reading rate has dropped a lot, partly because of all the drinking but I’m also finding The Left Hand of Darkness to be a bit of a slow burn. It’s great but the characters haven’t reeled me in to the same extent as some other recent reads.

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.

We had a very relaxing week in Türkiye, I spent most of it doing absolutely nothing except reading by the pool, occasional swims, and making use of the swim-up bar. It was 32–47℃ nearly the whole time which is just too hot to do anything else. I managed not to burn 👍

I did manage to injure myself in the process of stealing extra towel cards – a resource you can never have too much of. Instant karma got me and I spent a lot of the week with some nasty rib pain and popping painkillers.

I swam quite far out of my depth in the sea which I was quite proud of, not being a very confident swimmer and being scared of deep water 😅

Towards the end of the week, we went to Land of Legends which was a lot of fun. The Hyper Coaster there holds the world record for the largest rollercoaster loop, very fun, and the Turtle Coaster is one of the world’s longest water slides. The air was so hot that it felt like you were being attacked by an army of hairdryers.

I’ve read a lot in the last two weeks, particularly while we were away. I reached my target for the year and treated myself to a Kindle which I’m already in love with.

• I finished Ubik which gets weird but it was good; not my favourite Philip K. Dick but short and worth a read.

• I read Early Riser and loved it. Jasper Fforde is great at building a world over a long series and it was nice to get one just as rich in a single book. Early Riser is set in a world where humans hibernate over the winter and follows some of the few who don’t bed down.

• Then I picked up How to Stop Time by Matt Haig, which might be my favourite book so far this year. The protagonist is a man who ages far slower than regular humans and it explores his life over centuries, it’s gripping and a little heartbreaking.

• I then carried on with my Jasper Fforde catch-up with The Constant Rabbit, I enjoyed it but it didn’t grab my imagination in quite the same way as Early Riser. It’s got a nice but blatant anti-fascist message and is quite funny.

• The Prestige (now a major motion picture) was way better than I expected tbh, it follows a feud between two 19th-century stage illusionists from the perspective of their modern relatives reading diary entries.

• Finally, just before sitting down to write this, I spent the day finishing The Devil and the Dark Water. It’s more of a straight mystery than The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (also by Stuart Turton). I really loved some of the characters and the setting, mostly onboard a Dutch East India Company ship, was both interesting and educational.

We’re back home now. The lads seemed to enjoy spending the week with Gallal and we got lots of cute pictures of them being friendly with him. They’ve been extra sweet today ❤️

This week was fairly quiet, keeping it chill ahead of our holiday. On Wednesday I went over to Ed’s to hang out with him and Andrew, then Charlotte and I had dinner in Spitalfields one evening after a little bit of holiday shopping.

At work, Alex and I have been pairing loads on a new system that automatically merges dependency bump pull requests that we consider safe, e.g. if it’s an express or mocha minor version bump then it’s probably fine to just merge it.

We got so far in a week and it’s been a fun introduction to GitHub webhooks, more complex Lambda-based apps, and DynamoDB.

We dropped off the lads to stay with Gallal for a week. They seemed nervous at first but they’re definitely warming to him 😍 his flat is a little noisier than ours and maybe it’s good for them to get more used to it.

I miss them but can’t think of anyone better to look after them while we’re gone. They seemed to know something was up, I got a lot of cuddles the day we were leaving.

I’m writing these weeknotes from Türkiye, currently sat in my air-conditioned hotel room because there are highs of 38℃ today. We’ve been lounging by the pool, eating and drinking too much, and beaching off.

On Monday I braved the vet by myself to get the lads checked up after their operations. Everything was fine and we got the OK to remove their cones. They’re very happy about this.

On Tuesday I met up with Andrew and Ed for a few drinks near Spitalfields, lovely to catch up as usual. We went to the Merchant & Weaver which was nice and quiet, though £7.40 a pint nowadays 😓

On Wednesday we decided to try letting the cats outside for the first time. They were so nervous; Tom Barnaby explored a little bit outside the door and in the car park but kept dashing back if there was a strange sound. Douglas Fir barely left the doorstep despite us bribing him with treats. At least we know for now that they’re unlikely to stage any daring escapes.

I popped into the office on Thursday in time for a few after-work drinks. We ordered a cocktail pitcher with a tap in honour of the sea horse’s new menu. Turns out we were the first to do this; I suspect we may also be the last. Then Charlotte, Arjun, Anh, and I went on a small Jägerbomb crawl.

On Saturday it was Noah’s first birthday party, held at Charlotte’s dad’s new place which is great for a summer party. There was a bouncy castle. We saw Georgie briefly to collect all the various things we’d left at hers last week.

It’s been a good reading week. I read The Humans by Matt Haig, which was fun but sad in places, a good mix. He’s a new author to me and I’ll definitely read more. Then I read Lamb by Christopher Moore which made me laugh quite a few times, it gave me Good Omens vibes (one of my favourite books). I just started Ubik, being a Philip K. Dick fan I’m surprised I still haven’t read this one.

Seems like we’re getting an election soon. I’ve decided I’m going to work election night this year, keeping an eye on FT.com under presumably increased load. I’ll be awake anyway and I think it’ll be fun in the office!

This week Tom Barnaby and Douglas Fir had the snip, poor lads, and got microchipped. We want them to be outdoor cats and this is the last step. Their regular vet doesn’t have a surgery so we had to travel out to Hampstead, they were fine on the tube again.

The lads absolutely hated the vet-supplied plastic cones and, on night one, we had a shit incident – Douglas Fir went for a poo then tried to sniff it, getting a large lump caught on the cone and trailing it around a bit. The cones came off and I stayed up all night to make sure they didn’t lick their wounds too much. The next day I primed two soft cones and they were transformed into two beautiful little sunflowers 🌻🌻

Because the vet was so far away and the cats had to be in for observation for a while, we took the day off and spent it wandering around Hampstead Heath. We pretty much just moved from bench to bench in the sun and read our books, it was a lovely way to spend a day.

I’m reading still. Dune was excellent, loved it, and I quickly picked up Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde – a sequel I’ve been waiting 15 years for. It was fun and playful and I enjoyed it a lot. I started, and just finished, Doomsday Book which was also great. I barely put it down. I’m slowly getting back to the reading rate of my teenage self, I’m on 11/12 and realising my target for the year was a bit low.

On Saturday we went to Georgie’s for a house party, it’s been ages since I’ve been to one and I forgot how easy it is to get absolutely hammered when there are no time cues and you’re free-pouring all your drinks. I had a great time, I think, but Sunday was ruinous.

Ugh, Eurovision. We had a nice time in Malmö but, by the end, I was really feeling like we should have boycotted. There was a lot of protest regarding Israel continuing to be in the competition and boycotting was probably the right move. I donated a lot of guilt money to MAP to make myself feel better.

• You can hear me booing and yelling in some of the videos of the second semi-final rehearsal, which is funny and weird. The EBU played fake cheering over Israel’s act later in the competition, you can find what it sounded like in the arena on Twitter etc.

• It’s been a bit of a shit-show this year and the joy has gone. The fans are really not happy with the EBU. I’m not participating in the future unless things change.

In brighter news, the small lads were really happy to see us. They’ve been having a nice time with the cat sitter but it was lovely to return – there was a lot of cute purring and cuddling and they seem to have forgiven us instantly for leaving.

I hope they forgive us after Wednesday when we’re having their balls chopped off 🥲 not sure if there are enough smarts in their little walnut brains to realise that we’re the masterminds behind the plan.

Still reading! 10 weeks in a row which is probably the longest streak since my early 20s 👍

• I finished Brideshead Revisited, I enjoyed it but found it slower-going than a lot of the other books I’ve read recently. I’m definitely more gripped when there’s a fantasy or sci-fi element to a story.

• Speaking of sci-fi I’m about 3/4 of the way through Dune and loving it. I’m picking it up at every spare moment and will probably pick up the sequels after this one.

I don’t think I could have hoped for a better result RE the council elections. What a thorough trouncing for the Tories eh? I don’t know if I’ve felt so positive about UK politics since Jeremy Corbyn was around. Fingers crossed my optimism isn’t rewarded in the same way eh?

On Friday we finally finished all the required work on our flat. The electrician replaced our very outdated consumer unit and installed our new induction hob and now everything in the flat works again! What a joy. We managed to use the hob once before we went away; friends, I’ve missed eating pasta so very much. I made a very delicious Cacio e Pepe with some fried lardons and vegetables. I had three hobs on the go just because I could.

On Saturday we flew out to Malmö via Copenhagen ahead of Eurovision. We have tickets to some of the semifinal dress rehearsals and I’m excited 🎉

Malmö seems like a lovely city, we’re staying just outside the center in an Airbnb; one of the ones that is actually someone’s home and it’s really cute. The suburbs around here are super pretty with lots of flowers and blossom-covered trees and it feels super springy. Everyone’s very friendly.

Great to see lots of Palestinian flags around the place, I don’t think Eurovision’s “apolitical” stance is gonna fly here and there are a couple of protests against Israel’s participation.

The food here has been excellent so far. I can’t get enough meatballs.

Ahead of J&C arriving, we went on a day trip to Copenhagen and visited Tivoli, the world’s second-oldest amusement park. It’s like stepping back in time ❤️ It’s extremely well maintained and looked after.

It’s weird to leave the lads for the first time, I miss them quite a lot 🥹 we hired a cat sitter because we need someone to be there most of the time and it felt a bit restrictive to ask one of our friends to do it. She seems nice and the boys are warming to her based on the pictures she’s been sending.

Right, I have to go, gotta try on some sequined clothing ready for the show this eve ✨ have a nice week.

I’ve been feeling quite smug at work this week. I managed to track down and debug an error in our CDN config that’s probably been there for about 8 years. It’s reduced our error rate by a good amount and we’re going to see our availability metrics creep further towards where we want them.

On Wednesday I went to AWS Summit and wished I hadn’t. There was a lot of AI hype and the talks I went to were very sales-pitchy. I’ve managed to avoid events at the ExCeL so far and I’m not in a hurry to return – it’s too big. After lunch, I left to get some work done. It was still nice to hang out with Alex for a bit.

We have a bathroom light again! An electrician came to check the wiring and fit a new light on Friday and it’s still such a novelty to be able to see while I shower or clean my teeth. We’ve been using a torch in there for 10 weeks!

The weekend was lovely, on Saturday we went for some udon near Spitalfields Market, did some shopping, then came home and played It Takes Two. We tried a long time ago and didn’t enjoy it initially so gave up; It stuck this time and we had a lot of fun!

On Sunday we went for a short walk near Shoreham in Kent so as not to leave the lads for too long. It was so nice: perfect weather, lots of wildlife, bluebells, and I think we both needed a break from the city.

Our new hob got delivered this week but the fitters couldn’t fit it because they’d need to switch the oven over to a standard plug to make it work and didn’t seem to fancy it. It’s becoming very boring not being able to cook a lot of things.

Our new cat sitter came to visit the small lads and they all got on well so feeling less stressed about leaving them for a week in May. They seem to get on well with nearly everyone who visits which is nice.

I need to maybe have a small break from Thursday pub after work because I keep staying out quite late and feeling quite hungover on Fridays. New pub new Jägerbomb format, who knew these split glasses existed!?

I watched all of Fallout over the weekend, not groundbreaking but I enjoyed it a lot – I think it was a good representation of the world in the games and it was fun.

I’ve started doing Sudoku again, picking up where I left off with the Cracking The Cryptic app and trying to remember all the solving techniques. It’s a nice way to burn time.

On Saturday we went for a bottomless brunch with Tammy, Alison, and Marcus for the first time in ages. Afterward, we played on arcade machines and then went to see Daniel Beddingfield in Soho House (one of our friends works there). Soho House people are very much the worst and I was happy to leave.

Charlotte continues to be sick (but improving) and I have managed not to catch it but I am just very tired all the time. Trying to get this weeknote written before work because I didn’t want to interrupt our bed day yesterday. At least Spring has arrived!

On Thursday it was Arjun’s 10-year anniversary at the FT so we went for some drinks. Through a little serendipity and a desire for Jägerbombs we bumped into some more colleagues in a nearby bar with a downstairs karaoke room. I sang some Dolly Parton and then Summer Nights as a duet with Luke. Fun!

On Saturday we went to see Hadestown with Charlottes family – a Christmas present. It was fun but I wish I wasn’t so exhausted; I had to fight sleep a little in the warm dark Lyric Theatre.

I got around to buying a new hob, we went with an induction one so that we don’t need to have the kitchen floor dug up to replace the gas pipes. By Wednesday we’ll be able to eat things like pasta again 🤞

I’ve been catching up on TV and binged the fourth and fifth seasons of Fargo. I loved them both, the fourth was quite a refreshing take on the series and the fifth came as close as I think they could in recapturing how I felt about the first season.

The baby cats who live with us have discovered that they do both fit on the window seat we bought for them. Cute huh? They also like the washing machine which has me paranoid every time I do the laundry 😬

I’m going to keep this brief because I was up until 2:30 on Sunday and I very much want to crawl into bed instead of writing weeknotes.

It was a quiet week. Charlotte has become ill with what seems like a flu and has been out of action for a few days.

We had a nice little pub trip on Thursday. My highlight was a final drink in The Counting House with Gallal and Arjun.

The reason I’m tired is that I went to the London Eurovision Party last night and it overran a bit. I was supposed to be home relatively early but it started an hour and a half late. It was fun though! It’s not the main Eurovision but a lot of the artists head to London to perform ahead of the host city.

Charlotte and Chris were both sick so it was just Jennifer and I. We stood at the very front and made friends with some hardcore Eurovision nerds.

I don’t have the energy to list my favourites or anything yet. So tired.

I had a wine where the tasting notes said “If anyone wanted to make an adult Refresher bar, then this is it”. Suited my child’s palate nicely.

I liked Treasure Island a lot, it’s a good adventure. I started reading and finished The Time Machine by HG Wells, also good but think I prefer The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. The only problem with all these authors from the late 1800s is that they love to drop some casual but overt racism in there – often a cheeky little caricature of some race or other.

Next, I’ll treat myself to some 20th Century literature and read Brideshead Revisited followed by Dune, which has been on my reading list for ages. These will bring me up to 9/12 of my year target which, maybe speaking too soon, I’m gonna smash.

Bed now. Can’t even be bothered to select a cute picture of a kitten to share. We got them a cute double-deckered carrier backpack but you don’t get to see it.

Sorry. Bye.

We finally got our leaky kitchen tap sorted by replacing it. I was gonna do it myself but then realised that we don’t have a hot water isolation valve for the sink and it’d mean fiddling with the boiler. I had a look at the mess of pipes and decided to hire a plumber.

On Saturday we attended Alex and Christina’s wedding which was lovely. We spent a lot of the time hiding in the back room hanging out with Alice, Lachie, and their kids. The only slight disappointment was that Alex’s friends were tight-lipped about any youthful misadventures, you win some you lose some, eh?

On Sunday we dressed up again for a Greek Orthodox christening which was something new. The pretty intense religion was followed by a big party that was closer in lavishness to a wedding. We drank a lot and had some nice catch-ups with Charlotte’s family. The food, a blend of Greek and Caribbean, was incredible.

I have an impressive four-claw scratch on my shoulder from one of the cats misjudging an attempt to jump onto my back while I cleaned their litter. I wasn’t wearing a t-shirt at the time, lesson learned. They have a lot of confidence with their jumping/climbing but not a lot of skill to back it up yet. They also destroyed one of my pot plants by nudging it off the windowsill while I was hungover 👍

My reading has continued: Dracula was great, maybe slightly slow-paced at times but I enjoyed it. I didn’t know that the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Sleepy Hollow are both novellas and I finished them both super quickly. Charlotte thinks they shouldn’t count towards my 2024 goal but she’s not the boss of me.

Sticking with the classics I’ve started reading Treasure Island. It’s quite difficult not to picture all the characters as muppets so I’ve kind of stopped trying, Tim Curry hasn’t arrived yet.

We had a deliberately relaxed week without too many plans, we’re both quite tired.

I’ve been reading a lot for the last couple of weeks and I’m on track with my very unimpressive 12-books-in-a-year target. I read Frankenstein, which I enjoyed a lot, and have moved on to Dracula which is great so far. I didn’t mean to end up in “classic horror fiction 2024” but here we are. I might try the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde next.

On Tuesday I went to Alice’s birthday drinks and drank quite a few cocktails. It was fun! I didn’t need to stay as late as I did but the company was good. Wednesday wasn’t so fun.

In house news, we have lights again! Just not in the bathroom. Shah, the local man I’m paying to be my electrician/gas engineer/friend, will fit a new bathroom light soon ☺️ it’s been over a month of no big lights and the novelty of having them back is great.

On Saturday, Charlotte and I decided to have a day of shopping and wine. We visited The Humble Grape a short walk away and had a little wine flight and some cheese. It was so nice. On Sunday we went to Humble Crumble to complete our Humble Weekend.

In tiny lad news, they’re just so excellent. Tom Barnaby, who is more shy than Douglas Fir, has finally decided that cuddling up to us and purring is a great way to spend his time. Just two purring lads who live with us.

The kittens are settling in well, they now have free reign of the office, bedroom, and living room during the day but are kept in the living room at night or when we’re out for a short while.

They’re adorable. They still mostly want to be in the same room as each other or one of us, they play intensely for hour-long periods and then fully crash out.

We had a gas leak, which was fun. I’m terrible in a crisis if someone else is around but it was just me in the house so I calmly switched off the gas, opened the windows, and called the emergency line. It’s fixed now so we have hot water again however our gas hob has been disconnected so we either need to tear up the kitchen floor to get to the gas pipe that’s buried in concrete, get new gas pipes run around the room, or replace it with electric/induction.

On Tuesday my dermatology appointment finally arrived after many months. It was a very short appointment where I got told that yes, a new and different-looking rash is just more psoriasis and I’m “just going to have to live with it” 👍 she at least prescribed me a few different moisturisers to try and a low-strength steroid cream despite saying I was fed up of being prescribed steroids which only seem to work for a month or so.

We’ve had a steady stream of kitten visitors. They’ve met Jenn and Chris, Gallal a couple of times, Luke, and Charlotte’s mum. They seem fine around visitors which is great but definitely slightly more relaxed when it’s just us.

On Sunday I popped down to Paddock Wood to see Perry and Emma for the first time since their wedding (nearly 2 years ago!!). It was lovely, we had a roast in a nearby pub and caught up a lot ❤️

The kittens have arrived! I hope you’re excited for a lot of updates. They were described by the vet as “very calm and gentle for their age” 🥹. They’re just a couple of gentle little lads 🥹

We picked them up from Charlotte’s mum’s friend on Saturday, we hired a car because we thought they’d hate the multiple train journeys from Faversham to London. They were so well behaved and slept for most of the journey 🥹 no outward signs of stress or vomit or anything. Because we’re those people we got them a very aesthetic wicker cat basket and it would have been a pain to clean sick out of it.

Guess who was sick though? This guy. I was quite ill all week and I’m still exhausted. Supposedly not COVID but enough to knock me off my feet for a couple of days.

Anyway back to cats: they switch between being utter chaos and then passing out and having long sleeps. They chase each other around and play-fight a lot which is adorable 🥹 and means we can get away with a little bit less human-instigated play.

They’re already starting to get a little cuddly 🥹 this morning the larger of the two curled around Charlotte’s neck and started licking her hair while purring 🥹

We can mostly tell them apart already and we have settled on names (for now at least). We think the larger more fluffy and ginger-tinged one is going to be Douglas Fir. The slightly smaller and derpier one who likes to eat paper is going to be Tom Barnaby.

I’ve given up on the idea that my armchair and any soft furnishings will survive.

We said goodbye to Rocky this week, he went home on Wednesday. He was a delight, v chilled cat. I spent a few days being careful not to kick a nonexistent animal, weird how quickly you get used to having them around.

On Saturday we went on Rhys’ leaving hike which is a really lovely idea. There were 16 of us in total and we went on an extremely muddy walk up Leith Hill and back. It was a joy seeing Leaf for the first time in ages ❤️

Once back in London we had a few drinks near Victoria and gossiped a bunch.

Charlotte got sick early in the week and then got better and I seem to have dodged it, though I am feeling exhausted. Too tired to edit a cat/hike photo into this weeknote.

Today we went to visit JPD and David and meet their new(ish) baby. Very cute. She cried the first time I held her but warmed up towards us all by the end.

