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!
Generally, I don’t feel like I need to make any more major changes in my life in the near future, so maybe it’ll be a nice quiet one.
I also kept my promise to myself and bought the most extra annual leave I could at work, bringing me up to 50 days of holiday. It’s been glorious.
The biggest thing that changed this year was how much traveling we did, mostly as a result of all the extra annual leave. We had some incredible trips.
In the UK we visited York, the Peak District and Harrogate, Skegness for Butlins, a bleak motorway service station, the Lake District, Liverpool for Eurovision, Berkshire, Leeds, and West Wales.
Japan was my stand-out trip and I’d visit again any time. Tokyo and Kyoto were so much fun, the food was incredible, and my only regret is not extending our trip.
We ticked Australia off of Charlotte’s bucket list and I enjoyed it a lot. Melbourne was really fun but my favourite part of the trip was the more rural drive to Syndey.
Our final big trip was heading to Thailand and meeting friends who live in East Asia and Western Australia. It was lovely seeing everyone, the trip was intense in places but Chiang Mai was really lovely and relaxing. Ending the trip in Phuket for an all-inclusive was a treat and I conquered a little bit of my ocean fear.
Although I’m still going to buy more holiday, 2024 will be quieter. We spent so much, dipping into our savings. No regrets at all but it’s not something we could do every year!
I stopped reading very shortly after my last yearnote, which is a shame. I’ve read a few small books at a snail’s pace but it’d be great to pick it up again next year. Maybe the pacing was off and I should aim for a very reasonable 12 books in 2024.
Although I’ve still been writing a lot with ~19,500 words of weeknotes this year, it’s been less of a focus. There have been times when I’ve questioned whether I have the energy for this but on balance I’m glad that I’m still going. There have been a few times over the course of the year where I’ve found myself down a rabbit hole reminding myself how I was feeling or what I was doing at a given time.
While I’ve lapsed a lot on public blog posts, having written only one in early November 2022, I’ve been publishing internal blog posts at a much higher rate. I wrote 14 blog posts with a total of 12,000 words in our team’s Confluence! It’s been a really fun way to engage with other people across the business and make sure people know all the details when we launch something new or announce that we’re decommissioning something.
I really like my job and I feel like I’ve settled into my team. I think we’ve got great at prioritising the most important work and I know we’re positively impacting the stability of FT.com. Incidents don’t faze me at all, if anything they add a fun little bit of interest to the week.
We’ve done so much but the work I’m most pleased with is probably decommissioning four of our older libraries and replacing them with modern alternatives (modern, well-tested, and maintained JS, not some flavour-of-the-week framework).
This work included getting rid of three different logging libraries, replacing them with one, and massively reducing our use of a third party that we were no longer finding useful. I have my eye on more old code, “Delete More 2024”.
A nice thing happened towards the end of the year in my Annual Review. I’d kind of assumed I was doing great but wasn’t really developing any new skills but my manager, Alex, helped me see that this is untrue. Something I’d failed to consider is that I’ve become comfortable and proficient (not an expert yet!) with a lot more infrastructure stuff than at the start of the year.
I’ve taken on quite a few large pieces of work in VCL, CloudFormation, and Terraform and these were all things that scared me a lot back in 2022. I’m looking forward to learning more – it’s been fun!
I’ve had a great year! I haven’t fully decided whether I have any goals for 2024.
I think work-wise I’d like to continue gaining confidence with infrastructure stuff, I feel like experimenting with moving a few of our bigger services to AWS will be fun and I’d maybe like to get certified. I’d also like to continue the trend of deleting things.
We have a vague idea that it’d be nice to make some friends outside of technology in 2024. Not sure how we’ll do that, let’s see!
I guess overall I’d like to continue to be more relaxed about life 😊
Thanks for reading!
]]>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:
I had taken Thursday off to spend the day with my sister down in Brighton which I was looking forward to
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
I hate feeling weak and sick
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.
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.
I think the biggest news is that I demoted myself. It’s been, by far, the best career decision I’ve ever made. Last year I wrote:
I’m going to rethink over the next year and work out what I want from work…
I was in a big rut, I’d been a Principal Engineer for three years and was feeling a bit disillusioned with being in a less directly-technical role. There are plenty of rewarding aspects of being a Principal but I just wasn’t seeing them anymore and I recognised that I needed a change. Around this time, Alice introduced me to Felicity, who is an excellent career coach.
After several sessions and being given some useful tools, I found a pretty clear pattern in what I liked and disliked about work: I wasn’t getting any enjoyment from most of my principal responsibilities anymore, and all of the times I’d had good days were when I was embedding myself in teams as an engineer and solving technical problems more directly. I proposed that I take a demotion and become a Senior Engineer again.
I’ve been working directly in an engineering team since January:
Next week I’m starting a slightly different role for a while. I’m going to be embedding in our support team and getting more hands-on with the code…
The Support Team is now the Reliability Team for FT.com, I’m shipping production code most days and I’m absolutely disgustingly happy with my job. I’m feeling that sense of team camaraderie again and I think I’m doing my best and most impactful work.
I remember saying to myself that, despite not enjoying my job, it wasn’t impacting my personal life. Well, friends, it definitely was. I’m just a more happy and light person in all aspects of my life now.
Not long after the change in job, I found my capacity to care about programming really returned full force. I’m definitely more pragmatic about it than I used to be, but I’ve been picking up little side projects and maintaining my open-source libraries a lot more consistently over the last year.
I’m completely on top of dependency bumps, having merged close to 2,000 pull requests across 30 repos. The trick seems to be consistency – if I let the PRs build then it’s a massive task, but if I check every couple of days with my morning coffee then it’s very manageable.
It also helps that I did the work to make all my projects really consistent, switched to conventional commits, and started managing all my releases with Release Please. These things have completely eliminated the “toil” part of Open Source for me.
I picked up reading again this year, not in a huge way but in a way that’s been fairly well sustained.
In non-fiction, I’ve been reading The Pragmatic Programmer as part of the engineering book club at work. It’s been really fun to chat about it with my colleagues and there is some solid advice throughout.
In fiction, I’ve been reading at a fairly slow pace (compared to my past self) but it’s becoming a habit again. Over the three months since I picked it up again, I’ve read:
I could use some recommendations for authors who aren’t white men if you have any, ideally more in the fantasy or sci-fi genres.
I’ve been writing so much. While most of it is in my team’s internal work blog, I also managed to squeeze out one blog post on this website.
This is very likely underselling it because I can’t be bothered to trawl old Google Docs, but I’ve definitely written at least 48,500 words over the course of the year (not including the actual code).
Writing weeknotes has made this super easy. Writing isn’t daunting in the slightest. Blank page syndrome? Who’s that? I’m also finding it easier to enter flow state.
I’ve travelled a lot more in the last year, with COVID restrictions being lifted we slowly started to travel outside of the UK again. We visited Jordan, Bordeaux (where we caught COVID), Turkey, and Costa Rica. I feel very lucky and I’ve missed this a lot.
We also spent a bit of time in the UK, some highlights being The South Downs, Scotland for a stag do, Wales for a getaway with friends, and The Isle of Wight.
Another theme this year has been weddings! We attended six in total and they were all lovely. Congrats again to Ben & Jess, Emma & Perry, Gallal & Kim, Leigh-Ann & Andy, JPD & David, and Mo & Alice.
I have to admit I’m quite pleased to be able to retire my suit for the winter, although I think we already have two more weddings booked for the next couple of years 👀
What’s gonna happen over the next year? I have absolutely no clue. I’m going to buy the maximum amount of holiday and see what 50 days of annual leave feels like (I assume relaxing). I’ve let the home improvements slide a bit so maybe I’ll pick up on more of that.
Generally, I don’t feel like I need to make any more major changes in my life in the near future, so maybe it’ll be a nice quiet one.
Whatever happens, I’ll keep writing these, might be my longest-ever hobby apart from Minecraft. Wild. Thanks for reading!
]]>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:
Their place is still listed for the rest of 2023
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
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:
I have no hangover despite spending the evening creating a dirty pint inside my 34-year-old body.
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.
On Friday I had to go back homewards for the funeral of one of my close friends’ Nan. It was sad. Back in year 11 (I guess I was like 16?) we were allowed out of school on Wednesday lunchtimes, Scarlett’s nan lived around the corner from the school and so a group of us would pop round for tea because the Somerfield was a bit too far to walk to. I have such fond memories of these times.
After the wake I drove around a lot, it’s been a very long time since I’ve been home and had access to a car (which is essential in the sprawl of villages near the Bedfordshire/Hertfordshire border because the Tories have gutted public transport). I visited my mum, brothers, and grandma. Mum and I went to get food in Hitchin in the evening and I was overjoyed to stumble across Cantina Carnitas.
Cantina Carnitas used to run a burrito wagon in Flat Iron Square near London Bridge, I used to go there for lunch all the time because for me they do the best burrito I’ve ever tasted. They make all their own chilli sauces, and the owner is lovely – he used to let me and Jake try sauces that he had in development and would remember our orders. I’m glad they’re doing well post-pandemic and I sat eating my burrito and sipping a virgin Margarita with a huge smile on my face.
Progressive House is maybe the best genre of music for driving that exists?
I’m a bit hungover today and wanted to watch something relatively mindless. My go-to is Marvel stuff and I’m annoyed that I’ve watched literally everything already. I just rewatched all of Loki and then rewatched Shang-Chi, both were just as good on the second watching. I cried a bit.
I’m finally feeling more normal, far less snotty and my cough’s pretty much gone 🎉
I did a lot of spending on myself this week. I bought a new suit (we have three weddings this year and I want to look nice) and some new clothes because my wardrobe has really stagnated over two years of rarely going out. I look great in a suit, I’ll provide evidence when I pick it up next week.
I think I’ve done enough treating myself with bonus money and should probably pay off some more of my mortgage or something sensible 🤔
Oh, ages ago we got new toothbrushes with an app. I think I’m very susceptible to a bit of gamification, and I’m consistently getting 100% scores (complete coverage and the correct pressure for >2 minutes). Why am I like this? Look at my medals though.
We went to a practice bottomless brunch with Jenn & Chris which was delightful. It was a practice for when we go and do another bottomless brunch another time. I was very happy and fun to be around if I say so myself, but then later on I sent some embarrassing text messages and fell asleep in the corner of the bar. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Guess what, friends, I found myself getting legitimately excited during my team’s Q2 OKR session. What a dweeb. I’ve not done loads of SRE -type work throughout my career so far and I’m not sure why, it’s rewarding.
I’m not 100% sure about the new season of Killing Eve. Does it feel like it’s squeezing too much in maybe?
I’m 100% sure that the slight tweaks to the Masterchef format this year are great. Another few baby steps towards being as good as Masterchef Australia 👀
It was another relatively slow week. I finally tested negative for COVID a few times but I’m still producing horrible amounts of snot and phlegm.
The most exciting thing that happened was that our new bed frame arrived (a solid 12 weeks after ordering it). It’s quite tall and an ottoman so suddenly we have an over-abundance of storage for spare bedding and towels. This stuff excites me nowadays.
The bed has some slight art deco vibes, which Charlotte is worried might be a fad (it probably is), but I think it’s just in keeping with our 1920–1930 block of flats.
I’ve been thinking a lot about error handling, specifically in Express applications. Doing a bunch of reading about a specific topic isn’t something I’ve done a lot of lately, and it’s been quite fun. The way we handle and log errors across FT.com is ok but very inconsistent, and debugging issues across dozens of different services is quite difficult as a result. I have some cool ideas about how we might address this with a mix of code and conventions/knowledge-sharing.
We’ve had the windows open all week. What a treat!
I’ve been playing with Architect a bit (again) in my spare time, to throw together a little web service. It’s kind of delightful to work with and my AWS knowledge is less patchy (at least around Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB). I’ve never done any formal AWS training, do people find it worthwhile?
Early weeknote this week, because nothing is gonna happen over the weekend.
Confirmed I have COVID via lat flow. I think I got flippant and assumed I wouldn’t have it bad. I was wrong. I don’t think I’ve been this ill since I was a small kid.
I could barely get out of bed on Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday was a little better but there was a lot of coughing. By Friday (today) I managed to get myself dressed by around lunchtime, big achievement!
I pushed down the slight guilt and didn’t force myself to do any work, which would definitely have slowed down my recovery. My brain is mashed potato anyway so I wouldn’t have been much use.
We’re not going to Manchester again, and this time just cancelled the trip outright because I think it’s just not meant to happen.
You know you’re really ill when a cup of tea isn’t nice and comforting. That’s the benchmark for me. Tea tastes like shit? Take the day off mate.
Another sign: when binge-watching TV isn’t even an option because your brain needs a good half hour rest time between episodes.
In more positive news, the annual bonuses at work this year were ridiculous. Wow. When you include the surprise one we had, I’m comfortably earning 6 figures which is just… bizarre? Sometimes I struggle to resolve what the market dictates tech salaries are vs nurses, for example. Donating some guilt money helps a little.
I’m currently having a dilemma about whether I want to be the kind of person who grinds their own coffee beans. Do I? Can I be bothered? As a person who drinks coffee with milk and sugar (and has no intention of changing this), will I notice any difference between freshly ground and month-old pre-ground coffee? Any recommendations for a manual grinder? I’ve had a tab open on the Timemore Chestnut C2 for months now.
I’ve held off the decision for the length of time it takes me to get through 1kg of coffee because I just bought some more of Spiller & Tait’s Pure Colombian Huila, which is delicious.
Writing this weeknote has exhausted me. I’m going back to bed, goodnight.
It’s mostly been a quiet week because we were trying to not get COVID ahead of our weekend trip to Bordeaux. I kinda missed seeing people in the office for one of the days (especially as my new team member was in on Friday).
However, we did catch up with Kara one evening in a pub near our flat. We played Subjective Guess Who and we weren’t the best at it.
We flew to Bordeaux for the weekend, very pleased with ourselves for not catching COVID before the trip. The city is really beautiful and fun. We drank a lot of wine, did a short oenology workshop, ate a lot of food, and enjoyed occasionally being outside in just a T-shirt in the sun! The statues in Bordeaux are top-notch, check out this horse.
We started feeling suspiciously ill on the way back. For me, it vaguely felt like a hangover (which would be legitimate) but Charlotte got a runny nose. We did a test immediately when we got home 😬
COVID has finally reached our household, I’m all clear for now but it’s probably only a matter of time because the line on Charlotte’s test looks like someone drew it on in thick Sharpie. Several hours after writing this I’m also feeling pretty rough 😬😬😬 there goes my theory that I’m super-immune.
Failing at not doom-scrolling and watching horrible videos.
In a blatant attempt to get us back to the office, my employer made our canteen free for March and April.
In unrelated news, I’ve been in the office 2.5 days this week.
Charlotte found an AI-based horoscope app (Co – Star) which we’ve both installed. It’s utterly ridiculous, but also I kind of love the daily Do/Don’t list. Today:
Do: Learning curve, WikiHow, and Books on tape.
Don’t: Espionage, Message in a bottle, Butt text.
Did anyone else have to read that last one twice?
There’s also a feature where you can chat to people with the same signs as you which is just an infinite pool of quite depressing content.
We went to see Jennifer and Chris for some gentle wine drinking. It was very nice, Riley decided to snuggle up on my chest which I needed. Riley is a cat btw.
We finished watching One of Us Is Lying, I think it slightly tailed off for me towards the end and maybe we should have just binged it all in one.
We a couple of episodes away from finishing Cheaters which I’m enjoying quite a lot. Big fan of the 10-minute episodes. I think it handles some tough relationship topics pretty well and it’s also funny.
I’m down to 93 Dependabot PRs from 500 on my various open-source projects. I think the last leg is gonna be tough, I’m hitting a few nasty major version bumps.
On Saturday we went to Charlotte’s brother’s girlfriend’s 30th. It’s our first proper time going to a thing where we had to chat to proper strangers, I think I did pretty well after some initial awkward small talk. We went to the karaoke after and got home at 5 am 😬
I visited my grandma for the first time in ages and had a lovely time catching up. She’s doing quite well now that it’s been a full year since my grandad died, and she’s planning a trip to Yorkshire with my mum – something she just couldn’t do with my grandad’s mobility issues and care needs. I introduced her to Wordle (she loves word games and somehow hadn’t heard of it).
I got The Letter stuck in my head somehow and made a playlist based around it which I’ve been listening to non-stop.
(Yeah I know I haven’t had the mental energy to find an alternative to Spotify yet after all the Joe Rogan and Not Paying Artists stuff. I will get to it soon)
I don’t know what to say about Ukraine. I’m flitting between avoiding news, just to be able to get things done, and doom-scrolling. Alex covered this better than I could. I try to keep these weeknotes relatively news-light because they’re mostly there to help me process what’s going on in my life, but it’d be weird not to highlight the impact this is having. As with Alice’s note, there’s a definite vibe shift below.
I’m enjoying the office. A couple of times recently I’ve had excellent work and personal chats with colleagues that just would never happen fully remote. I might try switching to twice a week soon.
Nobody’s masking up anymore, apart from in the office. Still feels very weird seeing naked mouths everywhere.
Our friend Andy is moving to Finland in March very close to the border with Russia 😬 we went to Birmingham for the weekend to see him off. I love a night out in a city where everything’s closer together, we pub crawled and then did karaoke until 3 am. I managed not to pull my usual stunt of falling asleep in the pub because I need my beauty sleep. The train journey home was not good.
What was good was coming home to our new mattress being set up (well done past Rowan and Charlotte). We both quite like a firm mattress and we splashed out on a Simba Hybrid® Luxe, I had the best night’s sleep since I can remember. Turns out all I needed was ten layers of patented Simba technology.
I spent a lot of my free time this week revamping some of my open-source libraries. Most of them were kind of in a state of abandonment, with hundreds of Dependabot PRs open and upgrading everything felt like a monumental task. I also wanted to simplify my build setup by retiring my old shared Makefile and moving everything from a mix of Travis CI and CircleCI to GitHub Actions.
In this case, the solution to having too much open-source was obvious to me: create a new open-source tool. I spent a bit of time working out what standards I wanted for my Node.js libraries and codified them into a simple command-line tool that I can run in a repo to validate and then auto-fix a lot of issues.
I’m super pleased with it, and the little bit of up-front investment means that 16/34 of my Node.js projects have been overhauled with relative ease, and 6 more have been archived because I don’t need them anymore. I’m still at ~220 Dependabot PRs, but that’s down from 500 💪
I’m really happy with the improvements to my standard way of writing open source JS projects:
Everything has a contributing guide and code of conduct
Everything uses main
instead of master
as a default branch
My published npm packages are smaller because I have a far better .npmignore
I’ve switched away from Make
in favour of npm.scripts
I’ve disallowed a bunch of dependencies that I either no longer know how to use, or they’re owned by Facebook (bye Jest)
Everything has consistent and well thought out GitHub Actions
Interestingly, now that I look back over the week, knuckling down and churning through a lot of repetitive and well-defined work was 100% me trying to cope with the news.
Charlotte and I don’t celebrate Valentine’s day, but on February 14th we do have Heart-Shaped Food Day because several years ago I jokingly cut a slice of lasagna into a heart shape. This year I tried a bit harder than usual: I made heart-shaped spinach and ricotta ravioli, heart-shaped roasted butternut squash, a heart-shaped parmesan crisp, and a brown butter and sage sauce. I need to work on my presentation but it might be the most delicious thing I’ve ever cooked.
After a long time of trying different pasta recipes, the simplest one (of course) seems to have yielded the best dough. It’s just 1 egg per 100g of 00 flour, very easy to remember and 100g is also about right for each portion.
Coming from solid last into second recently, I now have a strong lead in My City after playing this week. I feel a lot more energised after work lately and so I actually have the mental capacity for board games.
I went into the office twice this week, and it was excellent hanging out with a bunch of the nicest people. There were also a couple of pub trips (Old Change Happy Hour is always a bad idea), one of them being leaving drinks for Mel (😢). Just so good to see everyone though! chee got the goofs and tequila appeared.
There’s been a lot of great TV.
Love is Blind Season 2 continues to be wild. There has been some top meddling from the producers in the latter half of the series, well done all.
We watched all of Kevin Can F**k Himself, I think I loved it? Or maybe I just love Annie Murphy? It’s a dark comedy following a kind of stereotypical sit-com wife, and transitions between bright sit-com style scenes and the more bleak reality behind them.
We started watching One of Us Is Lying, 2/8 episodes and enjoying it so far, apart from the classic US trope of 20-30-year-olds-playing-high-school-students.
Charlotte and I finally used a gift voucher for Sabor, a fine dining Spanish restaurant we’ve been meaning to go to since before the pandemic. The food was all delicious, my only advice would be to keep the deep-fried items to under half of your selection rather than a solid 80%.
We’re not in Manchester, as was our original plan for the weekend. Eunice did a number on the trains, but our hotel and travel were re-bookable. We watched a lot of videos of things blowing around in the wind instead.
I’d already declined all my Friday meetings due to being off work, so when I cancelled my holiday I had a completely free day to get some focused work done. Number-of-PRs is a bad metric for productivity, but that doesn’t stop me from being pleased with getting seven of them merged. Soon I’ll stop talking about how nice it is to write code again, promise.
Week 69, that’s the sex number. Nice.
My new office chair arrived! Instead of just sucking up buying one myself, I spoke to occupational health at work and they were excellent. They quickly assessed that the dining chair I was using was the cause of some back problems and approved me expensing a chair 🎉 so far it’s a huge improvement and having a headrest is really encouraging me to sit properly.
Please excuse the messy desk and also the terrible cropping in the photo of my chair. I was scared by this thread on Twitter and had to crop my bank card out of it.
On Thursday I went to Puttshack in Bank with a group of friends. The actual golfing was fun! I enjoyed nerding out about how the technology works, it’s really slick, and I came second (after Jenn, who smashed everyone). What wasn’t fun was being surrounded by drunk city boys 😬 probs the only downside to our office’s proximity to the city.
I’ve had my first couple of challenges juggling my current role vs my previous role at work. While I’m working directly in a team, I’m supposed to be dropping most of my Principal Engineer responsibilities but:
I got more involved than I probably should have in some tech strategy stuff. My excuse is that I spent a bunch of time last year helping to define this piece of work and I have a bunch of useful context.
I maybe gave too much thought to the upcoming promotion round while pointing Alex to the right docs etc – I ran the last two rounds and it’s difficult not to have it in the back of my mind.
In my day-to-day work, I’ve had my first chance in a while to put together a new app. Our Platforms team has been doing an excellent job of improving our tooling and everything is going pretty smoothly.
No spoilers, but Love is Blind season 2 is wild. At least on a par with Season 1. I can’t believe I have to wait for the next part of the series 😬 If you’ve watched up to episode 5 then let me know, I need more people to talk to about this.
On Saturday we went on a nice long walk near Beaconsfield and stopped off for food, I feel a bit unfit at the moment and need to start walking more. I keep meaning to start Couch to 5K, but so far haven’t managed to prize myself away from the couch.
It’s been a busy week! We had dinner with Gallal after writing last week’s note and met his and Euan’s new housemate who seems nice. Gallal made vegan chilli, it was delicious.
On Sunday we went for a walk along the Thames path around the Isle of Dogs with Luke, Euan, and Gallal. We stopped off in The Gun for a roast and stuck to just a few shandies. How wholesome of us, eh?
It’s safe to say I’m fully a coriander fan now. I was unsure back in week 30, but during the week I found myself shovelling fistfuls of it into my face while cooking this halloumi bake thing. Give me that soap!
On Wednesday I took a half-day at work and went to meet my new niece. Shem (my brother) and Miruna are clearly sleep-deprived and a little anxious, but their new daughter is very tiny and sweet. She didn’t cry when I held her which might be a first for me. They also have two beautiful cats who I’d like to steal. Great move on my part taking the half-day instead of trying to squeeze a visit into an evening 👍
On Thursday I met up with Andrew and Ed after work, I’ve barely seen these two throughout the pandemic and it’s comforting to just slip back into friendly conversation. We probably didn’t need to end up in a cocktail bar, and discovering that a stranger splashed sick on the sleeve of my coat really took me back to the before times.
I’m still enjoying work, which is lovely, despite a few times this week where issues fixed themselves before I could get to the bottom of them. The team had an almost mind-meld moment during our weekly meeting, and we’ve collectively come up with some exciting ideas to improve how customer support get to the root of live issues, and to aid us in debugging the production website. It’s gonna be so good if we can pull it off.
We had a more chilled weekend overall, just some board games with a few friends. We played Whirling Witchcraft again, not the most balanced game ever but the rounds are quick and a lot of fun.
It was my birthday on Wednesday. There’s often a lemony theme to my cakes, and this year Charlotte made a Lemon Meringue Cheesecake. It was delicious. I’m made of cake now.
I was supposed to go to a pub quiz, but the pub quiz got cancelled so we went for cocktails around the corner. It was quite a lot for a Wednesday but my lovely friends were very good at carrying out my wishes: stop me from buying shots when I’m drunk.
We finished Too Hot to Handle Season 3, started Archive 81 (seems good but too intense for a hangover so we only watched one), and binged all of The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window.