Work this week was a little dominated by a security incident. Although it’s always a bit of a pain I’m reminded of how readily people at the FT come together when we need to act quickly 👍

I’m becoming an AI bore. I can see people glazing over a little when I start talking about it, I need to pick my moments maybe. But now you’re on my website I can moan as much as I want about how email-based AI worms are probably a thing we need to worry about, that plagiarism is rampant, or that the AI bubble is driving a massive surge in energy and water usage. How about the fact that the companies launching these AI products have helped enable lawyers to work on child custody cases, middle-school kids to make and distribute fake nude photos of their classmates, or military forces to decide which school or hospital to fire missiles at. At least I can make pretty pictures for my slide decks and search my work email a little bit faster though, eh?

This week was the first FT Boardroom (boardgame night) in a few years, it was so much fun. We mostly played large party games but that was what we were all in the mood for. Several rounds of very competitive Codenames were my highlight.

On Wednesday a visitor came to stay for a week, Rocky was very nervous at first but I think he’s warmed to us and he’s quite sweet and cuddly. It’s nice having a cat around again and he’s very easy.

In two weeks we’ll have two kittens and then all you’ll hear about for months is them.

On Friday it was Rhys’ leaving drinks. I thought I was being very smart sticking to shandy all night, except it turns out that every shandy has a half pint in it and those add up. I got quite drunk and then I stayed in bed for all of Saturday feeling like the room was spinning. I ranted about AI a lot and we made some friends on the bus home. Turns out The Sea Horse does Karaoke on a Friday night.

On Sunday we went for breakfast with Gallal and then a roast with Luke, both were delightful ❤️ probs didn’t need the bottle of Sauternes to finish but I do love a sweet wine.

We’re getting two kittens! We’ve been thinking about getting another cat for a while and an opportunity kind of just landed in our laps – a friend of Charlotte’s mum had an unexpected litter and there are two left. We pick them up in March and I’m quite excited about it.

We’re still not 100% on these but the winning names at the moment are Tom Barnaby and Jane McDonald.

On Tuesday we went round to Gallal’s for pancakes and cider, which is apparently a thing in France. It’s a good combination! Also, pancakes with pesto, cheese, tomatoes, and anchovies are :chefs-kiss: so good. Pancakes are just thin pizzas.

Wednesday was Heart-Shaped-Food Day. I forgot to take a picture of the finished dish, which is annoying, but I made heart-shaped Batata Harra with Mujaddarah and flatbreads. As usual, I got stressed, particularly cooking by lamplight, but it tasted pretty good! I should make Batata Harra more often 👀

Over the weekend I got a train up to Leeds to hang out with Scott, Eric, and Carlton and play in-person board games. It’s always nicer in person than our weekly virtual sessions and I had a lovely weekend. I was on form, I won Archaeology: The New Expedition, came second in Galaxy Trucker, and second in Terraforming Mars with no cities, greenery, or oceans on the board.

My LLM experimentation continues: my employer has procured ChatGPT. I’ve mostly used it to steal other artists’ work by generating images to make people laugh. I also spent a bit of time using it to steal other programmers’ work to see how well it can do this (not dissimilar to Copilot so far).

Finally, I tried using it to steal my own writing, using variations on “write a weeknote in the style of Rowan Manning”. It seems to understand that I’m a software engineer in London and they have a weird familiarity to them. Either my life is super generic (likely) or my weeknotes were stolen by OpenAI (likely). I already know my website formed part of the datasets that OpenAI used because I used a tool that I can no longer find (annoying) to verify that rowanmanning.com was crawled.

In other dystopia AI news, OpenAI has released Sora which can generate fairly realistic-looking video. I’m sure this will be fine and definitely not used to make deepfake porn, silence political rivals, or use more of our planet’s precious resources than a small country 👍

So. While we were away the flat above the flat above ours had a burst pipe and we’ve had our fourth instance of water leaking through our ceilings. Hooray! This time the hallway was the most impacted room which sounds OK right? Well yes except that’s where our mains switches are, and they got a bit damp.

• 

  We turned off the electricity to let the board dry out, we now have power back in the plug sockets but we’re leaving the light switches turned off because several of our lights make nasty fizzing sounds when you turn them on 👍 living our dark house lives.

• The building insurance should cover everything (except the inconvenience) but that means coordinating with two other leaseholders, neither of whom live in their flats.

After a stressful week, we traveled down to Brighton to stay with Charlotte’s brother who has working lights. Their house is lovely. We played mini-golf, ate a lot of good food, drank some good wine, and went on the rollercoasters on the pier. The weather held up nicely.

Setting up a Factorio server to relax 💆‍♂️

After some advice from a friend (me not trying LLM-generated stuff makes it easy for people to dismiss me as a Luddite - paraphrasing), I decided to suck up my strong moral objection and try GitHub Copilot for some personal projects. My intentions for this robot aren’t good I’m afraid, but I guess I could try and turn this into something productive. These are my thoughts after ~3 hours of playing.

• Unless I’m very bad at writing magic incantations, Copilot is not very good at writing tests. So far I’ve spent more time trying to get it working than if I’d just written them myself.

  • Coverage has been ~5–25%

  • Sometimes it tries to test functions that are never publicly exported

  • It gets very confused when files are named the same, e.g. multiple index.js files in different folders

  • It doesn’t always use the testing libraries that you’re already using, e.g. importing a new dependency instead of the one you already have that does the same job

  • If you didn’t care about tests then I guess you could convince yourself that it’s done an OK job

• The documentation that Copilot writes is reasonable but pretty generic, repetitive, and poorly structured. It requires a lot of work to make it flow well for a human reader in my opinion. I tried it in earnest but then decided to scrap it and start again because it would have taken me longer to fix it up.

  I still need to try using it to proofread/improve my existing documentation which is something people have highlighted as a good use, I’ll do that next.

• I didn’t have a lot of code to write this week but I was curious so I described some of my open source libraries and got Copilot to regenerate an equivalent to see whether it would solve problems in a similar way to me.

  • I can get it to generate something that I’d consider good if the problem is simple and I keep rewriting the prompt. E.g. this gives me something usable:

    Write a function that accepts an error object and extracts a valid HTTP status code from it. The status code could be either on the status or statusCode property of the error. If no valid status code can be found then return 500. It must check that the status code is valid. Do a good job please with not much repetition

    I’m definitely not an expert at writing prompts but it feels like there’s a lot of redundant information here that I’d kind of hope the machine would have inferred. E.g. I originally assumed that “a valid HTTP status code” would infer that I wanted a number between 100 and 599, but I had to keep reiterating this. I wasted a fair amount of time checking that the code was giving me what I wanted.

  • This is where LLM prompts make me laugh so much – it feels like you’re bargaining with an otherworldly entity that’s willfully misinterpreting your wishes. “Genie, I’d like to be a billionaire but please don’t just make me look like Elon Musk, give me some actual cash pretty please.”

    I know this isn’t an exact science but based on my simple example and several repeat tests, “Do a good job please” makes Copilot more likely to do extra type checking to avoid errors and shunts it towards some more modern JS patterns.

  • Again, I’m pretty fast at typing code and I already did all the thinking work ahead of time in the prompt. I’m not sure this would save me any time unless I blindly trusted more of what Copilot gave me.

So far I’m not super impressed but I will persevere. I have a healthy amount of scepticism but I’m trying to give the robot a fair chance.

I’m still worried generally. I’m approaching this as a senior engineer (5 years as a hobbyist plus 16 years being paid to do this) and I can mostly spot where the LLM has generated garbage. I wouldn’t be so sure if I was 5, 10, 15 years earlier in my career.

It was a pretty ordinary work week aside from having a minor debate with our CTO about the use of generative AI in programming.

I met up with Andrew and Ed for a few Guinness 0.0s, which was lovely. Drinking alcohol-free beer really doesn’t save you any money though. I’m trying to be better at arranging to see people this year, well done me.

We took Friday off work and drove up to Shrewsbury with Chris on Thursday evening to stay with his parents. We had Riley (cat) in the car and he was very cute and well-behaved. Jenn was waiting for us and we had our first wine of the year.

Chris’s parents have a dog named Bertie and he’s pretty much the perfect dog. He does everything a good dog is supposed to do. We’ve done a lot of walking together, Shrewsbury and the surrounding countryside are really pretty.

Jennifer swam 3km down the River Severn which was very impressive. We followed her on bikes along the towpath and she managed not to get swept down the weir 👍

Chris’ mum is an exceptional cook, we’ve eaten really well. Also we didn’t know until much later in the weekend that she used to be a software engineer working in Cobol and Fortran, which is very cool.

We’re working from here on Monday and I’m glad we’re not heading back tonight – we’ve had a tiring day of tearooms, meeting Emma who lives nearby, long walks, and reservoir swims for some of us (not me). I got to meet Emma’s dog, Peg, who’s a delight. I love a Border Collie ❤️

I’ve set up a regular call with Mum so that we talk a bit more out of habit. We both just assume the other is busy (we’re not) and so now I call her on a Tuesday on my walk home. It makes the journey fly by.

Water started leaking through our bathroom light fitting, this time because the waste pipe from our upstairs neighbour’s bath broke. The building insurance covers it, but this is the third time in two and a half years 😩 The light makes a scary fizzing sound when you turn it on so we’re relying on a torch for now.

I’ve managed to do Dry January on easy mode because I’ve just not gone to the pub. On Thursday that changed and I had a great time at Jeison’s leaving drinks on the Guiness 0.0.

Happy 36th birthday, me 👍 I can’t be bothered to celebrate much in recent years so I had a very chilled day off work. I spent the morning playing video games, Charlotte made me Lemon Meringue Choux Buns which tasted incredible, we went to an interactive bubble thing, and then went for a nice meal.

We saw lots of family. My mum and brother came over, we went to visit Charlotte’s nephew, and then her grandparents. All were very relaxed and I feel energised by it all.

I also did some admin with Mum and I’m now one domain away from having zero control over other peoples’ web stuff. I overdid it in my early career and hosted a lot of websites for people. Pretty soon I’ll be able to stop paying £30/mo to GoDaddy (not my choice, they bought MediaTemple a while ago).

I realised that, If I was my mum, I’d have four kids by now and would be raising them on my own 😱 wild.

This week was Engine Room, the FT’s internal tech conference. As always, it was a fun day and really well-organised. I shouldn’t pick favourites but I think Andy’s talk on his decade-long (!!) Theatrebase project was really excellent. I’m a big fan of a talk where somebody introduces you to a subject they’re passionate and knowledgeable about; this ticked all the boxes.

On Friday we headed over to Marlow to stay in a hotel. It’s very pretty and is also where a lot of Midsomer Murders was filmed. On Saturday we did a nice 12-mile walk across the countryside, looked at some of the filming locations, and saw several pairs of Red Kites. It was a lovely day, walking in the cold is my favourite and the ground was crunchy with ice.

I love seeing Red Kites. Back when I was a kid my dad would frequently point out wildlife, particularly birds of prey. He loved Red Kites and I have really early memories of him talking to us about the conservation efforts after years of persecution. Whenever I see them I think of him.

On Sunday we met up with Luke and walked around the Courtauld Gallery for a while, marveling at the medieval animal depictions. Afterward, we wandered up to The Ship in Holborn for a lovely roast.

I started writing a blog post about generative AI. I put together an outline and then realised it was so large in scope that it’s probably more like a series and I need to rethink it. Just writing an outline was helpful, I can probably more readily talk about all my issues. So far the topics I want to cover are:

• How bad LLMs are at writing code, particularly from a reliability and security perspective.

• How showing someone your prompt is probably more valuable than showing them an AI-generated document.

• How LLMs don’t know things, covering hallucinations.

• How things will degrade over time as more of the training data consumed by newer LLMs will have been created by previous iterations, touching on how much junk is flooding the internet.

• How using an LLM is stealing, probably more from a personal moral perspective but also covering the many lawsuits.

Let me know if you’re interested (or not) in any one of these. I’m feeling spicy about it all at the moment which is a good motivator.

We watched Saltburn, loved it. Everyone in it was excellent. I’ll never look at a bath in the same way. It’s been a little while since I’ve been to the cinema and I’m not sure why, Genesis is amazing and a very short walk away.

We got the PSVR out for an evening with some friends and we haven’t put it away. We’ve been playing a lot of Beat Saber and can handle a few songs on Hard difficulty now. I forgot how fun VR is and how easy it is to forget you’re kind of exercising a bit. My inner elbows and wrists ache.

We tried to go to a bubble experience all the way out in Wembley but they had a power cut and we didn’t see the email before arriving. So we wandered around Wembley a bit, bought some sale stuff, and went home via Bleecker. It was a nice day despite the distinct lack of bubbles.

I’m not drinking for January and it’s quite easy. I originally thought I’d still try and pub after work but it’s cold and miserable so I haven’t bothered. Why pub when you can go home and play VR or Cities Skylines?

Happy New Year! We rang in the new year in a Simmons, it was the right level of disappointing – long bar queues and too-loud music. We managed to not be hung over 🎉

Back to work! I’m actually quite sickeningly pleased to be back. I feel refreshed and some of the stuff we have planned for this quarter is exciting. I’ve got a small hit-list of new things to delete and I’m very excited to do it. #DeleteMore2024

A lot of skeptical writing about AI keeps cropping up in my various feeds which I’m pleased to see 👍 The New York Times suing OpenAI is music to my ears, and there have been some really great papers on the dangers of AI-driven code generation:

• Lost in Translation: A Study of Bugs Introduced by Large Language Models while Translating Code has a couple of very quote-worthy paragraphs.

  On real-world projects, the LLMs were largely ineffective, with success rates of 8.1% for GPT-4 and 0% for the rest of the models.

• Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? is also great, the also-very-quoteworthy TL;DR being:

  Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant wrote significantly less secure code than those without access to an assistant. Participants with access to an AI assistant were also more likely to believe they wrote secure code, suggesting that such tools may lead users to be overconfident about security flaws in their code

On a very rainy Thursday, we got soaked to the skin looking at the lights around Kew Gardens. It was a Christmas gift and I really enjoyed it despite hating wearing wet jeans.

The weekend was fun, we went to Phantom Peak with Tammy and Marcus. As usual, it takes a bit of time to feel comfortable chatting to the actors but, by the end, it felt a lot more natural. It’s our second time and it was fresh because they change all the trails seasonally.

The week has been littered with more Cities: Skylines II sessions. I’m a little bit obsessed and have managed to rack up 58 hours in the past month 😳 it’s relaxing.

I’ve been playing over NVIDIA GeForce Now, a game streaming service, it’s pricey but considerably cheaper than building a gaming PC. It’s been super reliable and it’s nice to not hear my laptop fans screaming when I boot up a game. Thanks for the recommendation, Gallal!

We’ve instituted a “no TV unless you know what you want to watch” rule, which is really excellent and has resulted in there being no TV this week. Why’s it excellent? Firstly we’ve removed the frustrating endless scrolling through various streaming services. Secondly, we’re finding other ways to occupy our time. I’ve started reading The Starless Sea which I’m enjoying a lot so far. We also completed our first full cryptic crossword, not a difficult one but a nice achievement anyway!

Christmas day was nice and relaxed. Charlotte and I broke out the Christmas Dinner timing spreadsheet and it didn’t let us down – dinner was great. We played a few games, exchanged gifts, and ate a lot of chocolate.

We managed to complete the selection box rating, the raw data is available in this spreadsheet. Unexpectedly the clear winner was Celebrations, and Quality Street is really carried by a couple of heavy-hitters.

Charlotte started feeling sick towards the end of Christmas day, which meant we had to quickly adapt our busy schedule.

On Boxing Day we still drove down from Hull towards Bedfordshire to see my family. The drive was quite chilled and we got there in time for lunch. Charlotte got put in the box room to sleep and not infect everyone. We learned a fun fact.

As we were ushering Charlotte upstairs, my 90-year-old Grandma kept saying things along the lines of “we’ll put you in the small room, I’m sorry but it’s such a glory hole in there”. Cue lots of confused glances between me, my sister, and Charlotte.

It turns out that Glory Hole has a more innocent earlier meaning that we didn’t know: a room, cupboard, or other storage space that contains an untidy and miscellaneous collection of objects. I let Grandma know the more modern meaning.

After Bedfordshire, we drove my sister down to Brighton. We changed our plan and stayed in a nearby hotel instead of on the sofa in her living room.

The next day we drove back to London, dropped off the hire car, and sensibly cancelled many of our further plans. I was not-so-secretly happy about all the cancellations because it meant I got to rest; I spent a lot of time playing Cities: Skylines II.

The one plan we didn’t cancel was cooking another Christmas dinner (thanks again, spreadsheet) for Charlotte’s brother and his girlfriend – they’d been in Australia on Christmas day and were craving a colder more festive Christmas.

This brings us up to New Year’s Eve, with Charlotte feeling better and ready to go and have unlimited drinks until 3 am 👍

Work’s over for the year! I’m one of those annoying people who really enjoys their job so this isn’t all that great for me. I keep having ideas about new things I want to work on and then squashing them down.

I’ve had what I think is a great idea for a blog post that I might work on over the festive period. I want to analyse the lyrics of Christmas songs and find the places where they reference the names of other Christmas songs and see how deep the graph goes.

On Wednesday I met up with some of my old Nature colleagues, it was a fun time and really great to hang out.

On Saturday we picked up a car and drove up to Birmingham to have a little Christmas celebration before heading on to Hull. We went to the German market, had a few drinks, and sang along to some popular music from the 90s and 00s. Once we got back to Ari and Chibs’ we had a little group therapy session and talked about dead dads.

In the morning we set off for Hull, stopping for a festive McDonalds. We arrived in our Airbnb which is a vibe. Our bed is situated below a full-wall mural of Jesus on the cross (picture below).

After reading about different peoples’ selection box habits, we decided to buy a small box of each of the four main Christmas chocolate selection boxes. We’re rating each chocolate out of 5 and recording the data in a festive spreadsheet for science.

I’ll let you know our findings.

I’m writing these weeknotes while sat drinking Whisky Macs in a comfy armchair and eating more crisps than I’d normally allow myself. Merry Christmas!

This week included Christmas Party #2. Drinks were free all night and there were no queues for them – just pre-made cocktails ready on the bar. Perfect 👍 I’m told that some people were kicked out but I witnessed no real drama, unfortunately. Charlotte and I made a plan to leave as soon as the party was over to get Wings of East, it was a success, we avoided a second location and a hangover 👏

Wednesday was in-person boardgames which was great fun. We had a fun team-based game of Star Realms, I lost spectacularly at Long Shot, we all really sucked at The Mind (the only co-op game we brought), and finished with Skull.

Thursday was my favourite festive tradition: watching Die Hard in the office. We made lots of the same jokes, a few new ones, and had a very festive time.

Oh weird. The last time I mentioned Die Hard in a weeknote I also mentioned Wings of East. Patterns are emerging.

On Saturday we finally visited Parrillan, we were given a voucher last Christmas and it was close to running out. Lots of the tapas was excellent, but the stew was a bit meh and overpriced.

On Sunday we popped over to see Jenn & Chris, drank some wine and cocktails, and had a nice catch-up; this is why my weeknote is late. Worth it.

Since giving up on Advent of Code I’ve been working on a little side project. I’m rebuilding all the tooling for my various open source projects, massively over-engineering it and taking inspiration from some of the tools we have at work. It’s been fun!

It’ll probably look vaguely familiar to FT people. Why can’t I use something that exists already? Sounds dull and a lot less work.

I’m very tired. None of these bullet points will exceed 13.7 words.

Advent of Code was fun until day ten part two. No thanks.

We had an all-day planning session. It surprised me by being excellent.

Our first Christmas Party was great. Long queues, good Old Fashioneds, dancing.

Friday was a bad day. See above.

We went on a hike over the weekend. Bumped into an ex-colleague.

We put up our tree, our living room feels festive.

The highlight of the week was Friday – we’d taken the day off work to head out of London but the trains were fucked so we cancelled the trip. Instead, we walked over to the Olympic Park and then followed The Line. It’s a really nice walk through the docklands but possibly has an ulterior motive of trying to make people cross the Thames via cable car. We did, and it was novel.

On Saturday we did an escape room and then had drinks with Tammy, Marcus, and Alison. We came quite close to the record for the room 👀

We’ve started putting up Christmas decorations, we have fairy lights lining the living room and it looks lovely and cosy. I think we’ll leave them up permanently like we did in our old flat. Maybe I’ll connect them up to Home Assistant so I can automate away the big light.

It’s Advent of Code time again! Let’s see if I can be bothered past day 8 this year eh? I started doing it in Rust, got frustrated, and then switched back to JavaScript. Here are my solutions.

I’ve made a few changes though so that I learn something. I’ve ditched mocha in favour of the built-in Node.js test runner. I’ve also switched out ESLint and Prettier and I’m giving Biome a go instead. It’s written in Rust and it’s so fast that I might move my open source stuff over at some point.

For anyone waiting with bated breath for my third yearnote, I’m moving it to the end of the calendar year because I can’t be bothered with it yet. Three years of writing every week though! Still going strong(ish). I haven’t missed a week yet – I know myself and skipping just one will make it far harder to keep it up 😬

I had my first board game session since being away for a month and it was a lot of fun, sometimes it’s great to step away for a while – it’s renewed my enthusiasm. It helps that we played The Guild of Merchant Explorers, an excellent game that just really clicks with me and I can win pretty consistently.

On Friday we met up with Jenn & Chris, who I’ve missed, and we went to our third Champagne Show. The venue changed to one with more space so there were 160 different champagnes on offer. We drank quite a lot of them (Lallier is still our fav I think).

Three years has taught me that there are radically diminishing returns as bottle price increases. Also, champagne largely tastes the same once you get past ~30 samples.

We were originally heading to Brighton over the weekend but canceled due to our hosts being sick. We spent Saturday in bed, catching up on TV.

• We’ve been slowly working through Midsomer Murders, Season 6 has kicked it up a notch with a little bit more peril for old Tom Barnaby.

• We watched the first episode of “Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire” on Netflix, and it proved a bit much for our hungover selves. It’s interesting and well done so far but it gives your heartstrings a really good yanking.

• Afterwards, we sat through A Haunting in Venice, because we’ve seen all the other Kenneth Branagh Poirot films. It’s very atmospheric but a bit meh – too much of a departure from the source material I think.

Back to work this week! It wasn’t easy to get back into it but think I got some useful things done. Alex and I worked out a cool way that we can tie our error pages to our logs and make it easier for us to debug production issues; I’m looking forward to getting it implemented.

On Tuesday I went to see the Mrs Doubtfire musical, I arrived with few expectations, kind of assuming I’d have the nostalgia forcibly beaten out of me, but it was amazing! The film was on heavy rotation when me and my siblings were kids and, problematic plot aside, it was an excellent rendition. Enough key dialog points were hit, with a few updates to remove some early-90s transphobia.

I got sick (not COVID), probably from either the plane, the office, or the theatre, take your pick. It was a little rough but cleared up by late Thursday.

On Friday evening we went for a bottomless brunch with Tammy, Alison, and Marcus. Polo bar was fun, as always, afterwards we headed over to Boom Battle Bar on Oxford Street to drink and play mini golf. Alison, Charlotte and I continued on to a few bars, then the casino to avoid club entry fees (regret), bought a bottle of Tequila Rose for the journey home, and then continued drinking at ours. Oops 😅 Saturday was not fun.

By Sunday we’d recovered. Charlotte and I didn’t wake up in time for our planned outside-of-London walk so we walked along Regents Canal from Mile End to Angel and went for a great roast. On the way we stopped at Stepney City Farm which is lovely and bumped into some of my sister’s friends with their daughter; Bumping into someone you know in London is always magical and unexpected, and it makes me happy.

Phuket is beautiful, we spent a week mostly inside the resort with a few trips out to bars and the beach. The food was excellent, the drinks were excellent, the pool was excellent.

We did a lot of swimming in the bath-temperature sea, a highlight was sitting in the sea drinking wine past sunset as lightning flashed in the distance.

Trips outside were also fun. We did dinosaur-themed mini-golf, hit a few bars, and made the most of weed being legal.

I snorkeled for the first time which was a big step for a weak swimmer with a touch of thalassophobia. It was really fun! I couldn’t go any deeper than we did, I enjoyed seeing a lot of coral, and if you stay still then the fish start floating in the shade beneath you. I’d go again!

We flew back to London on Saturday, it’s a pretty big temperature difference! At least I get to bring out the knitwear.

It’s gonna be tough going back to work after a month away. At least we’re heading into Christmas.

Bangkok is a really busy city, it’s fun but I would probably struggle with a full week. We met up with Euan (who’s been in the Philippines for a year), Adam (who lives in Perth and we haven’t seen for a year), Luke (who’s been in Japan for three months), and Paula.

Bangkok nightlife is wild. Don’t assume that the cocktails will be low-alcohol in the touristy places.

The food is excellent everywhere we’ve been, especially when you’re paying £1–2 for a full meal.

Our hotel had a Christmas tree up already, I’m not sure if I’m ready to be festive in 30-degree heat.

After a few days in Bangkok, we got a sleeper train up to Chiang Mai. The sleeper was really fun and comfortable despite being in a public carriage, I slept pretty well despite the noise and the not-so-gentle rocking.

Chiang Mai is beautiful. It feels a lot more chilled up there but still a nice level of busy. We met up with Elka, an old friend of Luke & Adam’s, who showed us around a bit and took us to some amazing restaurants.

We also did a few of the big touristy things; we took a trip to some hot springs and soaked in and boiled eggs in the water. We also climbed up the sticky waterfalls which is weird but really fun. I fell and bruised my elbow, rib, and thigh though because I stepped onto a not-so-sticky bit 🤦 at least the ibuprofen here is double strength.

We ended the week by flying down to Phuket to stay in an all-inclusive resort and rest so that we feel like we’ve switched off properly before we head back to work. Yeah, doing stuff is fun but have you tried sitting by a pool for a week?

Driving is pretty easy in Australia (at least in Victoria and New South Wales). It’s on the left, roads are wider and better-maintained, and everything’s signposted well. Our trip along the coast was very stress-free. We did a lot:

• We went for a walk through a rainforest which made a nice change from the miles of eucalypt forests that line the route.

• 

  We stopped for lunch in Eden which is a nice little town. We walked to a few of the viewpoints and along the cliffs and we saw Humpback Whales breaching off the coast which was super cool. Then we drove to Horse Head Rock for another cliff walk and some more whale-spotting.

  

• We stayed in Bateman’s Bay which is nice but a bit dead pre-summer. We had a disappointing McDonald’s (not a lot of unique options, very average). We walked along part of the bay and went stargazing in the evening. The various motels we stayed in were all great, the whole coast seems to be set up for people doing the same route.

• 

  We had a beach day, stopping at a few beaches on the way to Jervis Bay. Maloneys Beach was completely empty and we saw some live Kangaroos who spend the daytime just chilling in the shade at the side of the beach. We had amazing fish & chips at Mollymook beach.

• 

  We drove inland a little to Kangaroo Valley which involved some fun switchbacks along mountain roads. There was a walk through the bush outside town which lef to some viewpoints, it was worth the walk once we got there but walking through the bush is super repetitive – I can understand why people get lost 😅

• We visited Kiama Blowhole before driving into Sydney, it was the most tourist-filled place we visited along the route but it was really pretty, at the right angle you can see rainbows dancing all around the blowhole.

We arrived in Sydney in the evening, checked into our hotel and then went for food and drinks nearby. Everywhere does really excellent cocktails and we had a couple of bottles of wine between us. Jacaranda trees are in bloom at the moment so the part of the city we were staying in looked really pretty with bright purple highlights everywhere.

Our only full day in Sydney was a little hungover but we crammed in a lot of sightseeing. We walked along the botanic gardens, saw Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge, got a bus out to Bondi and did part of the cliff walk to Bronte. Our whole time in Sydney was uncharacteristically cold and rainy due to some polar winds but it was still a lot of fun. We ended the day with maybe the best Italian food we’ve eaten outside of Italy.

Our last half day in Sydney was all about brunch (excellent avocado toast) and admin before heading off for the next leg of our trip.

We bid farewell to Australia after a couple of excellent weeks and flew to Thailand. We’ll be in Bangkok for half of this week (where I’m writing from) and then off to Chiang Mai.

Melbourne is a fun city. We’ve been fighting a little bit of jet lag but our sleep seems to be back to normal after week 1. We’ve enjoyed ourselves a lot despite it!

On Sunday we travelled into Melbourne proper and checked into our 45th floor Airbnb. It was fun staying so high up and it meant we could cook a few nights. Monday was a bit of a write-off, we explored central Melbourne a little and ate some food but then had an early night because we were tired and cranky.

On Tuesday we went for a walk into South Melbourne and ended at The Lume which is hosting a celebration of First Nations art and music. It was really well done; laying in a room surrounded by amazing projected art was what we needed after traipsing around in the heat.

After work time we met up with Leigh, an old colleague who moved back to Melbourne a few years ago. It was great to see him and we shared a few drinks near our Airbnb.

On Wednesday we had booked tickets to an open lecture at Melbourne University (on colonial debt). We spent most of the day hanging around that area, visiting Tokyo Lamington and Melbourne Museum. After the lecture, we went to the European night market to taste some Australian interpretations of European food – some great, some confusing.

On Thursday I got up early to queue for Croissants at Lune then we lazed around the apartment all morning to recuperate. We ate at Tonka in the evening then went to see some comedy in Fitzroy.

On Friday we got up earlyish and walked the solar system into St Kilda. It was a beautiful day to walk along the beach, especially when interspersed with good food and drinks.

We spent the evening at Luna Park, checking out the world’s oldest continually-running roller coaster, then ate bottomless pizza and cocktails.

Aside: I swear 90% of the bar staff and waiters in Melbourne are British or Irish.

On Saturday we did absolutely nothing, deservedly.

Today we picked up our hire car and left Melbourne. We plan to drive up the coast over several days to visit Sydney. The coast road is supposed to be beautiful and we have motels booked in a few of the picturesque little towns on the way.

We took a fairly long detour to Hanging Rock where we enjoyed a picnic at the summit, then started the ~5-hour drive to our first motel.

Wildlife spotting tally:

• Kookaburras: 1

• Puffer fish: 1

• Starfish: 1

• Rats: 3

• Parrots: 20+ (stopped counting)

• Australian Magpies: 20+ (stopped counting)

• Kangaroos: 7 dead, 0 alive (roadkill is no joke here 😓)

Hi from a Melbourne airport hotel 👋 this weeknote’s mostly gonna be about other stuff because we only got here last night. I stayed awake for most of 30 hours and I woke up feeling pretty normal which is promising. Today we check into our Airbnb and don’t commit to doing too much.

Earlier this week we had Charlotte’s dad and step-mum round for dinner which turned into a few drinks. Mostly trying to catch up with people before disappearing for a month.

In the same vein, I met my sister for lunch on Wednesday because I haven’t had any other chances to see her. We got great falafel wraps from Leather Lane Market and caught up. It’s nice to see her hating her job less and I should make the most of her being in London every couple of weeks.

On Thursday I met Andrew & Ed for a little pub trip, love these two. We had a nice gentle catch-up, stuck to a single round, and parted ways.

I walked past the sea horse on the way home and work people were still there. I should have stuck to the three drinks because Friday was a struggle.

I feel like I smashed it at work this week, albeit in quite a manic rushed manner as I tried to finish some things off. I did lots of digging into our router and CDN layer and have fixed a couple of issues which were causing a decent number of 5xx on FT.com for, oh, 7+ years:

• URLs with bad percent-encoding used to hang until you got a client timeout, e.g. https://www.ft.com/stream/%. This is a common(ish) attack vector so we were seeing a lot of errors. They now 400 so our availability metrics should improve 📈

• URLs which exceed 2,000 characters now get served a 414 at the CDN level. These were frequently erroring because of a few suspected ReDoS issues in our apps. I did an audit of long URLs and this seems to be the sweet spot where we catch a lot of malicious requests early but don’t block legitimate traffic.

• I’m looking forward to coming back to work and seeing whether this has impacted our availability metrics 🎉

• With that brain dump done, I get to not think about computers for 29 days.

OK gotta get up and explore Melbourne 👋

Back to work/normality for two weeks. It was difficult getting my brain back into gear but by Wednesday I think I was back to my normal slightly-too-keen-on-my-job self. We’re at the slightly awkward point between quarters where it’s not the most clear what to work on so I’ve appreciated being on support and putting out little fires.

I went down a very deep rabbit hole to try and understand how some of our routing works between the CDN and the individual microservices that make up FT.com. So far it’s resulted in a PR to the proxy we’re using and learning far more than I intended about how the Node.js request–response cycle works. Worryingly, I think I might now know the most about this part of our stack 😬

On Saturday we met up with Gallal to make the most of us being neighbours again briefly. We went for some great Lebanese food nearby and then a mini crawl through some of Whitechapel’s excellent pubs. We didn’t get trashed and just had some nice chats. In the Blind Beggar, one of the pub cats recreated a meme for us:

On Sunday I hired my worst ever Zipcar (automatic, very weird gear shifts, “infotainment screen” broken, dirty) to go and visit my family. I was my mum’s birthday and I spent a lovely day with her and my brothers, with a short visit to see my grandma. It was the nicest family time I’ve had in ages.

We went for a walk around Shillington (where I spent most of my childhood). It’s a small sleepy village – there’s no reason to drive through it to get anywhere so it’s very quiet.

We spotted a couple of crayfish in the stream that runs through the village, me and my friend Tim used to catch them and annoy our parents by traipsing river mud through our houses.

The next month is gonna be super busy, I’ll be writing weeknotes from Melbourne, Sydney, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Phuket 😅 I’m super excited but I don’t feel rested from our last trip yet. Spread out your annual leave, folks.

The FT allows you to buy up to 20 extra days of annual leave per year for reduced pay, meaning I will have had 50 days off in 2023 (as planned). This is my first year doing it and I’m definitely gonna buy the max every year from now on.

We can’t afford such a lot of far-away holidays every year though, we’ve burned through a lot of savings (probs inadvisable) and have had to willfully ignore any carbon footprint guilt 😬

These weeknotes are brought to you by a 9.5-hour layover in Shanghai airport.

Japan has been amazing! To all the people who told me I’d have a great time: you were right. It has not been restful in the slightest, though, we packed a lot in.

On Monday we went to Tsukiji Fish Market, there’s a lot of cheese with things that don’t normally pair; I had some cheese-filled tempura squid rings. Fresh fruit and vegetables are really expensive here. Afterwards, we went to TeamLab Planets which was amazing despite having to walk around it all barefoot.

Later on, we visited Luke in his very fancy apartment and went for some dinner. We’re told very few people cook here, eating out is really cheap and all of the pre-made supermarket food is a lot better than we’re used to.

On Tuesday morning we booked in a trip to the Tokyo Stock Exchange with some of our Nikkei colleagues, it was really interesting and they very patiently translated some stuff for us. Afterwards, we went for lunch, turns out I was at the same sake tasting as some of the other attendees when they were visiting our London office!

• Alex, Tatiana, Alice, whoever reads this first: can I claim back a half day of holiday for doing work-adjacent networking?

• I assume claiming the cost of the flights would be pushing my luck?

After letting the others go back to work we went to find a roller coaster. We finished the day by meeting up with Luke again and going to an Izakaya, like a small bar that serves small plates of food. It was so much fun, hate to say it but they put London pubs to shame 👀

On Wednesday we took the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto which is a beautiful city and a lot more chilled than Tokyo. We visited a temple, got very sweaty walking around, and then went for dinner in CoCo Ichybanya – a chain with a large menu of customisable curry options. I’ll definitely be heading to the one in London when we’re back.

On Thursday we went on a day trip to Nara which is famous for extremely tame deer. We spent all day wandering around the beautiful parks and primeval forest, occasionally feeding and petting deer – they’re actually quite demanding when they know you have food.

Friday was Luke’s birthday, Happy birthday Luke! We wandered around Nishiki Market, walked part of the Philosopher’s Path (no cherry blossom at this time of year), and then went for a sake tasting at a local brewery which was very interesting and progressively got more interesting the more sake we drank.

We followed the sake with a little Izakaya crawl. We accidentally signed ourselves up for 30 minutes of unlimited sake in one of them (genuine mistake), tried an English bar (not very much like an English bar), and decided two hours of karaoke was a great idea at 1:30 am.

Saturday was not the best day, see above, but my lunchtime black sesame tantanmen was very restorative. We travelled back to Tokyo later in the day, were too tired to do anything, and then went to sleep in our airport hotel.

And here we are. Writing this took up about an hour of our layover, excellent work, Rowan.

General impressions are that Japan is very fun, but it’s also very easy to fill every waking moment as a result. I’ll come for longer if we ever return! I wasn’t disappointed with the food even once, the people we interacted with were all very friendly, and it’s super easy to work stuff out (especially in Tokyo) where every user-experience detail has been considered. Highly recommend 👍

What even is work? I was quite switched off in the lead-up to this trip.

On Friday we started our ~18 hour journey from London to Shanghai to Tokyo. It was fine, I didn’t really sleep a lot so pretty much stayed up for 24 hours solid. I burned through a lot of TV.

China Eastern feed you pretty frequently, don’t know how unpopular an opinion this is but I kinda love airline food. It’s a nice little surprise what you’re gonna get given. Did you know that low pressure and humidity levels reduce your sense of smell and taste a lot so they have to add a lot of extra salt to the food?

We landed and got the train into Tokyo, found our hotel (thanks CityMapper), had showers and DID NOT NAP. A couple of hours after arriving we met up with Luke who’s been living here for a few months. It was really nice to see him despite us being complete zombies by this point.

We went to a nearby Soba restaurant, chatted for a bit, then went off to bed. I think I slept as soon as my head hit the pillow.

On Sunday we woke up feeling fresh, the staying up paid off! I managed to stay awake for the whole day.

Luke wasn’t feeling the best so we had Sunday to ourselves. We started by going to a ramen place near our hotel which was amazing, I’m told that it’s difficult to find a bad one. The staff were friendly and patient explaining how the ticket vending machine worked; as somebody who hates the part of a restaurant experience where you’re waiting for the bill, I’m a big fan of most places either being pay-up-front or take-your-reciept-to-the-till.

Our plans were mostly to explore a bit of Shinjuku City, which is the area we’re staying in. It was a lovely sunny day so we explored Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden which is beautiful. I tripped over a loose paving stone and fell onto my wrist which still hurts a bit but think it’s fine? We managed to work out how to buy ibuprofen and I can move it without too much pain 🤷

After the gardens we got coffee and sat for a bit then decided to make the most of Luke not being there by having dinner in McDonalds. Yes I know it’s kind of a travesty given how good and cheap the food is everywhere here, but it’s a tradition of ours to try the regional McDonalds menu. Teriyaki burgers are very good but quite sweet, excellent sauce selection, McNuggets are different and more delicious.

We wandered around a bit, went to a few small arcades and wasted money on the claw machines, and then stopped in a little bar. The owner spoke no English and we spoke no Japanese but he was really keen to chat via Google Translate, he gave us some snacks that we must try and recommended a lot of other places to visit in the area. Very friendly, would go there again and I’m glad I listened to my inner child when picking the bar by name alone (@home shot bar BJ).

A few beers and sakes later, we headed back out again and walked up to Kabukicho which was the barman’s recommendation for nightlife. At night it’s lit up in a way that matches my expectations for how Tokyo looks based on TV and film. There’s a lot going on, we just zig-zagged across the area for a while stopping for sake.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped off for snacks in 7/11 and FamilyMart and ate them in the room. A lovely day!

Everything is really quite easy and convenient here so far, despite only having a few very basic Japanese phrases which I’m probably butchering. Food’s great, people are friendly, there’s an overwhelming amount of stuff to do.

We’re off to some different parts of the city today and then travelling to Kyoto later in the week, I’m excited!

Oof a lot of incidents this week! Tiring but I think I’m good at making calls with this stuff and I don’t really get stressed about them. “Nobody dies if the FT goes down” is my mantra. One of the issues was a pretty nasty XSS attack which was quite a fun one to fix.

We were also onboarding an engineer who’s bootcamping with our team. By the end of week one he’s contributed a decent amount and got a good taste of all the different work our team does 💪

Four days to go before some time off 🎉 I’ll be writing weeknotes from Tokyo this time next week!

On Friday we visited Tammy and Marcus and ordered almost every item from the Taco menu to share and rate. Turns out the tacos are the worst bit? It was a fun evening, we played Priorities which is quite a fun party game, I might buy a copy.