My phone reminded me of the time I invented Grandmother’s Ruin. It got included in a “Taste of London 2019” memory which I think is a little bit too much praise but I’ll take it.
Most of the rest of the video was fried chicken, bowls full of pre-chopped ingredients (because mise en place makes all cooking more enjoyable), and a small pile of D&D dice (our robot overlords have got some work to do before I’m worried).
I’ve been very happy at work this week. I’ve done a lot of debugging, been documenting some of the processes and tools that my team use, and have had some fun chats with Alex about building software that will help speed up our diagnosis of issues. Who’s this happy guy? Where’s he been?
Maybe some of my happiness is tied to the fact that my birthday present to myself arrived. I really need to stop burning through my buffer money but look at how beautiful it is ❤️
It felt like quite an uneventful week. I spent a fair bit of work time digging into our Grafana dashboards, which was fun.
A lamp I bought on eBay got delivered, I love it. Soon the whole house will be free from the harsh glow of The Big Light.
We started watching season 3 of Too Hot to Handle. It’s great trash. Unfortunately, none of the contestants look like Simon Legg this year.
It’s taken since May but I think I’m finally getting the hang of My City. Over the last couple of games, I’ve gone from a very solid last place to a few points between me and first 🎉
I saw my uncle and aunt on Saturday, they came to see my flat and we went for some food nearby and a few drinks. It was actually lovely. I worked with this uncle as a kitchen fitter for a year between college and my first tech job and, as predicted, he spent a long time assessing the quality of my kitchen. We have good hinges apparently.
On Sunday we walked from Whitstable to Faversham, a very flat and easy 9 miles with nice sea views. We met Charlotte’s mum for dinner in Fav and felt very wholesome. We passed an antique shop and I bought another lamp, Charlotte thinks I have enough lamps now (I don’t).
Remember back in February 2021 when I wrote:
In incredibly shitty news, the trial I was supposed to be a witness in next week has been delayed again until January 2022. I’ve spent the last few weeks mentally building myself up to this, and to have it pulled out from under me is pretty devastating. All the energy and preparation I’d put in has just kind of dissipated; I feel a bit hollow.
Well, that happened again. The trial now isn’t until August. I’m really over this. I’ve taken a couple of days off work because tbh I can’t focus.
Another annoyance is that we’ve been isolating all week, which was kind of pointless. We broke our self-imposed isolation by going to The Light Bar in Shoreditch for some food. We’re being vegetarian for January in an effort to more permanently reduce our meat consumption, The Light Bar had some really delicious veggie and vegan options, I’ll probably go again.
I’m seeing mum and my sister this week as well, I’m glad we’ve finally arranged for them to come and visit my flat and I haven’t seen them this side of Christmas yet due to various isolations and COVID scares.
I fixed my lack of sleep with drugs! Thanks for the heads up, Alex, Nytol is magic and I’ve been using it a bit short-term while my brain won’t stop talking at me.
While we were not doing anything, we painted one of the walls in the living room. Just the one because we couldn’t be bothered to move any furniture and it also became apparent that I didn’t order enough paint. It’s so hard to capture the colour properly in a photo, this is kind of how it looks now (needs some touching up):
I finally bought a winter coat. It’s very cosy and a kind of mustardy colour that really reminds me of Glynn. There are worse people I could be reminded of I suppose.
Now armed with a better coat, we’ve been doing some regular nighttime walks. Here’s a heron we saw in Wapping the other day, just chilling.
I started working on my new team, embedding directly in the FT.com support team for a while. My pre-trial self wasn’t the most productive but I did a bunch of gnarly debugging and actually wrote code which was delightful.
I’ve been playing Wordle every day for the last week. It’s pretty addictive and I’ve managed to stay at a 100% solve rate.
Of course, there’s already a Slack channel for it at the FT.
I did some research to work out what the ideal starting word is. Previously I was using STALE
or STARE
. Based on the Wikipedia entry for letter frequency these words aren’t amazing, I just added up the percentage frequencies of each letter (based on dictionary frequency rather than text frequency):
STARE = 8.7 + 6.7 + 7.8 + 7.3 + 11 = 41.5
STALE = 8.7 + 6.7 + 7.8 + 5.3 + 11 = 39.5
I wanted something better, the top letters are ESIAR
, which isn’t a word. Immediately I thought of RAISE
which is pretty good:
RAISE = 11 + 8.7 + 8.2 + 7.8 + 7.3 = 43
However, when you look at the frequency of the first letter in a word, it’s S
by a pretty huge margin. A quick anagram search and I think SERAI
might be the best starting word.
I finally bought a kitchen bin, no more bin sack hanging from the door handle! The kitchen is looking great now. I used a little bit of my bonus to buy new crockery which I didn’t need but it’s so much nicer than the “temporary” IKEA set I’ve had for years.
I also spent a lot of money on a new bed frame and mattress, which is probably the final step in my sleep investment. We’ve upgraded to a king-size (our room won’t quite fit a super king), and got some pillows thrown in with the mattress because of the January sales 🎉
I’m sleeping terribly. I hope the bed helps fix it but maybe I should follow Lee’s lead.
I’m isolating now ahead of being a witness in a trial, I really don’t want to catch COVID and not be able to go to court. It’s gonna be stressful, but I’ll be happy when it’s over – it’s been already been delayed ~2 years which has felt like an eternity.
Next week I’m starting a slightly different role for a while. I’m going to be embedding in our support team and getting more hands-on with the code. I’d like to use the time to help us improve the monitoring and observability of FT.com. I think it’ll be fun and I’m looking forward to a change of pace.
Maybe I’m playing too much Minecraft? It’s just such a nice way to escape from everything. Gallal and I have moved into a Badlands biome and we’re building a slightly Petra-inspired base. I’ve been enjoying terraforming to make some more dramatic rock formations and most of the buildings hide automated farms. Here’s a before/after of my little area:
Happy New Year, friends!
This is going to be a short one because I’m tired and haven’t been doing a lot.
A friend we hung out with on Boxing Day got COVID so we isolated and did a PCR. Apparently, we’re fine 🤷 still mystified that we haven’t got it yet tbh. I’m very tired which is a symptom, right?
I got a bit drunk for new year, on the Monster and White Wine. I spent the next day being more tired than usual.
I don’t want to go back to work, possibly ever. I’m just too tired for all of that business.
I managed to fill some holes and prep the walls for painting between naps.
Have I mentioned that I’m tired?
Merry Christmas!
My pre-Christmas treat to myself was going to see Spider-Man: No Way Home (#nospoilers). It’s no secret that I’ll just watch anything Marvel chucks out, but I think I agree that this is one of their best films, I loved it. I’ve been to the Genesis Cinema a couple of times now, it’s so cheap and infinitely better than some of the bigger cinemas.
I got my booster 🎉 no queuing and super-efficient, and I had a nice chat about Java with the doctor who injected me.
We’ve still (according to all the tests we’ve done) not had COVID, against all the odds. The numbers are wild, stay safe everyone.
Charlotte’s mum stayed for Christmas, we chatted to everyone else over video call because a stupid number of people we know have COVID now.
Christmas dinner was excellent, as usual. I love cooking it and, of course, we broke out the festive spreadsheet again.
Minecraft is just the best game, isn’t it? Especially with friends, I love popping on the server and exploring the new buildings that have cropped up.
Anyway have a lovely new year 👋 hopefully 2022 is less of a shitstorm eh?
This was a long and pretty stressful work week, feeling really happy that the year’s nearly over. I’m working all of next week but most people aren’t, so fingers crossed it’s nice and quiet and I can focus a bit. On the plus side, our surprise bonus arrived in my December pay packet 🎉
Also, at work, we had our annual viewing of Die Hard. It’s one of my favourite work afternoons of the year, it worked really well remote, we just synced up start times. I left with a lot of warm fuzzy feelings about how great and funny my colleagues are.
I’ve been playing a lot of Minecraft again. We (a group of friends I play on a server with) have started a new world now that 1.18 has launched, it’s a lot of fun starting from scratch. I’m trying to take it a little slower than last time and not getting end game equipment really early.
A few more Christmas film reviews from this week:
A Castle for Christmas was a solid entry into the Netflix Holiday Movie Universe, it was nice and easy watching and has an excellent cameo 👀 I give it three castles 🏰🏰🏰
Last Christmas was ok but it felt like it was trying too hard tbh. I wouldn’t watch it again, unlike most Christmas films. I give it a pair of socks 🧦🧦
We finally tried Wings of East (despite it having played havoc with Adam’s digestive system). I’m still mulling it over, but it might be the best chicken shop I’ve ever been to. I don’t say that lightly, and I’m gonna need to try it again a few times.
I finally decided on some paint for my living room! We’ve gone with Victory Colours Pepper Tree Green and Skylark which will hopefully work nicely together. I’m excited to get painting!
Now that a decision has been made, the patch wall in the living room has been repurposed; it’s now our Christmas tree (or it was until we impulse-bought a half-price one in Sainsbury’s).
Jordan was amazing, I loved every minute of it.
We stayed in Amman briefly at the start of the trip and mostly ate a lot of delicious food. We visited the Citadel and the Roman Amphitheatre and walked around the city a lot.
Jordanian food is Levantine and so most of what we ate was pretty familiar. It was all delicious, I don’t think I ate a single thing I didn’t like. I’m going to have to wean myself off of eating Hummus as part of all three meals.
I no longer want to drink coffee without cardamom.
We drove down to the Dead Sea for a night after Amman and relaxed in a fancy hotel. Floating in the sea is a weird sensation, I don’t think descriptions of it do it justice. We floated, we swam, we covered ourselves in mud, we ate and drank a lot.
After the Dead Sea, we travelled to Petra. On the first day, we took the slightly less touristy route, starting at Little Petra and hiking through the mountains to reach Ad-Deir before people from the main entrance.
Nothing I’d seen online gives you the right sense of scale – Petra just goes on and on through so many different valleys. We spent an entire day wandering around, and I think the highlight was climbing up to the High Place of Sacrifice and being able to see most of Petra.
The second day we were pretty tired, we walked in via the main entrance to see The Treasury and walked up past the Royal Tombs which we missed on day one.
After Petra we drove down to Wadi Rum, I didn’t think we’d top Petra but after staying in the desert for a couple of nights I think we did. It’s incredible, and again nothing quite describes the scale of it.
We stayed in one of the many Bedouin camps about a 20-minute drive from the closest road. Travelling around the desert was a lot of fun, sitting in the back of a flatbed truck. It would take me a long time to get bored of it.
On our only full day, we hired a driver for the day and went on some of the best hikes I’ve ever been on. We started with a tough but fun scramble up to the Burdah rock bridge, then a more gentle walk through Burrah canyon.
We spent our last day driving back to Amman, having a few drinks, and chilling before our flight back.
We walked over 50 miles and 650 flights of stairs throughout the trip, I feel like all my hummus and flatbread eating was justified.
Early weeknote this week, as I’m going away and I will not be taking a laptop with me. I’m looking forward to a slightly less-connected ~10 days.
I’m flying to Jordan, which I’m really excited about, I haven’t left the country in about 2 years and it’s gonna be weird as hell. We got our negative PCR tests back today, the only thing that could go wrong is if the rules change over the next week and we get stuck abroad 😬
We’re going with Gallal (his partner is living over there) and Euan, and we have so much planned out. I’m really excited to visit Petra and the Dead Sea and go desert hiking. My next weeknotes might be insufferably upbeat.
Travelling is very expensive with buying all the COVID tests. I don’t think it’ll be a common occurrence for a while.
I’m very smug about the fact that I correctly wired up a smart thermostat. So far our boiler hasn’t blown up and I managed to do it without shocking myself. I bought a Tado wireless thermostat and so far it’s been excellent, I’ve hooked it into my open-source hub and I can control the heating based on the output from all my various temperature and humidity sensors.
I think my wiring turned out better than the previous thermostat’s wiring (pictured) – it’s now all clearly labelled and they’re more securely tightened.
The failure state is pretty reasonable as the boiler’s manual heating controls are accessible, so it’s not like we’ll cook or freeze if we have WiFi issues.
We finally no longer have two flats, I gave the keys back early in the week. Paying a mortgage and Central London rent last month isn’t something I want to repeat.
Great news this week, everyone at the FT got a nice and not-insignificant surprise bonus just in time for Christmas 🎉 I really like working at the FT generally, and we happen to be hiring a lot of people at the moment 👀 (apologies for the job site, if you search “engineer” here you’ll get more technology-based stuff)
I assembled our desks, I love them. The office space is starting to come together, next we need some actual storage so we can unpack the last boxes.