Because we’re away quite a lot over the next few months, we’ve been doing family visits. On Saturday we went to see Charlotte’s nephew who’s 3 months old now, he’s very chill and very cute.

On Sunday my mum and brother popped over and we spent the whole day together. Lots of chatting, lots of eating, and a couple of games. It was lovely.

Later on Jenn came over and then refused to leave, which is why I’m writing these at 22:30. Rude 💛

We finally got rid of the large corner sofa which was dominating the living room of our flat. We never used it and it wasn’t comfortable. We’ve replaced it with a lovely table and chairs so that we don’t have to eat off of our laps. I love it.

I drove a van for the first time to go and pick it up. It went well but highlighted how much I rely on my rear-view mirror when driving, feels very unnatural not to be able to stare into the eyes of the person driving behind you.

My Shelly flood sensor arrived and I got it set up in Home Assistant. Now I’ll get alerted if there’s dampness in the under-sink cupboard in the kitchen, so I can stop checking it compulsively every time I go in there 🎉

As always, I love working in Home Assistant, it’s such a brilliant system. I decided to buy a Zigbee radio for the Raspberry Pi that it runs on so that I can reduce WiFi network load and remove some of our reliance on the Internet being available. I also found that it’s possible to get UK smart meter data piped in so I can use Grafana to chart our energy usage over time. This guide was useful.

Thursday pub was delightful, glad I put sunscreen on.

On Saturday we went to our only wedding of the year, Lou & Char got married down in Kent, on the grounds of a country house which was lovely. The ceremony was really sweet despite us baking in the sun, the brides seemed to have the best time.

Despite not knowing a lot of people outside of Charlotte’s family (Lou is her cousin), it was a lot of fun. Various other family members are also considering moving to Brighton; the list of people to visit when we go down just keeps growing ❤️

A weird small-world moment was meeting someone and discovering they’re the brother of one of my colleagues. I love it when things like this happen.

I started the week off strong by fixing the wastewater pipe under our kitchen sink. It turns out one of the elbow fittings had cracked so it was mostly just replacing that. I used expanding foam (fun) to secure the pipe in the wall in the hope that it can’t be twisted from the outside again 🤞

Most of the plumbing is boxed in which might make a future leak harder to detect immediately, so I bought a Shelly Flood. Shelly’s hardware is really great, my temperature and humidity sensors ran on a single battery for almost 2 years. I’m gonna have Home Assistant alert me via the app if it detects water under the sink.

Next on the house list was selling a sofa, dressing table, and bookcase which we no longer needed so I’ve been busy with that. The living room is feeling a lot more spacious and we have room for a table, chairs and another armchair, Charlotte found a lovely drop-leaf dining set on ebay, it’s gonna be so nice not eating off our laps on the sofa all the time!

Coming back to work was alright, I had a productive week. We started building the Slack integrations for our dashboard project which went really smoothly, we now unfurl any dashboard link that someone posts, augmenting their message with useful information.

We’re rewatching all of Schitt’s Creek which is still the best sitcom ❤️

We booked all our accommodation for our trip to Australia later in the year. It feels more real now and I’m super excited! We’re spending most of our time in Melbourne but we’re gonna drive the coast road from there to Sydney over three of the days.

It’s been nice spending some time not thinking about anything much, I feel refreshed but maybe still a little tired. I slept so much over the past week.

Some of the petrol stations around where we stayed have milk bars where you can buy glass bottles and purchase both regular and flavoured milk in 500ml increments. Fun!

We went to the beach (I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating… and it gets everywhere), I entertained myself by making art in the sand while the others went swimming.

It reminded me of my Art Foundation course in college; they sent us off to Wales on a coach and we made land art in the woods. It was calming and meditative.

The latter half of our trip had to be adjusted a bit when we found out Charlotte was not feeling well due to COVID. It forced us to slow down on the activities a bit but that wasn’t unwelcome tbh, and she’s on the mend. I’ve been testing every day and have somehow avoided it so far despite not really trying to isolate 🤷

We decided it was safer to drive all the way home to drop Charlotte off instead of taking public transport. Driving through central London is almost relaxing now that it’s 20mph in most places.

I was rudely shaken out of my holiday relaxedness by finding out the hard way (during a washing machine cycle) that the wastewater pipe in our kitchen had come loose. The kitchen is quite wet but it’s patched for now. My theory is that the small kid who roams around our car park has twisted the pipe from the outside, it’s happened before and it seems to have loosened the seals directly inside.

I’m gonna try and do the fix myself, it’s all fairly standard stuff and maybe we can seal the outside pipe to make it not possible for anyone passing by to royally fuck our plumbing.

OK, one small work thing. I had a fun idea on the Friday before we left for Wales and I ordered some medals as prizes. They arrived and they look great 😄 If you’re in Customer Products at the FT, look out for an announcement soon!

On Tuesday Charlotte’s mum popped over for dinner and video games, we showed her Sackboy: A Big Adventure which she’s since bought for herself. She met us at the office and we showed her the roof terrace which we definitely take for granted. She stretched her mum muscles by making us take an embarrassing photo under the flags.

On Thursday I went to a talk in the office from Laylo who are trying to make boxed wine good. Their wine was good 👍 it set me up nicely for post-work pub.

On Saturday we picked up a car and drove ~4 hours to stay in a cottage near Aberaeron in Wales. We’re here for a very chilled week off without too much planned, it’s very pretty around here and Aberaeron is picturesque af.

We stopped off for lunch at The Salutation Inn on the drive up. Their food is amazing, we sat in their sunny beer garden and it was a perfect start to the trip.

On Sunday we went for a ~10-mile hike through a couple of woods, a National Trust café, Aberaeron, and Aberarth. Following the river down into town was lovely. I got unexpectedly burned on a day when it was supposed to rain.

We finished the day with a few (too many) drinks and a long soak in the hot tub. Delightful.

It’s been a milestone week for the house, I spent most of the weekend Doing It Myself, putting up shelves and pictures.

I’m super pleased that the shelves are mostly straight and seem secure. We bought a load of twin-slot shelving and we now have so much more storage in our office space. We might stain the wood later to be a bit darker, but tbh we probably won’t notice it once they’re full.

• They allowed us to unpack the final two boxes, some books which have been sitting for nearly two years behind the door to this room.

• The aim is to add a whole bunch of trailing plants, which I think will look lovely and soften the room a bit (please send recommendations for ones which don’t need too much light). We can also both personalise the wall space around our desks more which will make it a nicer space to work in.

I was also feeling motivated to finally put up the now-framed art that has been cluttering up our living room for an age. We’ve started a gallery wall behind our sofa and I love it. We’ve also started scattering other artwork around the rest of the house and it feels so much more homey.

Shout out to my A-Level sketchbook work on the far right 😁 it’s done a lot of house moves with me and is still the only work I still like from back then.

At some point between putting up paintings and drilling holes in the walls, I met Glynn for a coffee nearby, what a nice weekend treat! He was taking his kid to Spitalfields city farm and I’m bummed I didn’t have quite enough time to join them.

I’m a big fan of many of my colleagues, Thursday pub was particularly fun, Arjun and I had our monthly Jägerbombs and the world seemed very bright and exciting for the evening.

Every now and then I rediscover this absolute banger: Rage Against the Machine vs Shaggy - Killing Mr. Boombastic In The Name Of Laba Laba. A gem of a mashup which is better than either original.

Gallo pinto, fried plantain, egg, and pico de gallo (mostly all present in a Costa Rican breakfast) was what I ate every day for two weeks while I was there. I think I’ve perfected my versions of each of these and it makes an amazing veggie dinner.

On Sunday night after all my hard work with the house, we went to see Barbie with Gallal. It was fun and silly and I enjoyed it.

We caved and started watching The Bear because people kept talking about it. We’re 1½ series down and I understand the hype now, it’s beautiful. Season 2 episodes 6 & 7 (“Fishes” and “Forks”) are some of the best TV episodes I’ve seen in a long time.

We made lots of progress at work this week, I’m super excited about our current project because we can already see how much it’s going to help improve our tech estate. Like, almost every day another thing cropped up which led us all to ask “Why has nobody built this yet?”.

At the FT we have quite a lot of different (and disparate) systems that we use to monitor our services. We’re pulling all these different data sources into a single suite of dashboards. It’s gonna help us to manage incidents and monitor our systems, and it’s also gonna help us work out the parts of our estate that could use some attention.

On Thursday it was Mo’s leaving drinks, there was a nice turnout and I had a great time. Arjun and I decided not to use it as our monthly Jägerbomb day, very sensible, and I had some nice chats with people.

Shout out to the person who said that reading all my colleagues’ blog posts was a waste of time. The hardest of disagrees, buddy.

We’ve made a bunch of house progress, the office shelves aren’t quite up yet but the area’s prepped and I’m feeling motivated to do it. What I did do was finally cut mattes to size for some of our artwork and mount it in the second-hand frames I bought ages ago.

I don’t think I’ve done any proper framing since art college. It was as painful as I remember but I felt really great about it afterwards, my poor cutting board has been a mouse mat for a very long time.

Shout out to the Fiskars Fingertip Detail Knife, still perfect, I’ll never look back.

I don’t like Terraform any more, I accidentally deleted 21 of my GitHub repos and then had to spend several hours restoring them from backups. Dangerous stuff!

I participated in a hackathon at work and won the Judge’s Choice award despite a tenuous link to the theme. I spent the day running njsscan against all our Node.js repos and building an interface around it to make it easier to assess results.

I won a small green robot that clearly states on the box this is not a toy, it’s for adult collectors. It was really fun, there were some excellent hacks and presentations and I’m glad I joined in this year.

We went out for dinner and drinks with Alison on Friday which was lovely. We ended up going to Oslo in Hackney, which was a bad idea. The night was fun until we tried to extend it beyond the natural end! I didn’t feel my best on Saturday morning.

On Saturday afternoon, having recovered a bit, we went to Tammy’s parents’ 40th wedding anniversary which was lovely. Her mum is a Masterchef finalist and runs a catering company so the food was incredible. A few cocktails down I felt fine again.

A lot of new shelves arrived for our office, which means we’ll be able to unpack the final two boxes. So exciting! Then the dominos will continue to fall – we’ll be able to get rid of our second sofa, get a table and chairs, and finish off everything 👏

Hello friends! I’ve just spent two hours trying to work out why my self-hosted RSS reader couldn’t connect to my database so that was fun. So here I am starting my weeknotes at 10 pm 🎉

I fixed it by deleting the entire database cluster and building a new one. I think I was never closing the database connection and so they just built and built until somehow made my free tier MongoDB Atlas completely fall over. Like I couldn’t even connect to it through their own interface?? I have no idea what I’m doing.

I forgot how much I enjoy The Quacks of Quedlinburg (board game). It probably helps that I was just really on the ball this week, top strats.

Jeison (my Product Manager) ran a couple of design workshops this week, it was great to get together in person and draw on post-its instead of digitally. It aligned us all on what the new dashboards we’re building will look like, and we came up with some really neat ideas by smushing our drawings together. Fun!

On Saturday I decided I fancied properly learning Terraform, it’s been a while since I did a deep dive into a new language/technology. We use Terraform at work and I’ve kind of muddled through small changes but now I feel like I grasp a lot of the concepts.

Obvs I’m not just doing this for work, though it’s useful; I decided to automate something real. It’s been super fun! I now have a GitHub repo set up that orchestrates the settings for my other GitHub repos (no you’re over-engineering).

It’s quite basic at the moment, but I’ve handed over control of CODEOWNERS and LICENSE files to Terraform, as well as core repo settings like the default branch and which kind of merge commits are enabled. Many more things will follow!

I suspect that, for a while, every problem I encounter will look very much like it could be solved with Terraform 👀

Alex M: maybe it’s time for that “automate our Heroku apps” side project? 😁

In the evening we popped over to see Jenn and Chris and make some cocktails for Chris’ birthday. It was a success, though towards the end everything just tasted like the cherry wine we were trying to use up. I can still make a great Old Fashioned.

Shortish weeknotes because I’m tired and could do with going to bed.

On Tuesday I went to play board games in-person with my group. We played The Mind, Space Base, and Skull which are all great games. It was nice to see everyone in person after quite a while!

The main thing that happened was that my grandma turned 90. She’s doing super well and was on great form when my entire extended family descended on her house over the weekend.

My cousins’ kids are all slightly less chaotic now. Slightly. I had a good chat with one of them, he was amazed that “a grown-up likes Minecraft!?”. He proudly told me that his house had a toilet both upstairs and downstairs unlike Grandma’s, he thinks two toilets are better because he doesn’t have to go upstairs for a wee. I explained that I live in a flat with one floor so I also don’t have to walk upstairs to go to the toilet. He said that’s very sad for me.

It was generally a lovely day but we slept in super late on Sunday because it was also exhausting.

I had a mid-week day off on Wednesday to visit my sister in Brighton. She was made redundant recently and is enjoying having no job for a little while. We caught up and drank in the sun a lot, I met some of her friends, it was a lovely time. I got home at about 1 am 😬

Thursday was not a fun day. I woke up feeling like I could just about manage the office, but I slowly got worse as the day wore on. I barely even enjoyed OKR day.

However, I did manage to fix three annoying bugs in our logging library. I’m quite smug about stumbling across an ideal use-case for WeakSet.

The AI enshittification of the web continues, apparently nothing is safe. Mozilla introduced an “AI explainer” on documentation pages which gives completely inaccurate explanations. Wild.

Speaking of AI, we have an AI-focused hackathon at work coming up soon 😐 I’ll either pass on or mess around with some security stuff – lots of Open Source security scanning projects label themselves as “AI-powered”, might be fun to just go and fix all our potential injection attacks.

On Friday, after our original plans were cancelled, Charlotte and I painted our office a slightly darker shade of sage green. It’s very calming. The main benefit is that we’re now unblocked from finding the furniture we need, putting up shelves, and unpacking the final two boxes.

On Saturday we went to see Jenn & Chris, who we haven’t caught up with for a while. We had a nice relaxed time playing The Mind and drinking mine and Jenn’s birthday champagnes which we were saving for a tasting.

I’m very hot and sweaty all the time. It’s irritating.

I set up a new mortgage as my current rate expires later this year. It’s not ideal to be paying ~£350 more per month 😬 really wish I’d gone with a 5-year fixed term back when I could get a 2.79% interest rate.

On Thursday we saw Charlotte’s brother, who’s back from Iraq for a few weeks, as well as the rest of her London-based family. It was nice to catch up.

We booked annual leave for our trips to Japan, Australia, and the Philippines later in the year. I’m gonna be off for a lot of Q4 but I’m super excited for it all!

We took Friday off work and headed up to Birmingham to stay with Ari and Chibs, who recently moved into a massive house slightly out of town. We had basically an entire wing to ourselves.

We mostly chilled out and chatted but went to Godiva Festival in Coventry on the Saturday. It was lots of fun, I felt very old until we found the place where all the other adults were hanging out. I got a little bit sunburnt like an idiot.

I created a Lemmy (a federated link aggregation/discussion platform) account after going cold turkey on Reddit a few weeks ago. I was never a super frequent user but I was missing a place to endlessly scroll through memes and bad takes. Lemmy has been great for that so far and it’s growing loads while Reddit semi-implodes.

The more goes on with the major/VC-backed social networks the more I’m convinced that I’ll never hand my data over to one again (including BlueSky in that definition).

I’ve been obsessed with Padam Padam by Kylie for a couple of weeks. I can’t get it out of my head, and why would I want to?

It was Charlotte’s birthday this week, we’re normally away for it so this was a rare at-home one. I decided to bake because Charlotte always puts a lot of effort into my cakes. I made peanut butter and salted caramel cupcakes (because I realised too late we don’t have a pair of cake tins). They were pretty good, especially considering that I can’t remember the last time I baked anything. In the evening we went out for dinner.

On Wednesday I popped around to Ed’s for a few drinks, I’m glad to be seeing him and Andrew a bit more lately, I’ve missed them ❤️

On Thursday it was Anna’s leaving drinks. She’s the tech director for the part of the FT I work in and she was my line manager for a couple of years when I was a Principal engineer, I’m gonna miss her. Her leaving drinks were predictably well-attended by both current and past colleagues and it was a late one!

I had a great chat with our new CTO . We’ve had quite a few CTOs over the past few years but this feels different – she has opinions, she’s keen on action, and she’s been both visible and approachable. All great things, I’m both nervous and excited about how technology at the FT might change.

On Saturday it was Charlotte’s main birthday event, we went on a Corner Shop Crawl around Whitechapel to drink slushies (very high slushy density out east), eat a lot of snacks, and stop off in various parks to drink. It was a lot of fun! We had laminated maps, stars, and Sharpies so that we could rank the shops. Everyone got a reusable slushy straw as a party favour.

We finished in a Simmons on Brick Lane and then stopped off at a pub near home before calling it a night. What a nice time 😊

I finally got around to meeting up with Andrew & Ed on Wednesday, haven’t seen them in an age and it was really nice to shoot the shit. I keep drinking beer instead of sticking to G&Ts which is frequently a mistake.

On Thursday it was the FT’s Product & Tech Rounders game in Regent’s Park. It’s a bit of a highlight of the working year and I had a great day of sitting around in the sun, meeting new people, chatting, and drinking. A lot of us made our way to a pub in Primrose Hill. We had jägerbombs.

Charlotte and I ended the evening with Arjun in a pub near Camden tube, we lost track of time and the station wasn’t open but the pub was. We made friends with some strangers before spending half an hour trying to get a cab home.

Friday was a bad day for me, I did very little useful work and mostly just moaned and groaned. We still managed to drag ourselves out for the most sedate bottomless brunch of our lives. I’m exhausted.

On Saturday we had a well-deserved lazy day. We finished watching all of Sex Education which has been filling the gap of “not-too-strenuous teen drama” in our lives for a while. I enjoyed it.

Today (Sunday) we went to visit Charlotte’s family, her step-sister had a baby recently who’s very cute if a bit gassy.

It’s my 137th week, which is special. Way back in Week 13.7 I thought to myself, “OK I have to make it to week 137 before I can reassess whether I enjoy writing weeknotes”, and here we are. I hope that I don’t lose motivation now that I’ve reached this goal.

OK. I just checked and week 1,370 will fall on my birthday week in 2047 so I guess I have to keep going.

That’s probably enough niche memes for this week.

I had a blood test on Monday, the first one I’ve had in my adult life. I thought I was all fine with needles now after the COVID vaccines but I nearly fainted so I guess not. Of course, all the NHS staff were wonderful.

On Tuesday I scraped some poo into a tube and dropped it off at the clinic as a thank-you gift.

I spent a lot of the week trying to debug why our Minecraft server is having network issues. It’s been a little frustrating and still not fully sorted, but the silver lining is that I got to do some debugging with Rowan. It was a joy. He’s a lot more experienced with server admin-type stuff than I am and he’s very patient, I feel like I learned a bunch.

We kicked off playing Minecraft v1.20 properly on Wednesday. At one point we had nine people online and we quickly turned the very plain spawn area into a disjointed home for us all. I forgot how lovely it is logging back into a server and seeing lots of stuff has changed. The server held up great, not a single lag spike.

I resolve to play at a more sustainable pace so I don’t overdo it and burn myself out and/or get to late game super quickly.

I read this really interesting essay: Modern software quality, or why I think using language models for programming is a bad idea. I agree very much with the author’s overall sentiment, that the fallout from people using “AI”-generated code (particularly for work) is going to be an absolute nightmare.

Over the weekend we went up to Leeds to see the city, see Scott (who moved up there in the pandemic), and go on a nice walk. Leeds is nice, though we didn’t really get to see loads of it. The walk was a slightly sweaty 14 miles but pleasant, and I got to eat cake at the end. We saw the Slabbering Baby along the route.

I kinda smashed it at work this week. We’ve been overhauling the alerting for FT.com and I’m so proud of what the team has come up with. We’ll find it far easier to dig into which systems are failing and why during an incident. We’ll also have far more reliable data to check whether we’re meeting our service-level objectives. I’m aiming to write a public blog post about it at some point soon.

My board game group started a Clank!: Legacy campaign this week. It’s fun! I won the first game by a decent margin, still feeling smug about it.