Our house has a high risk of mould at the moment, which we’re still trying to sort with dehumidifiers. There’s a calculation I don’t fully understand (which I’m now graphing in my home hub, of course) which does something with the average temperature, the coldest temperature in the house, and the average indoor vs outdoor humidity. Who knows exactly what 77% mould risk means? Not me, but it seems too high.
Our beautiful desks arrived! We bought them from a carpenter on Etsy (turns out there are a lot of people who make furniture there), neither of us have ever spent actual money on a desk for ourselves before and it feels really nice considering how often we’re still working at home. It means I can also sell the IKEA table I’ve been using and the much-hated dining table that Charlotte’s been working on.
I won a quiz at work! I never win things so it was a nice surprise, you just had to know/guess the locations of various colleagues in photos they’d sent in. I knew a few and got lucky with the others. I need to decide what to spend the £50 Amazon Voucher on. Another dehumidifier maybe?
We went to Tayyabs with Euan, Aadil, and Saney partly to celebrate Charlotte getting her braces off and being able to eat Indian food again. It was delicious.
Charlotte’s mum and brother spent all of Saturday visiting, which was lovely. We got through a bit of prosecco, went for a very cold walk, and played a bunch of Jackbox-like games. It felt quite wholesome.
It’s that time of year again where I watch a lot of Christmas films! IT’S CHRISTMAS! There are some pretty good new offerings so far.
Love Hard was a really heart-warming and festive tale about catfishing people. I don’t know about you lot, but I love some dodgy morality in my Christmas films. I give it four bells 🔔🔔🔔🔔
A California Christmas was a lot more serious than I was really ready for immediately after Love Hard. Once again lying about your identity is a key component, and I need to start thinking about who I want to lie to over the festive period, I’ve clearly not been doing it enough. I give it three glasses of milk 🥛🥛🥛
12 Dates of Christmas had it all. I had no idea that Amy Smart starred in a time loop Christmas film way back in 2011. Features less lying than the other two (but not zero lying so it’s still festive). This made me feel quite warm and fuzzy, who doesn’t love a redemption arc? I give it four places of worship 🛐🛐🛐🛐
I saved the best for last of course, The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star was excellent. The third instalment after The Princess Switch (my favourite Christmas film, 🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁) and The Princess Switch: Switched Again (☃️☃️☃️) really delivered and was an improvement on the first sequel. It also keeps building on the Netflix Holiday Movie Universe which is always welcome. Loved it, I give it four snowflakes ❄️❄️❄️❄️
Choosing paint is hard! Thanks, Matt for the ranking, it gave me even more colours to choose from 🙈 The living room mess of patches is growing at an alarming rate. I think I currently light the rightmost brighter green in the middle, but who knows how I’ll feel by next week.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with home automation. I bought some Shelly Temperature and Humidity sensors and set up a couple of dashboards with my Raspberry Pi dashboard and Grafana.
My next step is to use this data to power dehumidifiers around the house and get a smart thermostat set up. I’m kind of leaning towards a Tado wireless thermostat which it’s possible to integrate into my setup without giving more data to Google or Amazon.
I spent the first half of the week feeling really rough and decided to skip the office so I don’t spread it further. Unfortunately, this meant missing Lee’s visit 😔 fingers-crossed we can catch up next time!
By the weekend I was feeling a lot better. I went to play board games in person for the first time in ages, followed by a bottomless brunch (somehow feeling OK after that). Played a couple of great new games:
Whirling Witchcraft is a nice quick game and easy to pick up. There’s a bit of engine building but the pace of the game means it’s not super heavy on tactics.
Nidavellir is kind of similar to 7 Wonders, I found it nearly impossible to hold a mental model of the scoring, but it was still fun – hopefully, I’ll do better next time.
We went to the pub with Charlotte’s dad and had a nice catch-up. Nothing beats a home Sunday roast, but The White Hart’s one is pretty great!
We went for Turkish food with Luke, and after several failed attempts (unexpectedly closed restaurants), we tried Wood Mangal based on a quick Google and it was delicious, also exactly the right level of chilled out for all our moods.
The plants I ordered from Patch arrived! More plant friends!
We’ve been buying and trying paint samples, some from Lick and some from Dulux, struggling to find the exact shades we want. I think maybe we’re going a bit too dark with the colours, but I guess we can just eventually repaint if we hate it 🤷 we bought a couple of Farrow & Ball samples just in case.
I went into the office, it was the busiest it’s been in a long time but it was great to see everyone! I got just a little carried away with the wine after work and Friday was a struggle.
We went for a little 6 mile walk around Epping forest over the weekend with some friends. It was perfect walking weather: a little cold with crips autumn leaves everywhere.
I’m sick. It’s not COVID, according to the tests, but I have a sore throat and am feeling very run down. I blame the office, does anyone want to own up to spreading their gross germs?
We made a pretty delicious butternut squash lasagna, and I got out the pasta machine for the first time in forever. It was fun! I should make pasta more. We spent a fairly solid 3 hours prepping and cooking and I think it was worth it.
It’s been a relatively quiet week, Charlotte’s been out quite a lot of and I’ve been pootling around doing stuff around the house.
This place is feeling more and like home, I dismantled the sofa bed and dining table and switched them around, the living room feels a lot more spacious now and there’s less and less stuff that doesn’t have a place to live.
Next up is painting! We’re being a bit indecisive about colours, but I’ve ordered a lot of paint samples to try a few things. On Saturday we went to Canary Wharf (a nice walk along the Thames path) and then got the tube to the closest Home Base. I finally bought myself a drill, a mountain of decorating equipment, and hundreds of interesting-looking drill bits that I don’t know how to use. It’s very exciting! I’m looking forward to making the walls less bare with lots of art.
A nice bonus of living so close to friends is that Euan pinged us late on Friday to ask if we wanted to go for food. We did. It was excellent.
I really enjoyed a little pairing with Ania this week, I think it was helpful for both of us! I’d like more of this, if any of the FT people reading could use a hand with a nice self-contained piece of work then I’ll always try and make time 🙂
Alice ran a social for our broader team at work, it was a lot of fun! It’s been a while since we had one and it was so nice to see everyone in a more social context. Gentle good-spirited roastings were had by all. I need to pull my finger out and stop letting Kara do all the work for the social we’ve been vaguely planning for months 😬 sorry Kara.
The biggest life change this year was (eventually) buying a flat. It took a good 7 months due to issues with cladding, some very slow mortgage brokers and solicitors, and everyone being busy with stamp duty holidays.
People aren’t lying when they say this process is stressful, I feel like I shaved a few years off of my life, but I’m feeling a lot more chill about everything else now that we’ve moved in! A solid half of my weeknotes are tagged with “House”, hopefully that’ll reduce over the next year.
Obvious content warning, skip ahead to the next heading here.
Back in January, my grandad died. It was kind of expected, his health had deteriorated a lot but it was still really tough. My grandma seems to have adjusted to life by herself and my mum and uncles have been visiting a lot and keeping her company since.
We also lost our cat, Tootsie. It’s still painful to think about him, and I’d really like to have had him with us when we moved to our new flat. I know most pet owners feel like this, but he was the perfect cat and I can’t imagine taking on another pet for a long time, particularly not one with health complications.
We got the news about Tootsie while we were at Charlotte’s stepdad’s funeral. What a shitty week that was. It’s so completely out of my control, but I’d love it if 2022 was a bit less death-heavy.
I think it’s fair to say I really miss coding as part of my day-to-day job. I moved roles a while before starting weeknotes, it’s been quite challenging and I frequently question whether I’ve taken a bit of a misstep career-wise away from the part of my job I enjoyed most.
I’m going to rethink over the next year and work out what I want from work. I know I don’t really want to leave the FT yet, which is a nice conclusion to arrive at – I love the people and the culture and I definitely couldn’t cope with the stress of switching companies right now.
I’ve been trying to keep my technical skills fresh outside of work, mostly via updating this website and slowly adding IndieWeb features (my blog and weeknotes have received just under 600 webmentions) and I took on a couple of side projects.
More recently I’ve been tinkering with home automation, I’m going to try and do everything open source and avoid the tech giants. I bought a Raspberry Pi and it’s really fun to play with, maybe I’ll finally do some hardware hacking.
Since starting with weeknotes a year ago, I’ve written a lot! It was part of my reasoning behind writing weeknotes, and I feel a lot more comfortable with writing in both a work and personal sense now.
I have written 20,000 words across 53 weeknotes, with a calculated reading time of 125 minutes. Apologies to all of you who have been here since week 1 – those 2 hours of your life are non-refundable.
I also wrote four longer-form blog posts, totalling 8,000 words. I hadn’t blogged since 2016 before this last year so I’m quite pleased with myself.
Yeehaw! talks through a fun side project I built, where you can race horses in Slack.
I Like RSS introduces Audrey 2.0, an RSS reader I built in order to start reading more again.
Organising a virtual treasure hunt as a team social explains how Glynn and I put together a well-received work social.
Webmentions for your Static Site teaches you about webmentions and how to implement them on a GitHub-hosted static website.
With the pandemic I haven’t been watching a lot of films, there’s been a lot of TV though! I think my reality TV consumption has got trashier, but I’m fine with that, some highlights alongside the usual Masterchef and Great British Menu were The Circle and Too Hot to Handle. The best stuff I watched was Bridgerton, The Queen’s Gambit, Loki, and Good Omens.
I’ve enjoyed playing a bunch of videogames socially, which I hadn’t really done for ages pre-pandemic. I’ve loved Minecraft sessions with a bunch of friends I share a server with, we also tried Factorio for a while which was a nice change of pace.
Charlotte and I play games together quite a lot lately, Two Point Hospital got a lot of hours of play-time as did Crash Bandicoot 4. More recently we completed Unravel Two which is an exciting and cute cooperative puzzler.
Over the last year, being a bit more shut up at home, I’ve rediscovered my love of puzzles. I’ve been doing crosswords daily and more recently I’ve been getting pretty good at Sudoku. As usual, I took this hobby too far and built a website for tracking the New York Times mini crossword. It’s been tracking a group of people’s times for 133 days now and still going strong 🙂
I can’t really not mention the pandemic in this yearnote. I think we’ve made the best of it, but the whole thing’s been pretty stressful and it’s going to take a long time for anything to feel “normal”. We’ve been social within the restrictions, had a few UK holidays (Edinburgh and then Loch Lomond and Fife were big highlights), and made a few bad decisions. Somehow, according to the dozens and dozens of tests, we haven’t had COVID yet, which is good.
I’m grateful that work has been so relaxed about the return to the office. We still don’t need to go in until April 2022, and even then we only need to be in twice a week. I mostly miss the social aspect and think I’ve adapted well to home working.
I’m feeling good about the year ahead, definitely more positive than at the start of this one. If most of 2021 was focused on stabilising my living situation, then I’d like to focus on readdressing my career in 2022.
I’m still getting a lot of value from writing weeknotes, it really helps me digest my week and introspect on what I’ve enjoyed (or not enjoyed). I hope all 50(ish) of you are enjoying reading them 😊 writing these has really reduced my other social media output and it feels a lot more considered to me than random Twitter shitposting.
Here’s to another year 🥂
]]>I’m feeling very settled already and excited to make the new flat homier. It’s so quiet, I’m sleeping like a baby (weird expression based on what I hear from my babied-up friends - they do not sleep well) now that I can’t hear constant train screeching.
I’m feeling very smug about the little bits of DIY I’ve been doing. I’ve never really bothered in rentals, but this week I learned how to fix threaded screw holes and rehang my kitchen door. Rowan B said that it looks like my walls are concrete based on the surface-mounted light switches and that I may need an SDS drill – I need to remember that our 1:1s are for line management first and DIY tips second 😁
I couldn’t admit it last week because it was still too raw, but within an hour of getting the keys to this flat I locked myself out. I’m ready to laugh about it now, but it’s a very expensive mistake which I won’t be repeating.
We ordered some desks and an armchair, and have decided that we’re making our home office the highest priority room to get right as it’s where we’ll probably spend the most time. I’m really excited about the desks: they’re beautiful, made from reclaimed wood, and have built-in monitor risers. I’m so excited to not be working at a very old IKEA table anymore.
Hyperoptic customer support is super helpful. I rang to question my internet speeds as in some areas of the flat we were getting a paltry 100MB/s. They sent me their better router (free of charge) to try out, and it’s fixed everything. It’s consistently 600–750MB/s download, and I once saw (in one of my many speed tests) an upload speed of 950MB/s!
Euan and Gallal, our neighbours (weird), got us a cat lamp as a housewarming gift. It’s a board game in-joke, I love it.
We broke our drinking fast in style by going to a champagne event. There were more than 100 champagnes to sample, and I think we got through a pretty decent number of them. I was very merry by the end; ~50ml samples add up pretty quickly.
I was in the office on Thursday for Cait’s leaving afternoon tea. I’m sad to see her go, she started around the same time as me and has had an enormous impact on making the FT a great place to work. My next boss’s boss’s boss has some big shoes to fill!
I’m going to write year notes ASAP, probably for tomorrow as 1st November is the anniversary of starting this thing! I read Lee’s this morning, which brightened up my morning coffee. He did absolutely smash that presentation.
I moved into my new flat! I feel like a whole new person – youthful and rejuvenated. What did I do before I was perpetually stressed about this purchase?
A lot of our stuff is still in boxes, and probably will be for a while. I re-assembled all of our furniture and the bedroom and kitchen are pretty much done. Here are some pre-move photos of the place, I love it.
There’s a big Sainsburys nearby, we’ve wandered over a few times and it’s amazing having a big supermarket again after years of relying on the tiny ones close to Waterloo. There are also a bunch of markets in the area with an incredible array of fruit and veg. It’s all very exciting.
Fantastic Removals was great and definitely worth the extra cost over hiring a man and van type thing. It was the most stress-free move I’ve ever done, and we just managed it in one van load.
It was weird celebrating the move without a little champagne (we’re not drinking for October), then Alison brought us a Nozeco and popping a cork felt like enough 🍾
It’s so hard to know what changes to make to the flat immediately vs later. I’m going to make a spreadsheet so we can prioritise between furniture-buying and DIY.
I have been tinkering with some home automation stuff. Luke put me onto Shelly and I’ve been trialling some open source hubs on a Raspberry Pi. Getting everything set up without any big tech cloud services is gonna be fun.
Hyperoptic is amazing. Going from a patchy ~15MB to a consistent ~500MB over WiFi just makes everything easier. For a start, I don’t have to tether my phone every time I open my laptop. I tried switching to my own router, for a brief moment I was getting ~700MB but then I somehow managed to screw it up. I probably need a Rowan B to visit 👀
Anyway, I’m very happy and relaxed, which is worryingly unfamiliar.
I think I’ve won the war against the moths. It was really important that no larvae survive the purge and get a free ride to my new flat. My victory wasn’t without losses: I said goodbye to a couple of old cushions that I didn’t like; one of my favourite scarves is quite moth-eaten now, but maybe I’ll lean into the elderly librarian look this winter.
I’m fucking excellent at packing. I’ve been enjoying spending my evenings playing box Tetris and being super organised about the whole thing. All my paperwork is categorised in plastic wallets, most of the junk drawers in the flat have had a good sort through, and many near-empty bottles of stuff have been emptied and recycled.
A couple of weeks ago, Chee shared a great idea. I have now rolled up my cables and put them in labelled bags. This pleased me. I mean I probably don’t need most of these still, but 🤷
I’m excited for the first time somebody asks me for a very specific cable and I can hand them a little bag.
I played two Minecraft “speedrun"s this week, thanks to Chris for suggesting. The first was a pretty standard one with just me, Chris, and Luke - some highlights include 3x desert temples, 3x saddles, and riding to the stronghold on horseback. I also pulled off an MLG water while fighting the dragon which was exciting.
The second “speedrun” never got completed, we tried starting in the Nether and spawned in a Crimson forest. As well as being really difficult, it feels like a massive grind having to find gold to barter with.
OMG I’m so excited, I got internet sorted for my new flat and it’s being installed a couple of days before we move 🎉 I’ve been putting up with 15MB download speeds (on a good day) and/or tethering to my phone for the last 3 years, so I treated myself to the 1GB Hyperoptic package. The best part is that Chris pinged me to let me know that they’re doing this package for £20/mo for their 10th birthday 👀
I’m getting really good at Sudoku, I’ve played through a lot of Cracking the Cryptic’s classic puzzles and finally actually understand some of the logic behind more complex solving techniques. It’s fun to use my brain.
I had a 1:1 with Alice which has reduced my stress levels significantly, I’m not really feeling the Sunday dread. Thanks, Alice ❤️
The next time I write weeknotes will be in the new flat 🙂
I exchanged contracts on my flat! I’m finally legally locked into buying this flat and I’m really excited. I’ll be collecting the keys on the 19th of October 🎉 I’m not sure if it’s properly hit me yet. I booked a moving van and have spent a bunch of time clearing out stuff and packing.
It’s been such a long process. I got an offer accepted way back in March. That’s 30 weeknotes ago!
Maybe the scariest thing I’ve ever done (definitely in the top 5) is calling my bank to transfer most of my savings to my solicitor. They really hammer home at every opportunity that you might be falling victim to a scam.
Olio is one of the most useful apps I’ve downloaded in recent times. It’s really saved me from throwing away a lot of stuff that someone else might find useful, and it feels nice because everyone’s always happy when they come to pick up free shit.
I’m not drinking for October. It’s something Charlotte does every year and it’s nice to cut down a bit occasionally. Alcohol-free beers have gotten quite good.
I didn’t skip Legg Day. I went into the office on Monday, mostly to see Simon who was visiting from Berlin. I had a good coffee wander and gossip with Alex, some lovely chats in The Sea Horse, and caught up a bit with Daisy.
We finished the last season of Lucifer. It’s a ridiculous show, but I did find myself getting back into it towards the end. Lucifer mentions Bones at least three times that we counted, which reminded us to pick that back up and we’ve been binging while we pack.
While emptying the bottoms of cupboards and under the beds, I found the source of the increasing number of carpet moths in this flat: an old wool hot water bottle cover. There were lots of tiny larvae 🤢 I doused everything in moth spray and put out some more traps, but I think fire might be the only answer.
We got a new washing machine! We’re frantically getting everything fixed in this flat before we hand in our notice, so that money isn’t taken from our deposit. What this means is that the next tenants will have a lot of shiny new stuff that we should have got sorted a lot earlier. Oh well.
Facebook eh? What a trash fire. I saw some scary maps over the course of the week describing the impact of their outage, particularly WhatsApp. I find it terrifying how many people rely on one company for all their online communication.
I didn’t exchange on my flat this week despite saying I would last week. My solicitor hasn’t been contactable at all. Maybe I’ll be able to get in touch with them this week? Who knows. This probably means I need to pay an extra unnecessary month of central London rent 🎉
Despite the irritating house news, I had a lovely week in Wales! It was very relaxing, and despite not really making a lot of plans I had a great time. Here’s me enjoying a cold Stella in a hot tub.
It was Luke’s birthday while we were away, we went for a walk and had scones. Happy birthday, Luke!
Riley (Jenn and Chris’s cat) came with us. It was bittersweet spending a week with a cat.
I played with him in boxes a lot, which I used to do with Tootsie. By the end of the week, he was pretty chill with all of us and he’s a cute little lad.
We ran a development kitchen (which is turning into a holiday staple) where you pick a food item and try as many ways of making it as possible to see which is best. We did onion rings in the past (tempura batter with sparkling water was best) and this time we did chips and mayonnaise.
For me, the best chips were parboiled, frozen, and then deep-fried. Do not make mayonnaise with Olive Oil, it’s very bitter. Charlotte’s garlic mayo sticking to vegetable oil was amazing though.
I drove an automatic for the first time, it’s very easy, there’s barely anything to do. We managed to avoid queues for petrol on the way home 😬 though driving a 7-seater through the middle of Knightsbridge and Westminster was maybe a mistake.
I’m going to exchange on my flat next week! I’m excited but it still doesn’t quite feel real, I’m almost waiting for another issue to crop up. Hopefully, we’ll complete a week or two into September 🤞
I popped over to Gallal’s (my new flat is about a minute’s walk from his house). We had a few beers and I helped him set up his 3D printers, it was fun! I haven’t done any printing since before the pandemic, I forgot how magical it is turning on a machine and getting an object out.
On Wednesday I went into the office, the highlight was having a couple of Jägerbombs with Arjun for the first time in forever. We snuck off to the bar so that we didn’t have to buy a big round of them (sorry everyone else) and it was delightful.
I think this was the longest work week I’ve ever had. Tuesday felt like Friday.
We’ve gone away! I’m writing this weeknote from a lovely big house in Wales, on a big wooden table, in a cute kitchen with an AGA. I’m enjoying myself a lot.
We went walking for a couple of hours, investigated a castle, and rescued a sheep who’d managed to get out of the field. I learned how to safely identify some mushrooms but I’m not confident enough to actually pick or eat any – someone dying would be pretty awkward and probably spoil the holiday.
There’s a hot tub, I had some champagne in it. Bliss.
I finally have an actual mortgage offer! I started applying back in June. It’s taken this long due to several failed attempts (deck access), some very inefficient people, and the lender checking all the fire safety docs extremely fastidiously. I did a little dance around the flat when I heard.
Now my solicitor is being the blocker. They’re being quite slow and it’s looking a little unrealistic that we’ll complete by the end of September. This doesn’t impact me too much, but it will cost the sellers more in stamp duty on their next place 😬
I bought some boxes! I’m a big fan of packing at a nice slow pace, far earlier than is really reasonable. Everything feels more real now, I can’t wait to get out of this flat.
I timed my office trip this week to coincide with Mel being there, and we had our first in-person mentoring session for around 18 months. Mel’s an ace person and I’ve missed grabbing coffee with her.
My crossword leaderboard website is three months old, and several of us have managed to do the crossword solidly over that time (as evidenced by our shiny three-month awards). If you’re an FT person who likes crosswords then let me know!
We went for a meal to celebrate Charlotte’s continued recovery, it was lovely to do something that feels normal. We’ve been slowly increasing the length of our walks to ease us both back in – we’ve been very lazy since the surgery.
I’ve been a professional software engineer for 13.7 years as of today! Thanks Arjun for the reminder – I forgot to add it to my calendar.
I’m getting a real hankering to play Minecraft again, and might play a bit while I’m away and have more time. The first 1.18 snapshot was released and the new caves and mountains look amazing.
I spent two days in the office this week and got to hang out with a lot of lovely people. I spent a bunch of time collaborating on architecture diagrams for some future work – I think that this is where being in a shared physical space really works for me. Two days in the office is exhausting though, I’m going to have to slowly build up to being in for longer periods.
We finally booked a countryside trip with some friends and will be staying in a big house later in September. I was originally going to work for some of it, but have treated myself to a full week off. I’m excited about having a break but rapidly running out of annual leave.
I signed and sent the contract and deed to my solicitor for the flat I’m buying. Technically we can’t exchange yet because I’m still waiting for a formal mortgage offer (my broker thinks it should come through next week 🤞). I guess I should be pleased that they’re so fastidiously checking the fire safety documents.
We started watching American Horror Story. I’m not very good with horror, might be one to watch more slowly so there’s recovery time between episodes.
We went for dinner, a show, and drinks with Tammy and I had a great time. Co&Ko was delicious (Korean small plates), and I got a little too enthusiastic with the drinking and having long chats with strangers.
I paid for the fun with a horrible hangover and finding out that someone stole my debit card and withdrew £400 🤦 I’ve been refunded with a slapped wrist from my bank. The kind Lloyds fraud division employee reminded me that it’s important to be security-conscious and cover my pin when inebriated.
We rewatched all of Good Omens on our hangover day. I think it was even better on a second watch.
I popped into the office on Wednesday, I miss seeing people and now that I’ve stopped isolating I might try and head in weekly. I caught up with Kara and it was lovely.
I’ve got a copy of my contract and deed! Things are actually moving with my flat purchase! It’s only taken 6 months so far 😓
I’ve been playing with Architect a bit, I have a bit of a knowledge gap when it comes to AWS and it’s been a nice easy introduction to it. I found myself writing a bunch of extra code to avoid lots of boilerplate, which maybe I don’t need to. Also, I can’t get Architect to populate environment variables in production, which is odd.
We’ve been watching a lot of Castle, it’s very similar to Bones but less good and more relaxing.
I had a first career coaching session at work, I spoke a lot about motivation, it’s really difficult to know whether my issues are related to all the outside-of-work stuff I’m dealing with, or whether I need to rethink my role a bit (or a mix of both). My coach gave me some useful tools to help me work this out before our next session.
We went for some drinks at Gallal’s and I had a lot of Monster and white wine. My body isn’t used to that much caffeine anymore and I didn’t get home until 5 am 😬 We both deserve a very lazy weekend.
We’re no longer isolating, which is great! Leigh-Ann popped round with her baby, he’s very cute – all smiles and laughter. It was nice to talk to another human in person. On Saturday Charlotte and I did a circuit of Archbishop’s Park which really tired her out, I think full recovery might take quite a while.