Get ready for some over-sharing: I finally got my ass in gear and have a blood test and a stool sample collection coming up. Best case, I have a food intolerance or vitamin deficiency. Worst case, I have a horrible life-altering illness. Time will tell! Interestingly it’s quite possible that my psoriasis flare-ups are also gut-related, who knew?

My over-engineering of Minecraft is almost complete. Indulge me in talking about the new setup for our shared server.

• I ditched the idea of using AWS, because it turns out it’s way cheaper to run an old-school dedicated server. It’s been super fun setting it up, I haven’t done something like this in ages.

• I have a beefy Ubuntu server running AMP – a super cool piece of software that can set up and run different game servers with an easy-to-use and web-based admin interface.

• Outside of the game servers we have a basic static website hosted on GitHub. Of course, all of this needed a domain, nobody wants to be passing IP addresses around right? https://thisland.space/

• I gave a few of our group some server admin capabilities so that I’m not a single-person dependency. Rowan has done a bunch of this stuff before so I’m hoping he can help me with a few networking issues 👀

• I’m really pleased with some of the automation. We run a Vanilla server but we use a few data packs and a custom resource pack (yes yes maybe a GitHub org is overkill). The resource pack is made public via GitHub pages so that a download can be prompted when someone joins the server. The data packs get uploaded via SFTP every time the main branch changes. Anyone on the server can PR changes.

• Writing data packs is fun and slightly addictive.

• If I know you (like actually know you) and you fancy playing on a chill server with some nice people then let me know! We’ll be kicking off properly on Wednesday 7th June.

My week itself was fairly uneventful. There’s a bunch of mid-quality gossip going on at work about who might be applying for the recently-open tech director role in my group but, otherwise, it’s been a quiet one.

Charlotte and I took Friday off to extend the long bank holiday weekend and I’m glad we did. It’s been super relaxing.

On Friday and Saturday combined we did about 20 miles of walking in the countryside near Kintbury, the weather was perfect and we had a few pub stops along the way for a shandy and a sit in the shade. I feel refreshed and rejuvenated.

On Sunday we met up with Luke and went to the Hayes Canal Festival. We were there for about 10 minutes before we decided to just walk along the canal a bit. We ended up walking another 9 miles, it’s quite pretty and rural-feeling between Hayes and Northolt, where we decided to get the tube back into central.

I’m over-engineering Minecraft at the moment, seeing if I’ve learned enough CloudFormation to successfully get a server running on EC2 with spot pricing, which should end up cheaper and more automatable than the current host I’m using. Right now I feel like this project is gonna be an unfinished one.

I have developed a seasonal allergy in my 30s. I had my suspicions already but I did an experiment: for Friday’s walk I took an antihistamine in the morning and felt great for the whole walk. On Saturday I didn’t take one and I felt snotty and tight-throated until I gave in. How exciting for me eh?

This week we’re looking after Areia, Estefanía’s cat. She’s really sweet, occasionally vicious, and maybe even more food-obsessed than Tootsie ever was. It’s been quite nice looking after her but it has made us question taking on the responsibility of owning a cat again 😅

It is super adorable when she decides to come and nap with one of us and she’s very confident and chilled in a new place.

My board game group played Everdell for the first time this week. I really enjoyed it! It’s a blend of worker placement and engine-building and it’s quite satisfying to build a city full of little woodland creatures. I’d recommend it if you like Agricola/Caverna and Wingspan.

I’m still not 100% over this illness. Like I’m not feeling awful but I’m still a snot machine.

I’ve been putting together a basic Minecraft data pack (kind of like a plugin but more limited). If we start a new world when v1.20 comes out I’d like to keep people in a smaller starting area for longer so we don’t lose interest too quickly. The data pack introduces a small world border initially but you can sacrifice diamond blocks at an altar to expand the border, so you have to weigh up whether to use diamonds to progress technically or explore further out.

At work I’ve been learning a little bit of Terraform and a fair bit of AWS CloudFormation stuff, it’s been fun!

On Saturday we were supposed to go see Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera with Charlotte’s mum but she cancelled on us due to being ill. We took Sophie instead, it was funny!

We accidentally went for drinks afterwards and then stayed up until 5 am 🤦 goodbye Sunday.

Spoiler alert! Don’t read any further if you don’t want Eurovision 2023 spoilers.

Wow, friends. I think I need to go to the Eurovision city every year now. I had the absolute best time this week. I’m looking back with so much fondness while writing this up.

We travelled up to Liverpool last Sunday, I’ve never been before and it’s a really lovely city. I’d visit again sans-Eurovision.

After dropping stuff off at the hotel (we somehow managed to get rooms in the Premier Inn right next to the venue) we went and did an inflatable assault course in the docks which was so much fun! I was glad of the wetsuit in the chilly water and it’s exhausting swimming when it’s so cold. It meant I felt less unhealthy drinking for the next few days 😬

Sunday night was quite chill, we went along to the big welcome party by the town hall and saw loads of great bands. I can now say I’ve seen Atomic Kitten live twice after Butlins.

Monday was our big day. We did a little bit of touristy stuff and then a bottomless brunch for Jenn’s birthday. Vodka Revs does the best bottomless brunch 👀 they leave a prosecco on the table for when you’re waiting for cocktails to arrive and it’s two hours!

A few drinks down we headed to the rehearsal for the first Semi-Final. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this was probably the best show I’ve ever been to, definitely top three. The atmosphere was incredible and we were standing so close to the stage alongside a lot of hardcore fans.

As well as many of the acts being amazing it was so cool and impressive how quickly the stage crew turn everything around and it was awesome getting to see how smoothly the live show comes together.

The absolute highlight was watching the (now-indisputable) public favourite, Käärijä from Finland with Cha Cha Cha.

A little bonus for you: watch out for Jamie in an incredible outfit right at the end of this video! ☝️

After watching the rehearsal we were all buzzing and headed off to Euroclub to finish the night with music and a few more drinks. What a day!

Through the magic of Eurovision we all woke up with no hangovers on Tuesday ✨ we were fully prepared to go and watch the rehearsal for Semi-Final 1 again in the early afternoon, this time seated 😂 yes it was just as good watching the second time and from a higher vantage point.

On Tuesday evening we went for drinks in the Eurovision Village where they were screening the actual Semi-Final. It was great watching it for a third time through the camera lenses.

Through all of this, I can’t fully describe the atmosphere in words. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so welcome in a community, the Eurovision crowd is super inclusive and it was an absolute joy to meet people.

On the way back to London I started feeling sick with a sore throat and blocked nose 😬 apparently it wasn’t COVID but it was enough to knock me out for a couple of days. Worth it tbh.

One casualty of my sickness was our regular Eurovision Final party which we’ve hosted for like six years. Instead, Charlotte and I had a much more relaxed final viewing with a bottle of champagne and a couple of pizzas. It was still lovely.

I guess I’m going to Sweden next year!?

Slightly disappointed that Finland didn’t win it, I think their act was more unique and fun and captured the spirit of Eurovision more for me. I’m super glad that they were overwhelmingly the favourite in the public vote. I think the difference between the public and jury votes kind of highlights that the jury vote is maybe a little out of touch 👀

My Eurovision favourites this year illustrate my distaste for ballads: Finland, Australia, Moldova, Czechia, Germany, Croatia, Norway, and Serbia.

What a week ☺️ here are a few pics.

The stress has largely continued from last week, hoping having a little break and then not making any more plans for May will help. This is gonna be a short weeknote and I’ll probs have a better one next week after Eurovision. I’m aware that my stress levels aren’t really warranted or rational based on my pretty easy life but here we are 🤷 what’s nice is that work isn’t stressing me out at all and feels almost like some nice relaxing escapism.

Charlotte was in Leeds for a conference Wednesday–Friday this week so I’ve been mostly in my own company which I think I needed.

What I didn’t need was a three-hour tech support call with my mum to try and move her email to a place that she controls. Like, my mum’s quite tech-savvy but it took us a good 45 minutes just to find something we could reliably use to screen-share so that she didn’t need to send me passwords to her stuff. Exhausting! It was still lovely to chat to her but the call was coloured by my need to get a lot of other shit done that evening.

On Friday we went to Euan’s leaving drinks Round #2. We were very sensible because we had to be up early and I’m pleased with myself.

We just got back from an anti-coronation party which was fun. The televised coronation was the biggest snooze-fest ever, it’s all just extremely out of touch and the BBC did a cracking job of completely avoiding the many protests. We had our fingers crossed for something fun like a crown falling off or an assassination attempt but, spoiler alert, it didn’t deliver.

The big thing this week was Euan’s leaving drinks – he’s going to the Philippines for a year and the 40+ people who turned up are definitely gonna miss him. We started in The Old Thameside, a staple of the old FT board games group, and ended in St Christopher’s with a record number of people tagging along. It was a lot of fun!

I preemptively booked the Friday off work. Well done me 👏

On Saturday Charlotte and I went to see Sophie Duker at Leicester Square Theatre. We kinda fell in love with her on Taskmaster and her standup is so great too, the tour’s been extended.

Over the long weekend, we hired a car and visited Charlotte’s grandparents, an old school friend, and her mum. The weather was lovely and everything felt very summery.

I’m kind of dreading how little downtime I have over the next couple of weeks. We’re heading to Eurovision in Liverpool which will be amazing. We also have a bunch of other plans with friends, and it feels ungrateful that all I can think is “When am I going to get time to decompress?”.

It’s not a fun state of mind to be in when you feel a little bit of resentment towards every plan in your calendar 😬 In probably-related news, my psoriasis is flaring again. brb just slathering myself in salicylic acid.

On Thursday we had a three-hour OKR meeting at work which turned out to be more interesting than agonizing. We followed it up by going to a nearby pub with a card behind the bar. I explained to our CPTO (big boss) what my team does and said lots of lovely things about people. It felt more natural now that I’m not at all trying to climb the greasy pole.

I’ve been watching Beef as everyone else seems to be. It’s kinda depressing, none of the characters are particularly redeemable, but I keep coming back.

Spring is here! I’m enjoying the milder weather a lot and it’s soon gonna be time to retire all my knitwear until Autumn. Everything just feels better when it gets warmer, and London’s quite pretty. My flat is definitely a nicer place to be in the spring and summer; here’s the view from my bedroom at the moment.

Saturday was busy, it started early with a out-of-hours call because the FT’s home page was broken. Slightly unsatisfying that we couldn’t find the root cause but Alex and I got a hotfix out which kept it stable for the rest of the weekend 💪 guess I know what I’m working on Monday.

Around lunchtime Charlotte and I went to Brick Lane (we’ve neglected it area a bit considering how close we live now). It was really nice, busy but not horrible. We wandered around the vintage market and ate churros (thanks for the recommendation Cynthia!).

Later on Saturday, we got the train out to Tammy’s where she cooked us delicious food and we spent a lovely evening chatting. Some of her other friends were there too, I needn’t have been anxious about new people – they were fun and easy to talk to.

I’ve been playing a lot of OpenTTD (a free and open-source clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, a 90s classic). It’s such a good game! It takes a while to get used to the controls and I was slow to remember how to run trains but I’m having a lot of fun now. I might try a few mods soon or run a little server.

I’m still going strong with Cookie Clicker too. I’m up to 150,000,000,000 cookies per second. At least it’s mostly an idle clicker now, I just check in every once in a while to spend my hard-earned cookies.

On Friday we met up with Jenn & Chris for a whisky tasting. It was really chill, the bar we were at was nice and quiet, and we went for some great Thai food afterwards. My favourite new (to me) whisky was the Benromach 10 which has some nice black pepperiness to it.

The weekend was quiet, which I definitely needed. I’m feeling a little stressed about how booked-up my life is lately.

Charlotte and I went for food at Needoo Grill (better than Lahore and Tayyabs 👀) and then wandered up Brick Lane for a drink. We didn’t do any of the house jobs we were supposed to do 💆‍♀️

This week is all about the weekend again, with a pretty uneventful week.

The feedback last weekend’s bleakness varied from [paraphrasing] “I love this, please can I come next time?” to “we mostly think similarly but then you go and do something weird like this”. To each their own.

I don’t look at the analytics for my website generally, but it turns out divisive weekends drive views (shout out to Fathom who do privacy-focused analytics that doesn’t do anything creepy with the data).

In contrast to last week, for the four-day Easter weekend, we travelled up to the Lake District with some friends for a relaxing few days staying on a very pretty farm near Ullswater.

I’m really glad I didn’t have to drive up, Marcus and Tammy drove the six hours 😬 (lots of bank holiday traffic).

Cumbria’s always incredibly beautiful and worth the extra journey time.

On Saturday we did a ~9-mile walk and tackled 4 different Wainrights (Alison is trying to walk 30 of them this year). The walk was tough and boggy in places but a lot of fun. It was perfect walking weather, chilly with a bit of a breeze but warm in the sun ❤️

We spent the low-internet evenings playing board games. People really enjoyed Railroad Ink so I’m glad we took it with us. We also played a lot of Dobble which is always incredibly stressful and breaks my brain.

Charlotte and I set up an easter egg hunt, very cute seeing our friends get excited and competitive about it.

Back to normality now. I’m gonna finish the weekend by going to see Dungeons & Dragons with the Whitechapel crew.

Scott was down in London during the week so we played in-person board games. We chat a lot more in person and it’s just a lot more fun. We played Long Shot again.

On Thursday I was finally back in the office after being sick all of last week, it was great to see a load of people. After work, I did an escape room on the Golden Hinde which was fun, we absolutely smashed it.

The highlight of the week was going on our first Bleak Weekend with Gallal, something we’ve been vaguely planning to do for a couple of years. Here’s the premise: you locate the most run-down and bleak-looking motorway service station, book yourself into the hotel there for the weekend, and just let the liminality wash over you.

• The weekend was a big success. There’s something very relaxing about being kind of nowhere and there being a constant flood of tired-looking people wandering through the place you’re temporarily calling home.

• The hotel was very worn, with lovely bleach stains over the carpets where I think someone’s tried to prevent mould growth. The views from the windows were either a car park or the air-conditioning unit for the main service station. Unfortunately, you couldn’t hear the low drone of the motorway very well from the bed.

• We sat alongside some truckers and gambled away £10 on the slot machines. We didn’t win anything, thankfully.

• On Saturday we had a “no phones day”. We still took photos on a disposable camera which we thought would capture the mood a bit better. I’ll let you know when these are developed. Below is a small gallery of overly high-quality photos taken with a phone.

• I recommend the experience wholeheartedly. We’ll do it again soon and maybe indoctrinate some more people.

We’re sick. It’s highly likely to be COVID because three of the people we went to Butlins with have tested positive. Our tests are refusing to confirm this for us, we’ve tried a lot of different ones. I’m just assuming it’s COVID because the symptoms are identical 🤷 this sucks for a few reasons:

1. I had taken Thursday off to spend the day with my sister down in Brighton which I was looking forward to

2. Our friend, Scarlett, was supposed to stay for the weekend while she was doing some print workshops in London, it would have been lovely to hang out

3. I hate feeling weak and sick

4. It’s lame but I really miss the office. A couple of days a week is my ideal and I feel a bit isolated otherwise

We took the opportunity to do a bit of cooking, and I finally broke out the Sosmix. It’s not particularly appealing before you cook it but OMG the nostalgia! Charlotte, who’s never had it before, described it as “better than most of the vegan ones we’ve tried” which is a big win. I can’t recommend it enough 👍

We had them with mash, onion gravy, and peas; a staple of my childhood.

This seems to be the only place that stocks the original.

We had slightly more energy on Saturday and did some overdue junk clearing. We emptied all of the unsorted drawers in the flat which have been accumulating since we moved. We also piled up all the loose items which were making us feel like we were living with too much clutter.

It was a big success, the whole flat feels so clear and considered now. Everything that didn’t have a proper home now does 🎉

I feel so light and free! I even forgot I was sick for a while. I love it when everything is clean and tidy.

On Monday we went to Gallal’s for dinner, it’s so nice having people nearby who we can just pop around and see or have food with. I’ve never really had that in London and it’s lovely.

My board game group played Clank!: Catacombs which is quite a fun little deck-building / dungeon-exploration game. I’d definitely give it another go, despite dying before I could escape.

I still haven’t had Sosmix, apologies to those who are eagerly awaiting news.

I started a new ~10% project at work outside of (but kind of related to) my day-to-day work. I’m investigating whether it’d be possible to standardise logging across our tech department and what that might look like. It’s really fun writing a draft specification.

The big news this week is that we went to Skegness for a Butlins 2000s Weekender. I was nervous and unsure what to expect, but it was SO MUCH FUN! Like sure it’s full of stag and hen dos and a slightly unhealthy amount of drinking, but everyone was really nice and the music was great. The group of friends I was with all went at their own pace with a lot of respect for each other’s time and space.

Some highlights were: the bottomless brunch, a freezing sea swim, Gareth Gates, and Symphonic Ibiza.

Someone has a video of me dancing on a chair, singing Uptown Girl, while swinging my jumper in the air 😬

Anyway, here’s lovely Gareth who’s definitely 100% reaching out to me.

This week was fun but exhausting. A new engineer started on our team, is asking great questions, already contributing a bunch, and is fun to work with 🎉 I’m excited about the next couple of months introducing them to the rest of the work we do!

I took a long lunch on Tuesday to hang out with my brother, Shem. He’s down in London every couple of weeks at the moment and it’s been nice to just do some chilled hanging out rather than visiting being a big deal.

Over the weekend we went to see JPD and David to play board games at theirs. It was loads of fun 🙂 we played Shadows Over Camelot, a co-op game that we won in the perfect way; Tsuro: Phoenix Rising, which I think improves the original a lot; and No Thanks, which is a fun and easy quick game.

I had a little bit of a shopping spree and bought myself a few new pairs of shoes. I’ve been holding off buying anything like this for a while, waiting for our wardrobes to be done so we know how much space we have. It feels nice to treat myself a bit.

In the flat, we’re finally almost ready to hang all our artwork. The bulk of the work is planning and putting together a gallery wall in the living room. I think it’s gonna look great!

Charlotte bought me some Sosmix as a lovely surprise gift. There’s only one place in the UK that stocks it and it’s been years since I had some.

For those not in the know, Sosmix is kind of like a stuffing mix you could buy from health food shops in the 90s and early 00s before meat alternatives were very widespread. You mix it with water, form it into sausages, and fry them.

It’s gonna be a huge nostalgia trip, I hope it’s not disgusting.

I’m very tired at the moment despite the Iron and Vitamin D I keep putting into myself. I think I need a bit of time off soon to rest up properly.

I think it was maybe a couple of days of back-to-back meetings which threw me off a bit, those will kill your brain. I need a nice even mix of meetings and quiet focus to not be a zombie.

On Friday Charlotte took me to Myrtle for a belated birthday meal, it was incredible. We went for the tasting menu with wine pairing, everything was delicious. We did get chips on the way home though 👀

My feed parser is coming along nicely. I love it when you have a really good suite of end-to-end tests – it’s allowed me to completely overhaul large parts of the library and unit tests with full confidence that everything still works. I’m running these against a lot of spec-compliant and real-world feeds that I put together a while ago.

We didn’t get around to painting the office quite yet because I’m tired and lazy. This coming week hopefully! We’ve had a pot of nice sage green for ages and it’ll mean we can put up shelves, hang pictures, and think about the storage properly.

On Sunday evening we went to see Pendulum at Alexandra Palace. It started a little slow but was loads of fun by the end, I had a great time and I’m managed to behave sensibly enough to not have a terrible hangover 🎉

Did you know that if you search Spotify for “mix” then it gives you a huge long list of very specific playlists created just for you? There are a lot. I’ve been listening to my personal Goblincore Mix. I didn’t know what Goblincore or Angry Tuna was but I’m happy that I do now. Thanks, random TikTok user who I can no longer find.

It was a very long week, we were sleeping in the living room surrounded by all our vacuum-packed clothes while a carpenter fitted wardrobes in our bedroom. I’m really pleased with them now that it’s done though! We have way more storage space than we need, which is my preferred option.

Finally, my full range of knitwear is neatly folded and available to wear.

This means our office is so much more clear too and we can think about painting and finishing that room with even more storage 👀 I already cleared out our third and final KALLAX. Does anyone in London want a free white 8-holed KALLAX?

I spent a bunch of evening time working on my Node.js RSS/Atom feed parser. It’s a really fun little project and I’m doing some really deep learning about both the specifications and how many real-world feeds don’t adhere to them in various interesting ways.