Looking after someone is exhausting. I have no idea how parents do it, I have a willing, cooperative person who can rationally explain their needs to me and I’m still so so tired. The days are going quickly at least, it’s harder to be bored when every 5–10 minutes between meetings is dedicated to caring.
Speaking of work I had such a great week, I opened seven whole PRs and I feel like I achieved something. I also paired a bunch with Gallal and Estefanía, which was delightful, and wrote part of a proposal for a new longer-term piece of work which hopefully I’ll get to stay involved with 🤞
Charlotte and I are geniuses (at least according to the NYT Spelling Bee). Pretty proud of ourselves.
Alice mentioned the Holmes and Rahe stress scale to me a while ago. It’s based on a late 60s study that correlates life changes/stress to illness. A score of 300 or more as an “80% chance of health breakdown within the next 2 years”. I’m at 442 😬
Again via Alice, I found out about whostyles which is a possible fun direction for the continued Indiewebifying of my website.
I’m still drawing maps for D&D . I’ve set myself a much bigger task to map out my region’s capital city, which is going to take considerably longer than the 1–2 hours I normally spend on a map. I’ve drawn and inked the city walls and am starting to lay out the roads, I’m going to stitch it together digitally as I only have an A4 scanner.
I’m still very sad about Tootsie and probably will be for the foreseeable, thanks for all your kind words ❤️
We still need to settle the ridiculous vet bills that came with the end of his uninsurable illness 😬 very thankful that we have a healthcare system for humans at least.
Speaking of the healthcare system, Charlotte had a (routine) surgery this week. She’s fine but still mostly bed-ridden so a lot of my time is spent looking after her, which is quite nice so far tbh. The only place I’m useless is changing dressings – I’m really not very good with blood and/or wounds. My skin is crawling just thinking about it.
We’ve been watching a lot of TV which is all that’s really manageable for Charlotte. We binged the first season of Bones and are onto the second. We also started season 2 of The Circle, which is obviously excellent.
This whole thing has made us want to move all the sooner, I hate our current flat even more now that Toots isn’t in it. Things are still going at a snail’s pace with my flat purchase and I’m spending far too much time chasing both my solicitor and mortgage broker.
In the spare moments I do have, I’m very much getting back into D&D and have spent most of my free time doing some planning and worldbuilding for the couple of groups that I Dungeon Master for. It’s such nice escapism.
I’ve also been drawing a lot as part of this, mostly maps of nearby towns that my players are likely to visit. These aren’t as detailed as some of my older maps but I’m still pleased with them. You can click these for interactive versions:
We’ve gone from a great week to an utterly shitty one.
On Tuesday our cat, Tootsie, died at the vet. We were on our way to see him after a stressful day of phone calls. I’m devastated, it was all so sudden.
He wasn’t really eating after we got back from our trip. At first, we thought he was annoyed with us but got worried after a second day so we took him to the vet where he stayed overnight. Eventually one of the scans revealed that he had a mass in his chest and fluid on his lungs, and he deteriorated quickly from there.
I took some time off work. I keep crying.
We gave him a lovely couple of years, he was a happy cat and spent his time following me and Charlotte around the house purring. I feel really grateful for the little bit of time we had with him.
We knew a rapid decline was a possibility, Toots being an FIV /FeLV cat. Knowing that his immune system was fucked didn’t make it any easier though. We thought we had a year or two more.
I feel like I’m rambling. I’m just going to share some pictures of the best cat.
This is going to be a long weeknote because I haven’t crammed this much into a week since before COVID hit. Buckle up.
Aided by Luke’s excellent map, we explored more of Edinburgh. We walked up to Arthur’s Seat (we’re very unfit but I blame it on forgetting to have my morning coffee before heading up).
We found out that there was a Chihuahua cafe round the corner from our hotel and we visited on a whim. The result is probably one of the more ridiculous pictures of me ever taken. Just look at us. The pups were quite sweet though and I got to eat cake.
We left Edinburgh on Monday, hiring a car to drive out to Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park. We checked into the Airbnb and went on a gentle walk up to a nearby reservoir in the hills.
On Tuesday we drove to Arrochar and hiked for 12 miles, partway up Beinn Narnain and along Glen Loin to a dam. It was tough going at times but well worth it for the views. We ate sandwiches by the dam and felt very wholesome.
On Wednesday we drove up to Callander and walked along the shore of Loch Lubnaig, which is stunning. If we come back to this area I think it’ll be to stay in the cabins by this loch.
We visited Balloch on the way home and decided to try kayaking, which was loads of fun. My shorts got extremely wet and I had to drive home in my pants. I decided not to include Charlotte’s sneaky pics of this, you’re welcome.
Thursday was another travelling day, we packed up and waved goodbye to Loch Lomond to drive Falkland in Fife. It’s a beautiful little village – really picturesque. Once we got to Falkland we took a bus to nearby Newburgh for a distillery tour.
The Lindores Abbey Distillery was so interesting! It’s a super new distillery (they’ve only just released their first 3-year-old single malt) but the ruined abbey on their site is mentioned in the first written record of whisky being distilled in Scotland. The visitor centre is really geared towards tours and tastings, and we tried some excellent whisky and Aqua Vitae. We drank some of our purchases on the bus ride home and then some more after our pub dinner.
On Friday I felt (deservedly) a bit worse for wear, we cancelled our long hike up the Lomond Hills and instead we had a late wake-up and a more gentle walk along the coast from Kinghorn to Kirkaldy. We saw some seals basking off the coast in the hot sun, and later got completely drenched in a thunderstorm. Fish and chips at the end made it worthwhile.
Saturday was our travel home day. We packed all our damp clothes, dropped off the hire car in Edinburgh, and spent ~5 hours on a train. Tootsie was very pleased to see us when we got back and curled up between us to sleep.
So that was easily the nicest week I’ve had since the pandemic started. There are more pictures below if you’re interested 🙂
Here’s a gallery of various pictures taken over the week.
I’m fully vaccinated! I got my second shot of Pfizer on Monday with no side effects. St Thomas’ was super efficient again, I was jabbed within 3 minutes of arriving.
I had one of the best work weeks I’ve had for years. Gallal and I spent most of the week pairing on an experiment looking into server-driven UI. A lot of this was defining a schema for potential new API responses and it’s right up my street.
On Wednesday we both went into the office and I can’t remember the last time I felt this useful and productive. We decided to treat ourselves to a little pint in The Sea Horse after work to escape the torrential rain.
I added a Notes section to this site, I’m unsure if it’ll stick around but I’m experimenting with putting things like likes/bookmarks/reposts on this website. It allows me to send webmentions with different types (e.g. “like”). The next step is to see if I can automatically syndicate these to Twitter.
I’m in Edinburgh! I really needed a break and I already feel a lot more relaxed, we’ll be here for a few days over the weekend and then out near Loch Lomond for the rest of the week.
I’ve had a lot of good whisky and food. We haven’t really done much other touristy stuff yet except visiting Camera Obscura while it rained heavily outside. By next week I’ll hopefully have got a lot of good hiking in.
Bye 👋 here’s us on a thermographic camera.
I went to play Rounders with the Product & Tech department at the Financial Times. It was lovely, it’s been so long since I’ve seen many of my colleagues in person. I also got to meet some of the people who have joined since Lockdown began (they’re all just as nice in person as online), and I met Anna’s baby, she’s very cute.
We always have amazing weather for Rounders, this week has been beautiful if a little melty. We’ve been giving Toots a cold wet flannel, and he seems to enjoy it.
I had my mid-year review finally, it seems I’m doing well at my job but it is fairly clear that I’m burning out. I got great feedback on the last promotion round which makes me feel more chill about working on this one.
I need to stretch my technical muscles more too – I have a tendency to pick up any people issues or reactive work that crops up, and I have a lot to offer on the more technical side of my role. Generally positive but with some useful stuff to work on is an ideal feedback round 👍
I went on a stag do! We spent most of the weekend in an Airbnb playing board games with some light drinking, which was exactly my speed and didn’t feel COVID-unsafe. We also cooked a bit and didn’t spend a ridiculous amount of money, which was great.
The best new game I played was Fury of Dracula, it’s a really fun co-op game with one player taking the role of Dracula and trying to win by beating all of the hunters.
The only stag-like thing we did was going to a shooting and archery place. It turns out that shooting guns is not only more fun than I expected, but I’m weirdly good at it and got the highest score on each range.
I’m still pretty exhausted. We did very little this week – we’re being a little more careful after our COVID scare and isolation. We really don’t want to have to cancel our trip to Scotland in August 😬
What I did do was go and visit my family for my grandma’s birthday, the first time we’ve been out of London in a while. The weather held up and it was such a nice change of pace spending the day relaxing in her garden.
Every summer the Product & Tech department at the FT play rounders in Regents Park, it’s a lot of fun and it’s back this year! We’re going to spectate and I’m really excited to see some friends in person. I’ll hopefully get to meet a bunch of the people who have joined since Lockdown too.
I’m still coding a lot in my spare time, slowly turning this website into a reusable Hugo theme. I think I’m just doing stuff for the sake of it, like maybe adding integration tests to your personal website is a bit much?
I committed actual money to my flat purchase for searches, things are finally happening! I first viewed this place four months ago which feels like forever.
The closer I get to buying a flat, the more I hate the one I’m living in. By the time we move it’ll have no redeeming features in my eyes.
I’m melting.
It was a very uneventful week, mostly due to isolation.
We went back to work after our brief non-holiday, feeling really run-down and tired. I’m struggling to sleep before 2 am and just not getting enough, and I think that’s the main issue. I took some time off sick towards the end of the week just to try and catch up a bit. On Saturday night all my progress was undone – I got two hours of sleep because someone outside kept ringing our buzzer 😩
I’m stupid for caving, but I volunteered to lead the promotion round again. We’re running out of time quickly, there are quite a few of us principal engineers on holiday, and I still have the process in my head from last time, so it kind of makes sense. RIP my stress levels.
I spent a lovely impromptu evening playing Northgard with Gallal and Luke. It’s really fun, and each game only lasts around an hour. It feels like it’s easy to learn and difficult to master, and the graphics are pretty. This one isn’t particularly resource-intensive, but I keep being impressed at how well my MacBook can run games.
Gonna sick in my mouth a bit saying this, but football might be coming home? I think we as a country will be unbearable whichever way it goes. My real dilemma is whether I actually want Italy to win because winning Eurovision and the Euros in the same year would be lovely for them.
I found out via Webmention (this technology is just so cool) that a nice person in Scotland follows my blog, James’ Coffee Blog has lots of useful info and tips.
I wrote a long blog post about Webmention which explains how to add them to a static website like this one. I’m pleased with it, and I’m intending to get more involved in some IndieWeb stuff. Nothing public yet, but I started building a Node.js-based Webmention receiver to better understand the spec and how everything fits together.
We got contact traced. We saw a friend after work and they got a positive test result the next day, which means we have to isolate for 10 days. We had a big shop delivered.
We had to cancel our holiday plans as a result. We were going to a house in the country with some friends, it really sucks that we can’t go – the timing is terrible. Also typical that we can go an entire pandemic without incident and then have to isolate the day before a trip. Oh well, we’re still taking the time off as it’s much needed.
On a positive note, cancelling our rental car paid for the 18 bottles of Champagne we ordered for the trip. It’ll last us a bit longer now too.
I don’t have COVID. Charlotte’s test results haven’t arrived yet but hopefully she’s negative too.
My mortgage deck access appeal was unsuccessful, so moving onto application #3. It feels like maybe it’s a good thing, because some new rates came onto the market and this new mortgage is considerably cheaper overall, so I think this is positive? Also, they’re fine with deck access so 🤞
A lot of TV is happening in isolation.
We’re watching Too Hot to Handle, which is a nice level of trashy. I think Cam looks like Simon Legg and Cillian Murphy had a baby. I want to be in a beautiful villa in the sun please, but with nicer people.
We picked The West Wing back up (it’s my first time, no spoilers please). Holy shit the final episodes of Season 4 though! I’m not used to this show making me feel so on-edge.
I’ve been enjoying Loki so much. Charlotte refuses to watch anything Marvel-related, I can’t get enough of it and I recognise at this point I’m just going to keep throwing money at Disney until they stop making them or I die.
Charlotte and I started playing Planet Coaster together, we both liked Roller Coaster Tycoon as kids and this feels like a spiritual successor. It’s fun so far, but way more involved than Two Point Hospital.
I added a shortcut to switch between next/previous weeknotes (to be more IndieWeb). You can use the arrow buttons at the top of this post, or you can use the left/right arrow keys.
Charlotte’s birthday was nice, we ate and drank a lot and ended up doing some slightly drunk shopping on Oxford Street.
We saw Charlotte’s dad, we made him a giant Bounty for father’s day. The ratio of coconut to chocolate could have been better, but generally I think it was a success!
The flats above the flat I’d like to buy have deck access. I didn’t know that’s what it was called, but I learned the exciting way that lenders sometimes don’t like to give people mortgages for flats with deck access. We’re currently seeing if we can appeal this because it’s a central London flat. I don’t know what an appeal entails, but my mortgage broker thinks it’s worthwhile 🤷
The New York Times mini crossword has a leaderboard which you can add friends to and compare times. Annoyingly it only shows the times for the current day and there’s no way to get historical data for your group of people.
A few of us at work do the crossword daily, I decided to set up a small website that periodically scrapes the leaderboard and saves our times. Of course over the week I got far too into this idea and built a lot of extra stuff into the site.
We now have different awards to unlock and you can browse through averages and stuff. I’m pretty proud of it! If you’d like to join in then drop me an email or Slack me 🙂 (or check out the #crosswords channel if you work at the FT).
We went to Pub in the Park in Dulwich with Tammy and Alison as part of birthday celebrations. It was alright, but not sure if it was worth the money. I did get to see Monica Galetti and the food was really good. I’ve never been to Dulwich Village, it has big rich family vibes.
If you absolutely had to sleep with one or the other, would you go for Boris Johnson or Matt Hancock?
We took Tootsie to the park for the first time on his lead. He didn’t leave his carrier, bless him, I think it was all a bit much. We’ll try again some other time as he didn’t seem traumatised and I think it’s nice if he has occasional chances to be outside.
I’m posting this early because it’s Charlotte’s birthday on Sunday and I’m gonna be pretty busy all weekend. Today (Saturday) we’re going to see her dad and brother for a meal, and then tomorrow we’ll be drinking a lot of Champagne and playing mini-golf.
Wednesday marked 15 years since my dad died. We’re rapidly approaching the point where I’ll only have known him for half of my life, which is wild. Becky (sister) and I had a nice phone call and chatted about it, it definitely impacts us less year on year which feels sad somehow.
I went to view my flat a second time, and have renewed excitement about the whole process (it’s lovely). I have a solicitor, mortgage application stuff is happening, I was very happy until my first mortgage application got rejected due to Halifax’s maximum borrowing amount. Oh well, onto the next lender!
Since I moved to London 7 years ago I’ve paid ~£137,000 in rent. Trying not to get too annoyed about that.
I played Catan for the first time in years, I forgot how unbalanced it can be (especially with 5 players). I came second, which I’m happy with.
My website tweaking continues, this week I spent a few evenings on and off implementing search! It was a fun challenge because this is a static Hugo website; I had to get creative.
I decided an acceptable fallback for my site’s core experience was a Google site search, so if JavaScript doesn’t load for whatever reason you can still find stuff relatively easily. The search box (in the header up there ☝️) by default sends your query off to Google with a sitesearch=rowanmanning.com
parameter.
For the enhanced search, I decided to try out Lunr to index and search my content. Hugo is super powerful, I hacked together a JSON content type for my home page which is just a dump of all my site content. I lazy-load this JSON when someone uses search to keep the initial page weight down and create an index with Lunr.
For the displaying of search results, I used the Government Digital Service Accessible autocomplete, it’s so well put together and I found it painless to set up (well done GDS team). I custom styled it to fit in better with the rest of this website.
I set up a couple of keyboard shortcuts (try typing /
or cmd+k
) using Hotkeys.js – I initially tried building something myself but then realised something stable and well tested made more sense.
All of this is the first JavaScript I’ve added to this website, and everything still works without it 👍
I started working on a longer-form blog post about implementing Webmention, it’s going to be quite a big read I think 😬 - hopefully chee is OK waiting for a while.
I’m applying for a mortgage! I never thought I’d be so happy to see a fire safety form, but the flat I’d like to buy now has an EWS1 form and I might print it and frame it. I’ve instructed a solicitor and I’m finally beginning the long process of handing over all my personal details ready to be scrutinised.
I suddenly feel guilty about perfectly ordinary things in my bank statements 😬
I unlocked a new character in Gloomhaven! Both of my previous characters have been ranged spellcasters, and this one is all about melee combat and it’s really difficult. I nearly died instantly but it was fun. My board game group only really have time to play once a month at the moment so I find myself looking forward to our sessions a lot more.
It’s still a bit tough getting excited about work, but I’ve pushed myself to be a bit more technical over the last week or so and I think it’s helping (slowly).
Hasn’t the sun been amazing? We went and drank champagne on Jenn and Chris’s balcony and it was delightful.
We finished watching Lucifer because of sunk cost. It was predictably cringey.
I’ve had a whale of a time implementing Webmentions on this website. Thank you chee for introducing me to them! So far I’ve only implemented receiving mentions, but publishing is on its way. Here are some dull technical details (I might write a long-form post later):
This is a static site built with Hugo and hosted on GitHub Pages, so it’d be difficult to implement my own /webmention
endpoint. I set up Webmention.io as a receiver for now.
Most of the interactions on the stuff I write comes from Twitter, so I set up Bridgy to listen for any tweets mentioning this website, or likes and retweets on my tweets about this website.
For displaying webmentions on my site, I took some inspiration from this guide which outlines how to use GitHub actions to poll for new mentions. I now have an action that runs every 30 minutes to fetch new mentions from the Webmention.io API and save them as JSON in the repo. My script isn’t pretty but it works 🙂
My page templates now look for a matching JSON file and render webmentions beneath the content. You can see this on any of my blog posts or weeknotes (see Writing a Friendly Readme). I’m excited about it:
OK, that’s enough weeknoting. We’re going to take Tootsie to the park on his harness for the first time 🥺❤️👋
I spent a lot of the bank holiday weekend enjoying the sun in Archbishop’s Park. It was exactly the right level of busy, and I managed not to burn.
On Monday I saw Shem, my brother, and met his partner for the first time. It was lovely to sit and have coffee with them by the south bank, I find it really hard to get past small talk during virtual catch-ups and it’s been far too long since Shem and I talked properly. He’s finally moved out of my mum’s house and I think it’s doing him a lot of good.
I took a short notice day off on Tuesday because I really just couldn’t face going to work. Worrying eh? I’m grateful I work somewhere where I can be open about my mental state, and the extra day definitely helped. I spent a lot of the day outside walking.
My attitude to work improved a lot throughout the week, and I felt productive at times. I’m getting to be in a few meetings where we discuss actual code and that’s great. I also ran what I think was a good introductory session to our Engineering Progression Working Group, which ended the week nicely.
On Friday I went into the office again, mostly to see Lee, which was a delight. We went on a very rainy walk to Borough Market for lunch, I was very underdressed for rain in my shorts and T-shirt.
I played some board games in person! It was so much fun, we played Space Base but the highlight for me was PitchCar. It’s a super simple racing game where you flick your car around a track to complete three laps but you have to avoid falling off or knocking another player off. I laughed a lot and it’s fun regardless of whether you’re in the lead (I wasn’t).
I had my first jab, I’m part-vaccinated! As a kid, I was super scared of needles, which I told the person injecting me, but it was fine 🎉 The St Thomas’ vaccination centre was so efficient – I’m pretty impressed. It’s also nice being able to pop across the road for it. My arm aches but no other side effects.
I feel like I’ve been near-useless at work this week. I just can’t get motivated, then I guilt spiral because I feel like I’m letting down my colleagues by getting very little finished. So that’s fun. I think part of the issue is too much context-switching, and I need to cancel a few meetings and get better at carving out time to get focused work done.
Charlotte was busy every evening this week so I played a lot of Minecraft. I set up a server with the Create mod, Luke and I have been building some big contraptions to automate producing resources. I love how much the automation in this mod feels in keeping with vanilla Minecraft.
I’m gonna go into the office again next week because Lee is coming down from Sheffield and I haven’t seen him in 18 months. I’m genuinely excited for some more small talk with whoever else is in.
Charlotte discovered an AMAZING thing we can do with the blender via the internet. You chop up and freeze a couple of bananas, then blend them with a little bit of milk until they’re completely smooth and slightly frothy. The texture is exactly like ice cream and it’s delicious.
The weather on Friday and Saturday has made me a lot happier, and next week at work feels more achievable already. Maybe I just needed a bit of sun in my life? I’m gonna go and have a few drinks outside.
I went into the office for the first time in over a year. The day started really well, I got loads done and felt really productive, but by the end of the day I was exhausted, overstimulated, and barely able to think. I’m going to try and go in once a week to ease myself back into office work, I really enjoyed seeing a few familiar faces.
We did another Minecraft “speedrun” and did pretty well this time. We used a stable version of the game, a random world seed, and actually killed the dragon this time. We’re still pretty unorganised and not working as a group so we’re going to try a different strategy next time. I’m enjoying these a lot!
My board game group has been playing the My City campaign, which is pretty relaxing as competitive games go. You’re building a city with little Tetris-like buildings, and it’s really satisfying when you manage to combine all your buildings neatly. I recommend it if you want something quite relaxed and low-effort.
It was Eurovision! We hosted four others at our flat and went with our usual format of having food and drink from as many countries as possible. We overestimated how much food we’d need and we were full by halfway through the running order. I love Eurovision, I particularly love that the UK managed to finish at zero. I ate enough food to remember the whole evening and not have a hangover, well done me.
Partway through Eurovision something, blew a fuse and tripped the power off. We got it back on quickly and assumed it was the fairy lights we have up in the living room. However the next day we discovered that the oven wasn’t working 😬 I really hope it doesn’t take weeks to get fixed.
I think I’ve finally trained myself to enjoy coriander. It still tastes like soap but I find myself adding more and more of it to various recipes because I want that taste.
I finished and published my blog post on the treasure hunt that Glynn and I ran. I’m pleased with how it came out and I’ve had some nice feedback. I definitely find it easier to get into the flow of writing after getting into the habit of writing weeknotes.
A few of the people from the Minecraft server I’m part of did a “speed” run one evening. It went spectacularly badly – we used an unstable beta version of the game, it was infuriatingly laggy, and the dragon fight at the end just bugged out and we couldn’t complete it. It’s really fun when we do these but we’re by no means fast or efficient. The new cave generation is really cool though.
I really need to get rid of a mattress, and the Lambeth waste services website is just broken. I’ve tried it in lots of different browsers, I’ve tried tweaking the page via the debugger to get it to work, it’s quite annoying. After waiting 10 days for an email response they apologised and suggested I just call them instead 🤦
I don’t want to talk about house stuff. It’s moving very slowly is all.
We watched the whole latest season of The Circle (UK), I kind of wish I felt shame at how much I enjoyed it, but I just don’t. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt so invested in reality TV. If you want some gripping trash then I highly recommend it, it kept me on the edge of my seat until the very end. What a welcome distraction from life and the fact that all my other TV watching is cooking at the moment.
We went for pizza in some friends’ garden, they have a small pizza oven and it’s amazing! I had such a lovely time, however, I didn’t eat enough pizza and got blackout drunk, so the latter half of the evening is patchy at best. I spent all of the next day in a pit of hungover anxiety. I’m really far too old for this shit and I need to re-learn my limits after a relatively dry lockdown.
We went to Wahaca with Leigh-Ann and Andy and met their baby, Arthur. He’s very small and squished up and looks like an old man. The South Bank is rammed nowadays and I’m kind of glad to be moving somewhere less touristy.
I’ll hopefully have a little clarity on my flat purchase soon! It turns out that my mortgage broker works for the same large firm that manages the building I want to buy a flat in, which has shortened the chain of communication considerably. So I should have some more concrete dates on cladding issues being fixed as we now have a direct Building Manager > Broker line rather than Building Manager > Current Owners > Estate Agent > Me > Broker.
I found out the painful way that I’m allergic to something in Apple AirPods Pro 😬 I had what I thought was an ear infection ages ago, stopped using headphones because they hurt to put in, and it eventually cleared itself up. I used them (with brand new tips) earlier this week and had an almost immediate reaction (apparently so do a bunch of people). It’s almost better now and I bought some non-silicone replacement tips which I’ll try when I’m feeling brave. I also used it as an excuse to replace my very old wired over-ear headphones with AKG N60NCs which so far are great – the active noise cancelling pretty much blocks out all the train screeching from Waterloo. Work is a lot more peaceful and I’m finding it easier to focus.
I tested myself (negative again) and went to visit my grandma and mum. It was so lovely to see them, but there’s a constant stressor while I’m there because my family are basically ignoring every COVID rule there is. I guess it’s a little different out of the city but I find myself biting my tongue a bit.