There’s a lovely mix of “build the thing to the spec” and then “run tests against a lot of real feeds and see what isn’t correct”. I’m erring on the side of trying to populate feed data even for feeds that kind of messily bridge several specs (RSS, Atom) or use namespaced elements from other specs (e.g. the iTunes podcast extension).

I’m also getting to build and run a suite of compatibility tests, which is a thing I just love. I’m trying to maintain rough compatibility with the Node.js feed parser I currently use (feedparser) but with the slightly closer spec-compliance and more in-depth parsing of author/category data that gofeed provides.

I intend on migrating my personal feed reader to use this once it’s done. I read feeds via my reader daily, and dogfooding will help me uncover bugs.

I made kimchi fried rice for the first time in many months and it was so delicious, I need to make it a regular meal again. Gut health FTW!

This week it was Charlotte’s turn to be sick; I think I must have given her my gross cold. She’s been very snotty, poor girl.

Tuesday was Heart-Shaped Food Day. I wasn’t feeling particularly great so I just made one of our regular easy weekday meals but cut all the vegetables and halloumi into little hearts.

On Wednesday we pulled back the carpet in the bedroom to make way for the wardrobe delivery. I think the floorboards under there are pretty nice! We might end up sanding and varnishing them instead of replacing the carpet 👀

Our bedroom is not our bedroom now, just for a week. Apparently, it’s gonna take four days to fit the wardrobes and I’m gonna have to give up on the office again for a week because of it.

I played Power Grid with my board game group for the first time in ages! I came second last but I forgot how fun a game it is 😊

On Friday we went to Gallal and Euan’s for some food and a few drinks. I really need to never have Dr Pepper again – it fucks me up big-time, luckily I only had one as my last drink.

Over the weekend we got the train down to Faversham where Charlotte’s mum was stage-crew in a pantomime. Pantomimes are as bad/good as I remember them (it’s been a long time).

I felt rotten all week. I should start with the obligatory “it’s not COVID”, but it was a pretty nasty cold. I still ended up working quite a lot because boredom crept up quickly and work took my mind off feeling shit. I probably should have just rested.

I felt just about well enough for our long weekend plans. We hired a car and just drove, only booking our first night’s stay and then seeing what happened. It was lovely. We did a lot of walking and eating, starting in the Peak District and ending up in Yorkshire near Harrogate.

After a ~3-hour drive and 1-hour train back home we had to quickly finish dismantling our IKEA wardrobes to make way for the painting and fitting happening over the next couple of weeks. I finally saw Gallal’s new flat, went for a couple of beers, and I’m exhausted.

Have a great week, everyone 👋

Earlier in the week we went out for drinks with Paula who works in HR at the FT. I managed to not make an idiot of myself in front of all the HR folks 👍 is this progress? I mostly stick to shandy nowadays which means I can drink at a normal pace and not embarrass myself, I like this new me.

To prep for the new wardrobes arriving we’re having to dismantle the old ones and have all our clothes and things in piles around the flat. It feels very messy. On a positive note, I reinstalled Olio and have been getting rid of loads of stuff we don’t need again. It’s such a great app!

The week was generally quiet because I didn’t want to get COVID (which has been spiking in the office). I miss office chats and my walks to and from after just a week

The weekend was amazing but also emotionally and physically exhausting! My sister and I went on a little road trip up to Melton Mowbray (incidentally where I was born) to visit our aunt Ginny. We haven’t seen her since my dad’s funeral (17 years ago!!) and we recently regained contact.

It was so lovely, not awkward in the slightest, and we just spent a solid couple of days chatting about everything. She has a very cute dog named Alfie ❤️ and she’s just very cool – she’s 80 now and still doing things like cycling the coast-to-coast route and paragliding on a whim while she’s on holiday. She’s also pleasantly progressive so I needn’t have worried about things like “what if she’s racist old tory?”.

Ginny also really helped fill in a bunch of family tree stuff. Everything later than 1920ish is more difficult because the census results aren’t public and chatting to living relatives is by far the easiest way to fill out more information!

Anyway, I’m exhausted but happy.

I turned 35 this week. I wasn’t feeling up to celebrating much so we ordered pizza and had a chilled evening. I haven’t really been feeling the January birthday for the last couple of years.

Charlotte baked me an excellent lemon and mascarpone swiss roll. It was perfect and I ate an awful lot of it.

My brother came over with my niece on short notice, it was a flying visit but it’s always lovely to see her. She turned one year old a couple of days before my birthday and is walking all over the place now. She likes dice a lot, maybe a future D&D player?

On Friday at work I joined in on our annual Goose Chase, rushing around London between St Pauls and Farringdon to find clues and complete missions, ending in a pub for drinks and food. Our team came first! It was amazing and well-organised, exactly the kind of fun I enjoy.

It’s been quite a busy week, but with the kind of weekend that feels super long – it’s what I needed for sure.

As promised to myself, I purchased 20 extra days of annual leave for this year. 50 days off is wild. I’m gonna focus on downtime in 2023 and a better work/life balance – I’m far more consistent and motivated in other aspects of my life when I do this. Just trying not to think of the many thousands of pounds that I’m shaving off my salary 😬

Drinks after work turned into cocktails on the way back to Whitechapel and a slight hangover. Lovely to keep meeting new people who live out east 🎉 it was a great choice to move to this area.

Over the weekend we got a train to Tring where we went to our first auction to see if there was any tat or furniture we wanted to buy. The tat was quite expensive! I think we might take a Friday off and try that auction instead another week. I didn’t buy anything but it was still fun.

We also visited The Natural History Museum at Tring which was super nostalgic for me. My dad took me and my sister there a lot as kids (we were animal-obsessed). One of my favourite facts, which I glossed over as a kid, is that the museum was built for Walter Rothschild as a 21st birthday gift so he could continue to store all the exotic animals that he hunted and killed. Rich people, eh?

Speaking of birthdays, I’m turning 35 this coming week. My early thirties have shot by worryingly fast. I don’t particularly want to do anything for it, probs gonna keep it nice and chilled.

Speaking of my dad, my sister and I have arranged to go and stay with our aunt Ginny (his sister) at the start of February. I’m both excited and a little nervous – I haven’t seen her since I was 16ish. Very glad to be reconnecting with dad’s side of the family though.

You know the only thing that makes spreadsheets more fun is using the Google Sheets API to push changes to them from other data sources. I’ve been doing that this week and it’s the kind of work I love.

Such a busy work week! With the recent CircleCI incident, my team decided to build some tooling to help us mitigate this kind of issue in future. The three of us engineers paired and mobbed all week and I’m impressed with how much we got done. I think we’ll be far more prepared for the next time one of our suppliers leaks a bunch of secrets (let’s face it, this is gonna happen again soon).

I hope throwing a bunch of engineers at a difficult problem becomes more of a pattern. It’s extremely fulfilling and motivating work.

Outside of work, it’s been quite a quiet week, just lots of watching The Circle, resting, and going on little evening walks.

We invented a new game. Every time we get to a junction I randomly assign a direction to one of my hands or my head. Charlotte picks one and we go in the assigned direction. It led to a not-particularly-coordinated wander around the streets of Whitechapel.

I’m on day 15 of being a vegetarian now. I was feeling weird about eating meat through December and I’m giving vegetarianism a go again. Too soon to call it permanent but, after a couple of weeks, there’s nothing I’m missing terribly.

On Friday we went to Chiswick where Jenn is house/dog-sitting. We chatted, drank champagne, and made experimental toasties all evening. It was lovely to hang out and Rowan even made an appearance – what a treat!

We stayed over and went on a nice long dog walk around Chiswick, across the river and back. Spaniels just have endless energy – we were a lot more tired than him. We diverted the walk home past the Taskmaster house, and Chris snuck a picture under the gate.

Coming back to work was tough enough without the LastPass and CircleCI security incidents. Following the Heroku one last year, I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s worth us maintaining a large website. Does anyone fancy moving back to print-only newspapers?

A man came over and gave us a quote for some built-in wardrobes. It’s expensive but did you know we could gain 40% more space than ordinary fitted wardrobes and twice as much as freestanding?

My mum and sister came over for lunch on Saturday. I haven’t seen Rebecca since before Christmas and it was lovely. I made a couple of different curries, onion bhajis, raita, and roti. It was all vegan and delicious.

I’ve been doing family tree stuff, and Rebecca has managed to get in touch with our aunt on Facebook. We haven’t seen her since we were teenagers and I’m excited to regain contact with my dad’s side of the family, which tailed off after he died. I might try and head to Australia this year – I have a lot of cousins out there who I’ve met 0–1 times.

We had our first zero-plans day and it was lovely, I enjoyed Christmas but I needed a proper rest.

The rest was short-lived though; on the 30th we went to Remi’s for their birthday drinks and on the 31st we went to a party down the road. Fun but exhausting.

We played “Roll for Cocktail” on NYE. I love a bit of organised fun! Nothing too horrible was generated, except the Apple Sourz, Baileys, and Lemonade which tasted alright but looked and felt like a sponge.

Today we went on a walk from Ockley to Leith Hill, it was beautiful and I’m full of endorphins from being out in the country.

Back to the grindstone this week. I’m set on buying the maximum extra holiday this year, 50 days sounds delightful.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I put up the shelves as a festive treat! We’re still not completely unpacked but this made a huge dent in the remaining boxes. It feels a lot homier in the living room now, and we’ll be putting all our pictures up ASAP.

I was just about well enough to stick to our Christmas plan. We headed up to an Airbnb outside Hull for Christmas with Charlotte’s family. Being on neutral ground was a great idea rather than descending on her Granny, and we had a lovely time.

I hired a car for the trip ages ago to avoid crossing any picket lines. I went for a small Fiat 500 but got upgraded to a very nice-to-drive Mercedes which drank a lot of diesel and made plenty of pollution, but I’m choosing to blame the rail bosses.

The Airbnb had a hot tub. I’m worried I won’t be able to enjoy Christmas without a hot tub in the future.

We drove down to visit my family on Boxing Day and spent most of the day at my Grandma’s. It was chaotic as one of my cousins turned up with small children. The highlight was hanging out with my nearly one-year-old niece, she’s so smiley and chilled and has just started walking around so kept toddling from person to person and clapping 💔🥺

I used the opportunity to ask my mum and grandma a load of questions so I can keep building my family tree. I’m finding it fascinating and hoping to be able to get in touch with my dad’s side in Australia.

The sickness continued through the whole week. I’m feeling more normal now but still producing a worrying amount of snot. I’m still a bit worn down and weak and not sure if I can be bothered to trek into the office.

This weekend I managed to cut the shelves that have been sitting in our living room down to size. I’ve been putting it off because it’s been ages since I did anything like this, which made it annoying how smooth and easy it was. We took them around to Euan and Gallal’s to use their jigsaw (and more ventilated space). I just need to wait for some more sociable hours to drill holes.

We tried a drink that we saw on TikTok. You top up a bottle of Corona with Amaretto and it tastes very much like Dr Pepper. It’s delicious, but also very deadly, especially after eating only a few slices of toast and recovering from illness.

It snowed! I dragged myself out of my sick bed for a 10-minute walk to Wapping Woods while it was still falling. It was magical, I can’t remember having this much snow settle in London. We met a very friendly chap who decided to chill with us for a while.

Sickness is good for catching up on TV. We watched all of Too Hot to Handle (same old cringe) and Wednesday (very Tim Burton).

We had our main company Christmas party on Tuesday. It was fun, it’s always a different vibe when there are hundreds of strangers from other parts of the business. I did some dancing. I managed not to embarrass myself – I was able to actually work the next day.

You can tell I’m well and truly in Christmas mode because we did a bottomless brunch on Friday at Polo Bar which was loads of fun. I also managed to not be too hungover. Is this luck or restraint?

On Saturday we had some friends over to watch Christmas films. Luke came over earlyish and we watched a couple of films before Jenn & Chris arrived. Then we managed three more. I feel very festive.

• Christmas Under Wraps was very compelling for a Hallmark Movie. A healthy dose of nepotism is the key plot point I think, but it also sticks to some key themes like “love interest is introduced wearing a check shirt”.

• Christmas With You is a new-for-2022 Netflix film. It strays slightly away from the royal themes of The Princess Switch et al, but not so far that we couldn’t predict everything that was gonna happen. Enjoyed it a lot. Freddy Prince Junior does well playing “older but still hot dad”.

• Falling for Christmas is the new Linsay Lohan film that everyone’s been talking about. I enjoyed it and will watch it again but maybe I set my expectations too high. It did make me laugh a few times. Lindsay Lohan’s face doesn’t really move a lot nowadays. I had a bit of a crush on her back in The Parent Trap days. It’s not weird, I was 10 years old.

• Angel Falls Christmas was probably the flop of the evening. Every good Christmas film has some magic in it, however, I don’t want that magic to be explained away with complex in-world lore. I want to be left guessing a little bit thanks.

• A Christmas Miracle for Daisy, Another Hallmark, was fairly average but maybe we didn’t do it justice because it was movie #5 and we were tired. The title does just say it all, over-specific, Hallmark is running out of name ideas.

I’m sick. It’s very annoying, I have a hot and scratchy throat and I’m exhausted. Probs gonna take a day or two off to recover. At least it doesn’t seem to be COVID.

Ooh, week 111 on the 11th.

This week’s been all about seeing people I haven’t seen in a while.

Maggie (who is one of my reports) was in London so we got to hang out in person a bit. Despite being fine with mostly remote you can’t beat getting together in the real world – gossiping is a lot more fun, it’s far easier to read people’s faces, and you can wander to get a coffee instead of staring at your screen some more.

On Thursday, after work, I met up with Scarlett and we went to a private view for her friend Hester. I love the use of light in her paintings!

We went for sushi and just had a generally lovely catchup. Living in rural Wales agrees with her a lot.

Charlotte’s gone to Finland to see our friend Andy, who moved there earlier this year. I have a tiny bit of FOMO but no more annual leave to take. I really need to buy the maximum amount next year.

I spent a stupid amount of time playing Minecraft on a new server with some friends. We’re playing with Create Mod 0.5 (seems like it might be a yearly thing), and it’s so much fun. If I know you IRL and you fancy playing then give me a shout!

I also hired a car on Sunday and drove up to visit my family. One of my favourite things is to not tell my grandma that I’m visiting: her happy surprise to see me is the biggest dopamine hit. I played with my niece a lot (just the smiliest baby) and caught up with my mum and brothers. What a lovely day.

I started Advent of Code and managed to beat last year’s score (I only managed 3 days because I was so tired/busy). I’ll probably lose interest but in the meantime, it’s a fun little distraction.

There was some heavy news this week relating to the trial I was going to be a witness for. Whacking it behind a content warning because… well.

Funnily enough, my motivation hasn’t been at an all-time high this week. I’ve been letting myself do very little in the evenings and doing kind of the bare minimum at work, soz friends/colleagues.

It meant I had time to finish watching Andor which is, by far, the best thing to come out of Lucasfilm since Rogue One. The Empire actually felt evil and tyrannical in a meaningful and occasionally gut-wrenching way, every performance was so on point, and I really enjoy anything set in the period between Episodes 3 and 4. Absolutely loved it.

Charlotte’s been quite ill this week so I’ve been playing nurse a bit. Eating’s making her feel sick and she’s having a generally horrible time. Send sympathy.

We had our Product & Tech party at work on Wednesday at Winter Wonderland. It was a fun time, which I wasn’t expecting given how my week’s been. It felt festive, I ate a lot of pretzels and definitely drank too much because I thought it was a good idea to follow people to another venue once it was done. It wasn’t a good idea.

I took Thursday off sick, which is very embarrassing. How old am I now?

On Saturday we went out to eat for Charlotte’s mum’s birthday and then on to a candlelit Einaudi tribute which was lovely and ticks off the culture box for this week.

I got a new phone. It’s purple, fast, and lasts for a whole day of use. I used to be the guy who got a new iPhone every time they launched and I’m quite pleased to be out of that phase, I had my previous one for years before upgrading.

Some potentially big news: I think maybe I have ADHD. Although I haven’t written about it before, it’s something I’ve been vaguely exploring for a while. I’m bad at time management, focusing on tasks I’m uninterested in, and a shitshow when it comes to coping with stress (inwardly at least). I zone in and out of conversations far too easily (sorry), and I feel restless if my brain isn’t doing something.

On the flip side, when I’m interested in a task I can really hyperfocus. I think maybe turning the hobby I was fixating on in my late teens (programming) into a job probably helped me not identify this for a long time because I’ve always been good at focusing on interesting programming problems.

I’m trying to work out whether I should talk to a medical professional rather than just label myself based on doing a bunch of online tests. Though I’m told this is enough for some. I’m kind of fine, but taking a step back and analysing my behaviour has made me think about whether I can (and should) do something to adjust the aspects that make my life more difficult.

Charlotte and I went to see some comedy at Backyard Comedy Club because it’s just down the road. It was cheap and fun! New act nights are always a bit mixed, but I’d go again.

Friday at work was Engine Room, the FT’s annual internal tech conference. It was such a good day, and always serves to remind me that I work with a lovely and talented bunch of people. Hopefully someone blogs about it publicly so I can share.

After Engine Room we went out for drinks which were particularly special because Keran was back in London from Canada. So great to see her again, and it’s always fun when someone senior puts a card behind the bar 👀

On Saturday Charlotte and I got the train up to York to spend a long weekend somewhere else. It’s a really beautiful city, I liked it a lot. We didn’t really gather up a lot of recommendations or make a plan but that made it feel quite chill.

• We did a lot of walking around. We got a bus down to Riccall and walked the Solar System Trail in reverse. The planets are pretty far apart. We got rained on a bit, dried off at our Airbnb, and then went for a near-perfect Sunday roast.

• We also walked around the city walls, did a bit of drinking and shopping, and ate a bit too much.

I started the week off well by coming second in Lords of Waterdeep. It’s a classic that my board game group play every now and then

I’ve done the inadvisable and started building a CMS for my website. I want to start doing some more interesting stuff with ActivityPub, beyond what a static site can do. I’d also like to implement Webmentions myself to better understand the spec.

I’m quite pleased with it so far. My mantra is “this is for me” every time I feel myself going down the rabbit hole of adding features that I don’t need. I’m going to try and keep it opinionated and tailored to my site.

On Thursday I spent the evening with my sister in Brighton. We caught up, got takeaway, and lounged in front of the TV. It was lovely.

On Friday I went to ffconf and it was wonderful, I had such a great time. All the talks were excellent, my standouts were a perfectly executed talk on capitalism and the web from Heydon and a brilliant explanation of why you should build your own website from Sophie (I’ll share videos once they’re available).

As well as the talks being great, it was also a delight to hang out with a large group of past and present FT folk, as well as say hi to some people I haven’t seen in 3+ years. Such a good time 😊 huge thanks to Remy and Julie for putting it all together.

We’ve been losing forks. We only own two forks and we have no real idea where they’ve all gone. At first, we thought someone was playing a hilarious joke on us, but it’s also possible that we’ve thrown a lot of them away accidentally in hangover takeaway boxes.

Anyway, over the weekend we treated ourselves to a new cutlery set. Maybe we can invite people over to eat now.

I’ve been thinking about moving from mastodon.social to a smaller instance for a while but just wasn’t sure where to move to. Well, I finally found somewhere and have switched to Hachyderm – an instance for professionals in the tech industry which seems like a nice community. I’m @rowan@hachyderm.io now.

Kara introduced me to an npm feature this week that I had absolutely no clue existed: the overrides property of package.json. My team was puzzling over how to trial switching out our logging library and how we might be able to easily experiment with the Express v5 beta, this is the answer to both!

We can add the following to any of our Express-based apps to just force them into the v5 beta without having to roll out beta versions of our Express wrapping software. Amazing 👏

{
    "overrides": {
        "express": "npm:express@5.0.0-beta.1"
    }
}

I think I’m very much a Mastodon convert now, and I’ve noticed my anxiety and stress levels have been lower after going cold turkey on Twitter. I decided that Twitter is just for broadcasting and ignoring, and all my actual social interactions will be on Mastodon which is so much more chill. Say hi if you’re on there.

I fully removed Twitter from my home screen, it took a little bit of effort not to return to doom-scrolling but I think the habit’s gone. I’ve also moved Twitter notifications into my scheduled summary.

If I automate posting my weeknotes there, then I maybe never have to go on that website again. 🤔

On Saturday we went to The Champagne Show and tried a stupid amount of champagne. We did this last year too) so I think it’s an annual tradition now.

Afterwards, we went to Oslo for their 2000’s bangers night. It was great, as always, but I really need to stop having 4 am bedtimes at the weekend 😩

I’ve been really enjoying watching Andor. I wasn’t such a huge fan of the earlier Star Wars series but this and Obi-Wan Kenobi really gripped me.

Concordia is a fun board game. We’ve played before but I got into it a lot more this time around. All the mechanics feel quite neat and polished.

I feel like I shipped a lot of code this week. We started rolling out a replacement for our fatal error handling, which will eventually allow us to burn down a haunted forest that I’ve had my eye on since the beginning of the year.

I’ve also been playing around with a new solution for logging. For historical reasons, we have three large and complicated logging libraries for FT.com. I think (thanks to writing a massive test suite) I’ve condensed all of these into a new very simple Pino-based alternative. I’m having fun!

On Saturday we went to a Halloween party, I kept it simple with an understated (and easy to remove) Number 10 Downing Street costume. It’s been a scary thing.

I broke out my craft supplies and spent ages constructing the letterbox, but then I ran out of steam and couldn’t be bothered to make a 3D doorknob.

The party was really fun, the Sunday afterwards was less fun.

We started watching Love is Blind season 3. I think it’s maybe getting a little over-produced and I’m not as attached to anyone as in the previous seasons. There are some disaster people and plenty of walking red flags.

I’m switching more of my online social stuff to Mastodon now that Musk owns Twitter. I don’t think it’s gonna be a nice place to be. It’s probs not been that nice for a long time and Mastodon seems quite chill and friendly. I’m @rowan@hachyderm.io.

It’s been a busy and very tiring week 😴 gonna keep this one short because I want to just go to bed tbh.

On Thursday we went to Immersive Gamebox to play Squid Game, it was fun. Far too easy to accidentally lean on the wall and push buttons though.

On Friday I recaptured some youth at my first gig since before Covid. We went to see Sum 41 at Ally Pally. It was a lot of fun! Though we all realised that we know about four songs of theirs.

We took a horrific packed and hungover train up to Birmingham for the weekend for James’ 40th birthday. It was so great seeing everyone and I perked up after a few drinks.

OK, I’m going to watch some Love is Blind in bed now, byee 👋

Work was quite intense this week but in kind of a good way. My team was pairing with our Platforms team for a lot of it, trying to better understand and stabilise one of our more errant APIs. It was a lot of fun but pairing is always exhausting.

We spent the weekend on The Isle of Wight, which was lovely. Charlotte’s brother is in Iraq for a year and we offered to drive his car down there where he’s parking it at his girlfriend’s (who’s showing us around) parents’ place. The journey was fun and I’d never taken a car on a ferry before.

It’s pretty down here, I’m enjoying the cold and rainy weather with a dramatic sea backdrop. On Saturday we went on a very windy and rainy walk to look at The Needles. We ended up in a pub for dinner which made it all worthwhile.

On Sunday we drove to Blackgang Chine (the UK’s oldest amusement park, it opened in 1843!?). It was very dated and very focused on kids, but we had a lot of fun. There are some really questionable animatronics, and I recommend it.

We stopped by a beach on the way home and went for a swim in the very cold sea. It was invigorating and the waves really knocked us about. A hot cup of tea has never tasted so good.

I’m looking forward to waking up here again on Monday, it’s going to be novel working for a day from somewhere out of the city. I might go and eat lunch on the beach if it’s not raining. Less looking forward to the very long Ferry and train journey later on.

Incidents come in waves and we seem to be at the peak of one 😬 “I really enjoy incidents” FFS Rowan don’t tempt fate like that again.

The end of the week was calmber; Alex and I had a couple of fun pairing sessions on Friday, building on Andy’s work to help us analyse our npm package usage. It’ll really help us to manage the rollout of new modules.

Eurovision is in Liverpool! Exciting, we booked a place to stay and very quickly entered into a dispute with the host. They seem to have not had their finger on the pulse of Eurovision news. They’re pushing us to cancel “because their lease runs out before the end of the year”, but interesting that:

1. Their place is still listed for the rest of 2023

2. Airbnb’s policy is that hosts cancel in this kind of scenario, but if they do that then they’re not allowed to relist for the same dates

3. All other accommodation in Liverpool is suddenly £10–15k a night 🤔

It was my mum’s 60th birthday over the weekend! My sister and I pushing for a party paid off, and we spent the evening with all of mum’s friends and family in a roundhouse in the woods. It was so lovely to meet people I’ve heard so much about and mum seemed to have a great time.

The only minor drama was us locking ourselves out of my grandma’s house. Luckily the bedroom window was open and Charlotte braved climbing a ladder through the window to let us back in.

Charlotte hates when we accidentally match outfits in any way, so obvs I try to make that happen. I really outdid myself with this one.

I spent a bit of time finally setting up chezmoi which is a really cool tool to manage dotfiles across multiple machines. I switch between two laptops depending on whether I’m at home or in the office and this will make it far easier to keep my setup consistent.

It took a little reading to get used to but it’s super intuitive to use, I wholeheartedly recommend it! Here’s my basic setup.

It feels like a super busy week, I haven’t really had time to stop and think!

On Tuesday I went into the office because The Edit team were having drinks and some of our South American engineers were in London. It was fun, and It was great to hang out with Alice in the pub for the first time in many years

I finished All That’s Left in the World and loved it, weirdly heartwarming for an apocalypse. I fancy some Sci-Fi so I’m gonna give Children of Time a go

On Thursday we had most of the team in the office, it was great! I’m worried that I ✨manifested✨ FT.com completely falling over. We had Justine on our team for the day to shadow because her apprenticeship requires some experience with issue triage and incidents. I joked in standup that “oh I hope something serious goes wrong while you’re here” and then it did an hour later

I really enjoy incidents

Over the weekend I went up to Leeds with Eric, Carlton, and Euan. We were visiting Scott who moved up there a few years ago. It was lovely to have the whole board game group in one place

Scott and Lowri’s cat is adorable. Just look at her angry little face 😭 I think I want a cat again

We played Terraforming Mars which is a group favourite and The Quacks of Quedlinburg is a lot of fun

On Saturday evening we went out in Leeds. We ended up in a questionable bar but 6 Apple Sourz for £9 is a great deal

It’s week 100! I’m into triple figures. I should probably start working out if I’m gonna do anything special for week 137.

I’m sure you’re bored of hearing it, but going back to work after a holiday is pretty easy when you enjoy your job :intolerably-smug-face:

I was reminded by Emma’s weeknotes that I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once while away, I agree it was incredible, I enjoyed every moment of it. It’s also nice learning which friends you can watch things with – I’m a “silence while I’m watching a film” person and I think I’ve surrounded myself with like-minded people.

I got most of the way through reading All That’s Left in the World which was recommended based on Heartstopper. It’s been a pretty quick read so far and it’s just quite sweet – it’s given me the feels a few times. I’m enjoying the switching perspectives between the two protagonists.

Luke had some early birthday drinks which were fun. Charlotte isn’t drinking for October and her sobriety seems to have rubbed off – I felt like I hadn’t really been drinking and had zero hangover 🎉

I spent Sunday playing Minecraft pretty much all day. We started with a fun game of bingo using Bingosync, and then a few of us started a Skyblock server later in the day and spent many hours labouriously mining cobblestone. It was fun and relaxing.

I’ve also managed to really keep up staying on top of my open source projects recently. Since pruning a few and tackling a mountain of Dependabot PRs, doing basic maintenance like this has just slotted nicely into my week. I think I can call it a success after 30 weeks right? I’ve merged or closed ~1,500 Dependabot PRs on my projects in that time 😳

My team messed up slightly at work; we made a change which resulted in none of the FT.com teams being able to deploy for the best part of a day. It’s important to normalise that this kind of thing happens and paint your fuck-ups as an opportunity to learn (especially when you’re a team of pretty senior engineers). I very quickly wrote a post which explained what we did and our thought process, it was fun! I need to blog at work more.

I finally got smart meters fitted in my flat. Boring subject, but it’s been nearly a year of trying to make this happen. I can’t believe I never have to go and top up a pre-pay meter in a shop again, luxury.

I’m back from Wales, we extended the trip by a few days when we got an extra Bank Holiday. The extra few days out of London meant that we never got to witness The Queue.

Overall we walked about 50 miles across the Welsh countryside. A lot of footpaths were either ploughed, planted over, or guarded by angry farm dogs.

When you walk that much obviously you need to soak in the hot tub a lot too. It’s important to rest your muscles, you know?

Adam found a severed porcelain doll’s head on a bonfire by the farm. He named her Liz and she’s definitely cursed. We’re probably all cursed now.

starryai is quite good at generating haunted doll content.

We always over-order food when we go away with a large group of friends. On the last full day, we played Roll for Sandwich and managed to use up a lot of food in very weird sandwich combinations

The 8-hour trip home (broken cables on the line between Reading and Paddington) meant there wasn’t really a nice gap between holiday and work. Let’s see how this week goes!

My flat hasn’t flooded, which is great.

We started the week with a new prime minister. Hooray. It’s interesting to work for a newspaper when this stuff happens because we get a lot more traffic and we’re all slightly more on-edge in case the website falls over.

Later in the week, the queen died. It’s interesting to work for a newspaper when this stuff happens because we get a lot more traffic and we’re all slightly more on-edge in case the website falls over.

I don’t feel particularly impacted by the news. It’ll be slightly odd, because she’s been a feature of British society for so long, but also abolish the monarchy.

The flat above ours started leaking water through the kitchen and bathroom ceilings 😬 on the plus side I met my upstairs neighbour finally.

Mara was in town and hosted some birthday drinks near our flat, so we went along and drank a bit much for a weekday.

I’ve been playing with starryai, it’s weirdly addictive to generate images when a prompt comes up in conversation. Here’s “a girl named Charlotte but instead of a brain there’s a dark void”.

We’re away on holiday in Wales for a week now. We rented a ridiculously huge farmhouse with a bunch of friends.

• We have two hot tubs, and I’m going to go and sit in one with a beer immediately after publishing this weeknote.

• Waterbeds are weird and sloshy.

• We’re doing some nice communal cooking, cosy fires, and long walks.

• Today we walked 8.5 miles to the nearest McDonald’s.

• This is the moon over the fields behind the farmhouse, it’s pretty out here.

  

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 😊

What a ridiculously busy week. I’m exhausted and really needed the extra day off this weekend.

At the end of Sunday last week, we went to the Walter Sickert exhibition at the Tate Britain, which we never managed to visit when we basically lived next door. It felt nice to do something cultural.

I spent many a spare moment reading The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which is a really gripping time loop story. I enjoyed it immensely! I’m not sure what to read next but glad to be back in the habit.

On Monday, after work, we went to Mo & Alice’s wedding. It’s our sixth and final wedding of the year so I can finally retire my smart clothes for a while. It was a fun time, and we didn’t go too hard because of work the next day.

On Tuesday I was in the office. It was my only free evening of the week so I spent it at home starting to rewrite Yeehaw to use Slack’s newer Bolt SDK. I also refactored a lot to tidy things up and it’s much more clear how it all works now. I also got it deployed to Render as I’m slowly migrating away from Heroku.

I got an out-of-hours call around 00:30 on Wednesday, which I took because I was still awake. It wasn’t anything too serious but I didn’t sleep properly until after 02:00 😬

On Wednesday evening we went to Phantom Peak with a group of friends. It’s an “immersive open world adventure” and it surprised me how fun and engaging it was. The cast was great, and I shook my general embarrassment at all the acting pretty quickly. We managed to complete six of the different adventures, taking it at quite a chill pace. I’d go back!

On Thursday I went into the office again, this time mostly for a team lunch. It was the first time we had all five of us in one physical location and it was really nice to hang out. We expensed lunch and spent a couple of long meetings talking about the future direction of the team. I’m having a great time at work lately 🙂

After work, I played online board games with my group. We played a new game, The Guild of Merchant Explorers, which is excellent (maybe I mostly enjoyed it because I won by a clear margin which is always fun when you play in such a competitive group).

On Friday it was time for a bottomless brunch. We went to a new pizza and prosecco place, as our regular place in Angel has closed down. I’m mostly sad because the same group has been going there for years now, bottomless brunch will probably never be quite the same without Stef.

On Saturday we met Luke for lunch and then we all headed up to King’s Cross to hang out with Gallal and a few other friends. Gallal managed to convince us to go to a club night at KOKO. I’m not sure if I’m built for this anymore.

Sunday was a bit of a write-off, but we binged the first season of Never Have I Ever which is quite chilled and heartwarming. The biggest surprise hit is maybe John McEnroe as a narrator (!?) it made me laugh a lot.

The end of last weekend was a lot of fun, we spent it at Highley Manor for JPD and David’s wedding. The service was lovely and the party afterwards was great. I didn’t stick to my “no Jägerbombs” rule but I did spend an hour or two only drinking water so swings and roundabouts. You couldn’t ask for better weather unless you’re wearing a tweed suit in which case a few degrees cooler would have been nice.

I met my board game group in person for the first time in ages, I missed the last one due to a trial that never happened. It was lovely, I’ve been playing board games with this group for ~6 years and we went mostly virtual when Scott moved up north. We chat a lot more about life when we play in person and it’s nice to be reminded why our group works.

The standout game was Long Shot, which is a dice-based horse racing/betting game and it’s loads of fun. It has some elements of Camel Up but with some more interesting mechanics to give different horses advantages and mess around with your opponents.

Bucky made an appearance, he’s decided that he likes me now (last time I saw him he was really unsure and did a lot of barking).

We finally finished painting the living room! (apart from a few edges that need tidying up). The fourth wall is a kind of beige cream and we’re gonna put together a gallery wall. Moving all of our pictures from the spare room finally will free up a lot of space and also make the living room feel a lot cosier.

My shelves also finally arrived, I need to borrow a wood plane as they’re a little too snug, but I’m excited to also finally have space for all our books.

In nerd news, I spent some time overhauling the build process for this website because it was really slow. I originally wrote it all in this weeknote but decided to move it to my first blog post of 2022 instead: Halving my GitHub Pages Build Time. It covers a few GitHub Actions optimisations and an intro to the new GitHub Pages Custom Actions beta.

At work on Friday, my team spent our mobbing session getting familiar with OpenTelemetry and wow it’s incredible. We mostly played with setting up traces for one of our apps to see how useful it could be for debugging issues across our apps and we’re all now very excited about it. I’m looking forward to working with our Edge Delivery & Observability team on getting this rolled out properly 🎉

As predicted, the trial has been cancelled again, I’m getting very good at reliving past trauma for a couple of months and then immediately pushing it back down again. Healthy. I’ve been asked to provide a list of all the dates I can’t make for the next 12 months which bodes well for it being rescheduled any time soon. Once again it was moved because the defendant fell very conveniently ill. Shall we talk about something less depressing?

We’ve been watching The Sandman on Netflix, it’s been really great so far (we’re two episodes from the end). It’s one of my favourite series of graphic novels and I’m so glad Neil Gaiman developed the series because it’s really true to the books without feeling stale.

I finished reading the first and second books in The Book of Dust trilogy and now I’m remembering what it’s like to have to wait for a book to be written and released. Scarlett very kindly posted me a few books she thinks I’ll enjoy so I’ll likely pick one of those up next or start Tender Is the Flesh or All That’s Left in the World which made it onto my list a while ago. I’m enjoying the escapism a lot, this is more than I’ve read in years.

On Friday we went to a pub for Charlotte’s brother’s 30th. It was a lot of fun, but we stayed out until almost 6 am, oops. At least we got to see the sunrise, here’s Deptford Bridge at 5:30 am after we’d walked there from Peckham 😅

We’re off to our fifth wedding of the year today, JPD and David! It’ll be lovely, and it’s our first wedding where there’s a large array of friends also in attendance. Charlotte thinks I’m an idiot for attempting to wear a tweed jacket in 32-degree heat but what can I say, I’m a slave to fashion. I’m gonna try and ban myself from Jägerbombs.

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.

I’ve been reading a lot this week. “A lot” for me is “any reading at all”, I picked up The Invisible Man because it was free and I knew I liked The War of the Worlds. I’ve since moved on to The Book of Dust and am very close to the end of book 1, I’m enjoying being in Philip Pullman’s world again. It’s been a really nice change of pace away from just binging TV and I hope I can sustain it. A lot’s been released since I last had a big fiction stint.

In non-fiction, Alice started a book club at work and I have read the first two chapters of The Pragmatic Programmer (20th Anniversary Edition). I’m enjoying it a lot so far and I’m starting to make notes in the margins for things I want to come back to which feels way more organised than I’ve ever been with a programming book.

Andy joined my team at work which brings us up to three permanent senior engineers. It feels like we suddenly have so much more scope to improve the reliability of FT.com. Andy’s been here for years and previously lead our Platforms team so he’s got a lot of useful knowledge/experience 💪

Outside of work I’ve found myself with a bit of spare time and a willingness to learn something new. The Pragmatic Programmer advises engineers to “learn at least one new language every year”. I disagree with this on quite a few levels, however, it was exactly what I fancied so I’ve been working my way through The Rust Book. It’s been a lot of fun! I can understand some of the hype and the guide is very well put together, I probably need a small project to learn some more practical stuff but that can come later.

What’s up with everyone being born in July eh 👀? We had pizza to celebrate Kara’s birthday and then a picnic in Victoria park for Gallal’s. Sainsbury’s had stopped stocking hard seltzers so I fell back to Kalimotxo Blondes which makes for a fun time. Surprisingly not suffering much?

I’ve seen a mouse in our flat twice. It runs under the fridge. Not impressed. I’m giving humane traps another go but I don’t have high hopes, the peanut butter remains untouched but it’s early days.

I’m a bit hungover and my heart really isn’t in writing these, so it’s a bit matter-of-fact. 91 straight weeks in I’m unable to even consider skipping weeknotes.

We spent the week being relatively quiet/careful ahead of the next wedding. Still a lot of COVID out there 😬

Also, it’s just been too hot to do anything. Our flat is doing OK but going into the office on Tuesday was a treat – the aircon was delightful. We went in because it was Chris’ birthday and ate unlimited pizza for lunch.

On Thursday we had an unexpected visitor, Ashley was down from Birmingham and needed a place to crash for the night. It was a lovely surprise.

On Friday I took the day off work so we could travel up to Leigh-Ann and Andy’s wedding. We arrived at the really weird Airbnb we’d booked, the owner has made an awful lot of built-in pine furniture and it’s… quirky. There’s a hot tub though, which is a MUST when we’re travelling with Jenn and Chris.

The wedding was lovely, the vows were sweet and heartwarming and we got placed on the “southern” table with Andy’s friends (who were all a lot of fun). I only had four Jägerbombs, I had a tequila and a chat with the father of the bride about how great Leigh-Ann is, and worked off a bit of the booze with some questionable dancing. I’m claiming full credit for reviving the dance floor by requesting Torn by Natalie Imbruglia after the DJ lost his way a bit.

Now we’re alternating between eating and hot tub, I might have some champagne to take the edge off.

Wow, what a busy week.

We finally painted two more walls in our living room after a long hiatus! I love the colour and it means we can finally put up pictures, shelves, and unpack our books. I bought some beautiful reproduction brass brackets and I’m just waiting for the actual wood to arrive.

We’re gonna have so much space when we can finally unload these boxes, I’m very excited about it all after a bit of a break from doing house stuff.

We also changed our minds about the colours for the bedroom, thinking kind of rust and blue will be nice (the bed is already navy). I just need to damp-seal around the windows while it’s nice and dry and then we can finish painting.

I had my mid-year review at work. People were very nice about me and I’m doing a good job which is nice to hear. I’d be unpleasantly surprised if I wasn’t doing well tbh because I have so much less responsibility this year. I feel like I have the space and energy to focus on doing impactful things well, and that makes me feel good.

We went to a nearby pub for a low-key celebration of Gallal and Kim getting married ❤️ it was lovely. We had honey tequila.

Later in the week I finally went to Al Kahf, an East African restaurant nearby. Gallal and Kim had already been and it’s been on my list of places to go for ages, we got a huge rice and meat platter and it was delicious.

Charlotte and I visited Dopamine Land which was fun! Some particularly nice light and sound installations, and we went relatively early in the evening so we didn’t have to share many of the rooms with strangers. The staff felt slightly too chirpy and I’m unsure whether they a) like their jobs, b) have been told to be like that, or c) have unnaturally high dopamine levels from hanging around all the installations.

We went out in Soho with Charlotte’s mum, it was less horribly busy than I remember. We had dinner in Hawksmoor and then on to Shitfaced Shakespeare at Leicester Square Theatre (a Christmas present).

Off on a walk in the country now, which might just turn into a pub trip depending on how hot it is 👋

Feeling like we’re very much back to reality over the past week. It’s not horrible really, I’m still enjoying work a lot and am feeling pretty productive already. I haven’t forgotten how to code 🎉

It was the FT Product & Tech Department’s annual rounders tournament in Regents Park. I normally spectate, this year was no different, sitting in the sun and chatting is more my speed. It was so great seeing so many people and meeting some of my newer colleagues in person! Arjun and I found a secret Jägerbomb bar in the trees nearby and a good crowd ended up going for drinks afterwards in Camden. I love rounders day ❤️

We went for a meal for Charlotte’s dad’s birthday. She carried on the tradition of making him a giant-sized snack with an excellent (and challenging to carry) giant Curly Wurly.

Charlotte was off on a weekend hen do from Friday so I was by myself for a bit. I went to the cinema to see Thor: Love and Thunder. It was fun, though some classic Disney/Marvel queerbaiting led me to expect it to be a bit more gay, which is a shame but probably all on me for falling for it again.

On Sunday I went to my uncle’s house to see a bunch of extended family and for a couple of birthdays (including my grandma’s). We had a great veggie barbeque, played some table tennis, and enjoyed the countryside (they’re renting an amazing farm building between houses and it’s beautiful).

I also got to meet my niece for the second time. She’s ~6 months old and hung around smiling at people for an entire afternoon without crying once. Very chill baby, I’m a big fan. I need to make more effort to visit now that we’re back from a month off.

Here’s a photo of my grandma with her favourite grandchild (me) saying hello to some little horses.

We’re back in the UK! Jet lag was no joke despite managing to stay awake for more than 30 hours. Flying really messes with my sinuses nowadays and I have an ear infection which might be related. Fun!

Our final days in Costa Rica were lovely. We went sea kayaking to a secluded beach, I’m very unfit but it was fun. We passed a lot of Manta Rays who were just chilling and we had a little swim.

Our last full day was Tammy’s 30th birthday and we went pretty hard. The weather was the most perfect we’d had for the whole trip and we ended the day by heading to the beach to see maybe the most incredible sunset I’ve ever seen. It felt kind of unreal with the rainbow on the opposite side of the beach. We went for a little swim and I’m struggling to remember another time I felt so relaxed and happy.

After one night in our own bed, we headed off to Kent for Perry and Emma’s wedding. It was a perfect day both in weather and company, it was lovely to see a few friends I haven’t caught up with in years and a joy to see the couple so happy after several years of waiting/rescheduling.

Congrats again you two ❤️

A wedding face paint / glitter station is a great idea, especially after a Jägerbomb or two has made you forget what a pain in the ass it is to remove it all.

I’m back to work properly this week, let’s see how my mind and body cope with that! I’m maybe optimistic.

I’m full of beans, both figuratively and literally. I’ve had at least one bean-based dish every day for nearly two weeks and I don’t intend on stopping when I get home.

Gallo Pinto for every meal please. Pico de Gallo is always delicious, and every single avocado is perfectly ripe. I’m going to miss Patacones quite a lot.

We travelled loads over the last week, staying in each place for a couple of nights. Monteverde has been my favourite, it’s a little cooler and the scenery is beautiful.

I threw myself down some rapids in a rubber ring which was super fun. I also threw myself off a small cage in the sky with a rope attached to my feet which was incredible. It’s actually quite difficult to force yourself to step out into nothing, you can hear me say “oh my god, I can’t” just before I drop 😂

We did a lot of rainforest walking, most of the trails outside of reservations have been closed by the government so it was all pretty well paved but still exciting. We saw some agouti, monkeys, tiny tree frogs, plenty of hummingbirds, and many many insects.

I managed to order pancake shots but only with an accompanying drawing. They were pretty good!

A nice American woman gave us a lift while we were walking into town one day, and a nice Canadian man lent us some cash when we’d run out, so I paid it forward by giving lots of cash to a couple from the UK because their card wasn’t working. They paid me back once they had WiFi, yay for nice people.

I’m really really trying to avoid the news, at least until we fly back, but it’s impossible. What an absolute shit-show, I’m thinking a lot about my US-based friends 😔

In more positive news I love to see some industrial action ✊ also love to see the Tories lose two by-elections.

After nearly a month off work I’m actually quite looking forward to going back. I feel energised 🤓

I lied, I’m absolutely gonna try and write weeknotes via VS Code in my mobile browser. Apologies in advance for any typos.

Costa Rica is beautiful. We stayed in Liberia for a few nights and then moved to a small resort near Rincón de la Vieja volcano. We’re off to La Fortuna for a few days next.

The mornings are super hot and sunny and there’s heavy rain and thunder in the afternoon. We’ve been soaked through a few times.

Ziplining was a lot of fun, cocktails sat in hot springs was lovely, and all the food we’ve eaten is amazing.

Hummingbirds and geckos are everywhere here, we managed to not get bitten by bullet ants or the many other interesting-looking bugs. Cicadas are ridiculously noisy.

Everyone is very friendly and willing to put up with how little Spanish we all know. Pura Vida!

I’m back in London for a few days, feeling very relaxed. Actually looking forward to working for a couple of days, but not looking forward to mountains of Slack messages and emails to sort through.

We got back in time for Tammy’s birthday drinks, which got a little messy. Her mum (a Masterchef finalist) made food which was amazing.

We finished watching The Ultimatum. Wild. The reunion could have been a little spicier but you can’t have it all eh?

On Wednesday we’re flying to Costa Rica for June holiday #2. I’m really excited, we’re doing a little less lounging for this one and staying in 5 different places over the two weeks, I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun. We’re going with Tammy and Alison and it’s both Charlotte and Tammy’s birthdays while we’re out there 🎉

Adam, who’s back in London, is gonna stay in our flat for the weeks we’re away. His being in London and needing a place to stay while we’re away is very serendipitous.

I’m not gonna take a laptop this time and so it’s unlikely I’ll bother trying to publish weeknotes from my phone.

I’m gonna relax so hard. Byee 👋

We escaped all the bootlicking in London and flew to Turkey for a week with a few friends. We’re staying in an all-inclusive (my first time) and I’m a big fan.

I’m eating and drinking too much. I’m trying to balance this with a lot of swims in the sea and pool.

The various shows they put on for entertainment are very cringe.

We walked ~10km in 26° heat to a waterfall nearby, it was pretty.

We tried the late-night “club” in the resort. It was just four of us and a polish couple for the full two hours it was open.

I’ve heard despacito many many times and think I know the pool playlist now (mostly beachy or reggae covers).

I wear shorts and linen shirts now, it’s my summer look.

I had quite a quiet week because I didn’t want to get COVID before a stag do and holiday, this meant we caught up on a lot of TV.

• We started watching The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, which is by the same production company as Love is Blind. It’s even wilder, maybe it’s too much even for me and I feel a bit sad watching all these dysfunctional relationships where obviously they should just break up

• We also binged all of The Circle (Season 4 on Netflix, still prefer the UK one). It was pretty good and had the right level of drama. Also (not a spoiler) they got two Spice Girls to go on it!?

• I watched the first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi which has gripped me more than a lot of the other Star Wars series so far. Maybe it’s being more invested in the character from the outset? I’m excited to fill in some more of the gap between the prequel and original trilogies.

The big thing this week was going on Perry’s stag do, which was a lot of fun. We travelled up to Loch Tay in the highlands and it was beautiful.

• It was so nice to see Perry (who I haven’t seen since god knows when), catch up with Andrew and Linus, and meet a few of his other friends. We drove from Edinburgh via Aberfeldy Distillery which was a lot of fun.

• We drank a lot. I was somehow still coherent on Friday after 5 beers, ~150ml of whisky, 2 Jägerbombs, and 4 double vodka-irn-brus 😬 maybe it’s time to have a break? Oh, wait, I’m at an all-inclusive next week 😬

• Zero hangover which was incredible. We did a lot of stag activities. I absolutely suck at log throwing, no upper body strength (or lower body strength let’s be honest).

• I’m actually alright at Zorb football, but I think I was helped by wearing very grippy walking boots vs a lot of people wearing trainers. Zorb football is ridiculously fun, but I ache in places I didn’t know I had.

  

• I’m average at airsoft, but we did win capture the flag against another stag party. It was still fun though, but I ache from crouching in bushes.

• I’m even more excited about the wedding now that I know a few more people.

• Scotland is beautiful, the highlands are beautiful, I remember this every time I go and I want to move there when I’m bored of city life.

Perry is an excellent front end engineer who’s looking for a job btw 👀

I had my first self-made fresh ground coffee since buying a grinder. I could tell the difference! It was delicious and I’m a convert.

What a week. We’re dealing with an ongoing incident at work and a fair few engineers (including me) have mobilised to fix some things. It’s been non-stop. I’m managing to be mostly quite chill about it, but the stress did get to me a little by the end of the week.

What I’m loving is working towards a common goal with a bunch of excellent engineers who I don’t often get to work with. The FT hires and retains some wonderful and talented people and there’s nothing like an incident to remind me of this fact.

I got to scrape some data and build a spreadsheet from it, which is very much in my wheelhouse. I learned about Filter Views in Google Sheets. Wow. Game changer.

We went to Kara’s for dinner one evening in the week, she made delicious puttanesca (I think this is the recipe - will be making it), we chatted a lot, played some Exploding Kittens (I was ganged up on) and then we beat Pandemic: Rising Tide as a team. It was a particularly lovely evening ❤️

We were also graced by the presence of Kettricken who is an incredibly shy and very cute cat. Look at her little face.

Charlotte and I are away for a lot of June and we needed to do some holiday shopping. For some reason, we braved Oxford Street (I guess it beats Westfield or Canary Wharf). We did manage to get a lot of stuff, I bought some shorts which coincidentally perfectly match my shoes and I feel like a budget Glynn.

I think maybe I’m getting hayfever which is weird. I’ve never had it before. Do a dry tickly throat and slightly congested sinuses sound like hayfever?

Alex W has COVID which is notable not just because it’s sad that he missed a party, but also because Co – Star specifically told me to avoid him. Maybe there’s something to this horoscope bullshit after all 👀

We finished the week with a fun party for Jenn’s birthday. I had an incredible vegan Korean burger made with battered and deep-fried hen of the woods mushrooms. I drank pretty good margaritas, espresso martinis, and piña coladas.

The people were nice, the dancing was fun, and the hour-long walk home was sobering and I maybe feel kinda fine this morning? I’m still gonna eat a lot of takeaway.

My week started suddenly and unexpectedly at 4 am on Monday when I got an out-of-hours call because the FT home page was down. I’ve been on the rota for ages and this was my first time being called. It was weirdly quite fun, but it has absolutely ruined my sleep for the week because I took some accidental early evening naps.

I’m feeling quite comfortable and confident jumping on incidents now that I’ve been working back in the code for several months. My calming mantra is “nobody dies if you mess up and take FT.com down”.

On Thursday I did a small amount of public speaking. Yep, I still mostly hate it and feel like my entire body and voice are shaking.

It was Zuzanna’s birthday on Friday so we went round and drank a pretty sensible amount (aside from one or two vodkas, Na Zdrowie!).

The big news this week is obviously Eurovision. What the hell happened!? I don’t think I’ve ever seen the UK actually do well, Ukraine had to win (👏) but second is pretty great.

We dug out the European flag bunting and hosted a few people using our standard format. We had food from 17 countries and booze from 15 (always delivered while the country is performing). I love how hectic it gets and everyone was merry, but not too merry, by the end.

I was vaguely representing Germany wearing yellow, red, and black. Lederhosen Wario is a fairly accurate description, thanks, Alex. I’m enjoying the accidental renaissance.

I’m sitting in bed feeling really smug that:

1. I have no hangover despite spending the evening creating a dirty pint inside my 34-year-old body.

2. I did most of the cleaning up at 2 am after everyone had left.

I read this really excellent article on error handling in Node.js.

OK time to get up and eat a breakfast of bratwurst, pierogi, hummus, and Spanish omelette, doused in IKEA meatball sauce.

Work was fun this week. I got Reliability Kit, a new project I’m working on, to the point where we’re ready to start building and releasing packages. Release Please is just so magical. This is my first time building and working on a monorepo and it feels great learning a load of new stuff every day. I find myself reading a lot more and actually caring about what’s going on in tech.

I set all our test coverage requirements to 100% 👀 I read this great article on the benefits of 100% coverage last year and it makes so much sense to me. I think adding this requirement is way harder the longer a project goes on, so let’s whack it in at the start.

I’ve been playing around with WorldEdit in Minecraft, designing some large terrain pieces which I want to build on our multiplayer server. I’m getting that itch again which means I’ll probably spend half of my evenings playing again.

I finally perfected my Wordle guess distribution. What a nice curve, eh?

On Friday we went for some drinks with Jenn for her birthday, it was a nice time! We played Pin the Hard Seltzer on the Jennifer and ate pizza, it was lovely.

On the tube home, Gallal, Charlotte and I accidentally drank a bottle of wine between us which tipped us into “make bad decisions” mode. We stayed up drinking and chatting until 4:30 am 🤦

On Saturday we needed something gentle to watch and binge-watched all of Heartstopper. I loved it! It’s really heartwarming and sweet, and a pretty low-on-trauma celebration of young queer romance. I think I need to buy the graphic novels. hard recommend.

On the opposite side of my media consumption, I’m off to the cinema now to watch Doctor Strange before someone spoils it for me.

This week has been jam-packed, strap yourselves in for a few words.

First, let’s celebrate some success. I came second out of five in My City, a legacy game which my board game group has been playing for pretty much an entire year. I’m pretty pleased because I’m probably the least competitive person in this group. Well done me, eh? 🥈

I’ve been migrating all of my Node.js side projects to use Conventional Commits and publish releases via Release Please. This is honestly a bit life-changing – it removes a lot of overhead of managing ~20 different libraries.

At the same time, my team at work have finally started writing the boilerplate for a new suite of tools we’re going to publish. It’s hopefully going to make error handling and monitoring our many systems a much easier task. I’m having such a great time.

I’m gonna talk about my role at work properly because I’ve finally made a decision and I’m feeling good about it. Way back at the end of last year I told my boss I wanted to demote myself from Principal Engineer back to being a Senior. I was feeling super burned out (mostly personal stuff really - the trial, Tootsie, the impact of the pandemic) and wanted to be back in my comfort zone which is definitely contributing more directly to the code.

Anna kindly counter-proposed that I embed directly in one of our teams (which really needed an engineer anyway) on a trial basis. I’ve been essentially doing the work of a Senior 2 for quite a few months now, dropping all my principal responsibilities apart from a few related to line management. After a good trial period, I’m just a noticeably happier person, as quite a few people have commented. This week I decided to pull the plug and, pending some reshuffling of job roles, I’ll step down officially soonish.

Despite a fair amount of my reasoning being personal, there are some changes afoot relating to the Principal role in my broader team which are great. I’m pleased to see that efforts are being made to allow Principals to focus more on strategic tech work. I guess I’m not ruling out ever applying for a Principal role again, but this is right for me at the moment (especially considering the rescheduled trial is now looming 😬).

One or two friends questioned why I didn’t just leave the FT. Honestly, it’s really great here, we’re treated very well (as evidenced by how chill and kind my manager has been about my step down), and I like all my colleagues too much.

Speaking of lovely colleagues, I saw a lot of them this week as I ramp up my office visits. I think I’m finding a 2/3 day split in favour of working at home is actually really good for me.

On Friday I went to a club for the first time in who knows how long. Is it inadvisable still? Probably. Did I have the best time? Yes absolutely. We went to Oslo’s 2000s Bangers night and I danced and sang for several solid hours. I love a 2000s banger. Still covid-free based on a few tests, but I’m hoping I’m still pretty safe based on how recently I had it.

On Saturday we met up with Luke to get Zabardast which is one of the places I definitely miss from living in Waterloo. We sat outside in the sun and looked at how much his flat has changed since we were there last. We got home nice and early and made a Rhubarb crumble tart.

We took the tart with us to visit Charlotte’s grandparents on Sunday and had a lovely time. We haven’t seen them at all over the course of the pandemic and it was great to catch up. We went for a short walk through some bluebell-filled woods, got fed well, and were complimented on our baking.

We binged Bridgerton season 2 over two evenings this week. I loved it, not quite as much as S1, but pretty close.

The office was heaving on Thursday due to there being large presentations from a few different groups as well as drag bingo in the evening. There was a tab at a nearby pub, I got carried away, prosecco makes for a very happy drunk me. Note to self: just because alcohol is freely available, you don’t have to keep drinking it.

We travelled to Brighton on Friday for a wedding. We made the most of it by spending the majority of the weekend down there.

It’s my sister’s birthday soon and so we went for dinner with her and her partner on Friday. We went back to their place afterwards to meet their cat, Wilma, who has three legs and is ~15 (!!!) years old. Wilma is very sweet. I miss having a cat.

Ben and Jess’s wedding was beautiful, the sun shone and the service was held outside under an apple tree and officiated by our friend Jake. I’ve never been plied with quite as much food and entertainment at a wedding, but still managed to stick with most of the dances at the after-dinner ceilidh. I know Ben and Jess through D&D – I was introduced to new people as “The Dungeon Master” many times.

Congratulations Ben (who I now know reads these 😅) and Jess!

I’m really in the mood to run D&D again, logistics are so hard with people living all over the country! Online just isn’t quite the same.

I texted Alice while on the way down to Brighton on the off chance that she was free. She was! We popped round for lunch on Sunday and had a good catch up, eyed her garden enviously, and met her cute and very shy kids.

There was a brutal murder during our visit, which somehow none of us witnessed! I’m hoping Alice shares the photo (that she immediately took) of a mysteriously severed goldfish head which appeared next to the pond.

Lovely weekend overall!

Here’s Charlotte and I looking cute as heck:

Charlotte got back from her trip on Monday and we spent a couple of days together early in the week before she was off to visit her granny. It’s nice to spend time apart but I’m being a little needy.

It’s definitely shorts weather now. It’s lovely, I feel so happy.

The sun normally really reduces my scalp psoriasis, but it’s already been flaring so much less since I started trialling a less stressful role at work.

I went into the office for part of Wednesday because Jake is leaving the FT and was having some leaving drinks. I got a little carried away, and I lost count of how many Jägerbomb Arjun and I had at the bar.

We got chatting to some lawyers who work nearby, I’m unsure what we spoke about but I found a business card in my pocket the next morning 🤷

Once the pub closed, Chee and I went for a nice sobering-up walk down to London Bridge and talked a lot, which was nice. We wandered around for a good couple of hours before I realised I should really go to bed and got a taxi home.

Thursday wasn’t good but could have been much worse. I made my 9:30 standup which is heroic even when I’m feeling 100% tbh.

It’s wild garlic time again. I’ve eaten quite a lot, and picking up food that’s just growing outside will never stop feeling wholesome.

We went away for the first half of the bank holiday weekend with a couple of friends and their dog. We stayed in a small cottage in the south downs and it was lovely to be out of the city for a while. The weather was beautiful, and Magnus is a very sweet boy.

Charlotte’s been away and so I’ve been by myself for longer than I have in ages. I hung out with a few friends on Saturday. Otherwise, I’ve been a bit… lonely?

I spent a lot of time working on a long(ish) running side project. I’m mid-way through building my own RSS and Atom feed parser for Node.js, which is maybe inadvisable but it’s fun!

The only well supported one for Node.js that I’ve found (and have been using for a while) is missing a bunch of features I need and the streaming interface adds a lot of complexity.

I disagree that 100% unit test coverage isn’t a useful metric 👀 especially if you’re writing a library.

As part of writing comprehensive tests for my feed parser, I compiled a bunch of example and real-world RSS and Atom feeds into a website that I can reliably use to run end-to-end tests. Feel free to use it and/or contribute more feeds with interesting quirks.

I saw some people in the office on Wednesday and it was good. I feel a bit emotional, I’m looking forward to seeing people again.