Are we all looking forward to “friendly contact, intimate contact, between friends and family” being restored? 🤦
I finished the first draft of my blog post about the virtual treasure hunt that Glynn and I ran. Hopefully, with some feedback, it’ll be published in the next week or so. I’m mostly pleased I got a draft finished – I’d definitely been procrastinating to avoid it.
It was Tootsie’s birthday this week. We use his date of adoption and we think he’s 6 now. We celebrated by buying him a toy he’s not very interested in and making him a delicious cake that he inhaled.
It’s been interesting to see Basecamp implode over the last week. These snowflake CEOs eh?
I’m still going strong on the crosswords, and I’m finally able to beat Jenn relatively regularly on the NYT Mini. I made a Slack channel at work to discuss clues and it feels like a nice little group.
I’ve been doing more socially, which is lovely but exhausting.
I caught up with Andrew and Ed in a pub garden. I found out that Andrew’s partner is working on Bridgerton season 2 which has elevated her coolness by a lot tbh.
We went for a 10-mile walk with a few friends from Dover to Deal, I’m unfit, achy, and sun-kissed but very happy.
Kara started writing weeknotes which I’m pleased about – I’m not reading much else at the moment, little peeks into peoples’ lives is currently more my speed than actual news.
I had the week off, and I’m feeling rested. I naturally wake up and go to bed really late – my brain works better in the evening. It’s going to be hard switching back to waking up earlier 😬
My house move looks to be progressing! Fixing the cladding is underway, and also the new RICS guidance means that I should be able to apply for a mortgage anyway, as this building shouldn’t need an EWS1 form. I’m doing this, it’s exciting!
We forgot how to cook because we’ve ordered food or eaten out far too many times this week. We’ve had five pizzas this week. That’s too many pizzas.
We met up with Jennifer, Chris, and Luke at HOSB (members club but profits go to the homeless so I didn’t feel gross being there). It was lovely seeing people, we’re trying to plan a trip away, and aligning calendars for the summer is already a pain in the ass.
I’ve spent nearly 20 hours on Assassins Creed so far. When did it become normal for games to tell you how much time you’ve wasted in them? I don’t want to know.
I’ve been writing weeknotes for half a year now! I’m pleased with myself for keeping it up. Some weeks are dull but there’s always something to write.
I’m not looking forward to being back at work, feeling some Sunday dread. I like my job on balance, but would rather not have one right now. I’m sure I’ll be fine after a day or two back.
I got a haircut, got myself a negative COVID test result, and spent a bunch of time with friends. I really needed that.
I have a week off coming up and focus at work has been a struggle in the lead-up. We don’t have any concrete plans for our time off but the weather is supposed to be nice so probably a lot of walking and sitting in parks.
I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I’ve warmed to it now. I’m very rusty with gaming and my reactions aren’t as good as they used to be. I’ve died an awful lot.
I drunkenly hugged a homeless man after a half-hour chat with him. I don’t remember the conversation and hugging someone was a stupid thing to do – I haven’t hugged a friend or family member in over a year. Oops. Time to get re-tested I think 😬 at least I’m pretty certain I didn’t have coronavirus at the time
Charlotte and I have been doing crosswords a lot lately, I have a book of The Times crosswords from years ago and they’re just about the right level of difficulty. The FT ones are too difficult. I’m also playing The New York Times mini crossword daily, and have a leaderboard with some friends. You can add me here if you want to see how slow I am.
Some good news on the house front! The work to remedy the cladding issues on the flat I like is going to start this month. It’s not clear how long this is going to add to the process and they still need to get an EWS1 form after it’s done, but fingers crossed. I’m still viewing other places at a slower pace, but nothing has wowed me yet.
Alice is back at work, we had a little catch-up and it’s so great to see her. I also had a lovely scheduled impromptu chat with Cait, I’m looking forward to returning to the office for a bunch of reasons, but mainly not having to schedule bumping into someone and catching up.
I’m really fed up with my hair, it’s just too big. Based on how many meetings I have, I might need to wait until Wednesday to get it cut 😩
We cleaned and tidied the house for the first time in a while, because Luke came over again – he’s viewing houses nearby and is in our bubble. I’ve promised myself for the millionth time that I’m just going to keep up with the housework and not let it get bad again.
I made a pretty great fry up. Hot cooking tip: chives make a fry up extremely fancy.
I started playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I haven’t played a triple-A game in forever and it’s a bit overwhelming tbh; I don’t think I have the stamina/mental capacity to work out new games any more. Why does every game have an enormous skill tree nowadays? Charlotte’s mum got me it for Christmas so maybe I’ll actually finish this one.
We went on an off licence crawl on Saturday. It’s like a pub crawl but you buy a single can from each off licence on the route and try to drink it before the next one. I shouldn’t feel OK today.
Tootsie’s new feeding schedule is working! I’m so well rested! The only compromise is that he has his breakfast in our bedroom so that he can see that we’re nearby while he’s eating (yeah we need to resolve his separation anxiety too, but one thing at a time).
I bought five extra days of holiday at work, I’m aiming to be more relaxed in 2021 and not burn out before we even reach summer. I’m also blocking out lunchtimes which isn’t a fool-proof plan, but it will hopefully make those midday meeting bookers think twice. You know who you are.
We had a toilet roll delivery and decided to do that thing where you see how many your cat can jump over. Pretty impressed with Tootsie’s performance.
We did a bunch of social things. We hung out with Jennifer and Chris outside and drank my birthday champagne, we also went for a long walk with Gallal and Euan on Monday. Socialising in meatspace is exhausting but lovely and much-needed.
On our walk, we found some wild garlic! They’re always going on about it on Masterchef lately (it’s in season), and once we knew what to look for we saw it everywhere. We picked some and made it into a delicious pea and wild garlic pasta. Foraging wild garlic while out on a walk is the most wholesome thing I’ve done in at least a year.
I’ve felt a bit more technical at work this week and getting a bit closer to the code. There are three aspects to the role of Principal Engineer on FT.com and, due to some shuffling of tech leads, I’m focusing more on technical oversight at the moment to make sure that our new tech leads feel supported. I’m feeling less fraudulent in this role as a result.
Early in the week, I announced loudly to Charlotte that I did a 900g poo. She was on a work call to her line manager. It’s unclear whether he heard, so that’s fun. I have no idea why I weighed myself before and after using the toilet, I really don’t, but here we are.
My saving’s still going well, I barely spent anything extra last month because I’m very much trying to bolster my deposit and make sure I have a buffer if there are unexpected house fees. We got paid our annual bonuses, which was unexpected but super useful! We treated ourselves to a lot of champagne which was super frivolous but it should last us for ages and you’ve got to treat yourself occasionally you know?
Gallal came and picked up my 3D printers, I’m no longer a 3D printing person. I’m probably going to miss doing it but I’m really pleased to have the extra space.
I had Friday off work and, uncharacteristically for me during lockdown, I fancied coding. After seeing Simon was learning and enjoying Fastify, I decided to have a play with that to make my brain feel active. It’s nice! I found that I was missing Preact for view rendering, so I wrote a small plugin to render views in Preact (via htm).
Great British Menu has started again, and Andi Oliver is presenting permanently which I think is a big improvement. I’m enjoying it more than Masterchef, which I’m just finding a bit repetitive and formulaic during lockdown; maybe it’s because there’s less variety in the challenges when they’re all in the studio?
We had to buy Tootsie an automatic feeder for the mornings because this delightfully cute little asshole will not stop waking me up at 6 am. Training so far has been a success.
My transformation into the boring person who only talks about their house buying process is nearly complete. I can feel it happening but it’s really hard to stop.
The lovely flat I have an offer on has an issue and I can’t currently get a mortgage for it. It’s a lovely older brick building, but not that long ago the owners of the block decided to build some penthouses on top of it. These penthouses are clad in wood and are a fire hazard, so a lender isn’t going to touch these flats. Remedial work is already scheduled, but who knows how long that is going to take 🤷♂️ so on the negative side I’ve got a long wait if I want this place, but I’m not in a rush really. On the positive side, several sellers in the building are pushing the freeholder to hurry up because they’re all trying to sell before the stamp duty holiday is over. I’m vaguely still looking at other places and am only going to bother viewing if they look amazing.
We made a vegan Thai Green Curry, it was ok but I think the ratios in the paste were slightly off because it was very gingery. Also, we only found dried lime leaves and galangal powder; I need to decide whether I care enough about improving it to find fresh lime leaves and galangal.
We did an online rum tasting, which was a lot of fun until the morning after. I don’t remember exactly which my favourite rums were because we spilt something on our scoring sheet. It was weird being on a Zoom call with an array of strangers who are just sat in their houses, but it felt the most pub-like of any online drinking I’ve done in the past year.
I’m selling my 3D printers, which I haven’t touched since the start of the pandemic. I can’t tell if I’m going to regret this in the future, but anywhere I buy will not have space to safely print stuff (resin fumes are very bad for you). In a stroke of luck, I mentioned this to Gallal who has space and was thinking about buying a printer anyway 🎉
I’m still at Laundry Zero, for the second weekend running! I do all the laundry and Charlotte does all the washing up, we both think we’re getting the better deal.
We’re experimenting with Tootsie’s food, making sure he has biscuits available throughout the day to see if he stops nagging us several hours before his feeding times. Mixed success so far. I think this might push him back into overweight territory as he keeps trying to eat a day’s worth of food in one sitting.
My week has been dominated by house viewings. In ~10 days I’ve gone from not being sure whether I can afford to buy, to having an offer accepted on a two-bed flat near Whitechapel 😬 I’m fully expecting something to go wrong and this is maybe far too fast, but I love the place.
I’m currently applying for a mortgage and sorting a solicitor, it’s all very sudden, a little stressful, but mostly exciting. What’s not fun is trying to balance work with fitting in calls/viewings but hopefully this part isn’t for too long. I also hate having to pick up the phone to unknown numbers.
Relatedly we’ve been trimming down some of our belongings, we’ve slowly expanded into our current flat which is pretty big for central London (and far larger than most places in my budget), so there’s been no need or incentive to get rid of stuff for the last two years.
We cleared a lot of clothing storage space, partly via fabric recycling and partly because I bought some vacuum packs. Yes, I’ve become that person who vacuum packs winter jumpers to save space, and it was very satisfying.
Glynn and I have been working on a treasure hunt for our department social for over a month, and on Friday we ran it. It was a huge success, and I had a lot of fun doing it! Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and all the teams managed to complete it. The premise of a virtual treasure hunt is that each clue leads to another, and clues were hidden across department-wide emails, Google Drive, Slack, websites we built, and phone numbers (we set up Twilio responders). The original idea wasn’t ours, Alice ran one before going on parental leave which was also a lot of fun. We’re going to follow up with a blog post, which is a nice chance to collaborate with Glynn some more.
I’ve not been this pumped full of adrenaline in a while; speaking in front of 80+ people is still enough to turn me into a bag of nerves. Afterwards, I was exhausted but happy.
Our CPIO ’s review was “That was the most fun I have had at work in about a year”, which is exactly what we were aiming for.
In an attempt to better organise my work and personal lives, I started using Remember the Milk, a TODO list app. It’s been really helpful so far in planning out my week and I think I’ve been more prepared for things, which has reduced stress. What I’m enjoying about RTM is that it doesn’t try to do too much, so I’m not documenting large parts of my work in a place separate from my team’s Jira board or Google Docs (something I had an issue with in the past with note-taking apps).
I’ve been working at home for a full year now, which is weird. When we move I’m going to focus properly on making a nice working space, as I think even when the office opens I’ll still be working from home more regularly. A huge positive, if I get the flat I’ve offered on, is that the building already has Hyperoptic, imagine not having to tether to your phone all day every day!
Masterchef is back, so that’s something to do a few evenings a week (also good to see Grace Dent in the first quarter-final, we love her). I’m so ready for some easing of lockdown restrictions this time around, I’m bored of routine but lacking the inspiration to make any changes so we sit and alternate between evenings of watching TV or playing Two Point Hospital.
I reached my target weight after about a year of vaguely trying to lose a bit. My natural inclination is to eat far too much food, especially when I’m bored, so I’m pleased with myself. I’m unsure whether it’s sustainable once I can reintroduce pub trips and buying lunch out but I feel more comfortable in my own skin for now (I was an extremely skinny youth) so that’s nice.
East by Meera Sodha continues to be one of the best things we’ve bought over lockdown, every recipe we try is delicious. This week it was mouth-numbing noodles with chilli oil and red cabbage (which it turns out you can also find online). This book has helped so much in trying to reduce our meat consumption. I’m a fan of the numbing/tingling effect of Sichuan peppercorns, does anyone know any other good recipes?
I’m thinking about buying a flat. I’ve never been very good at saving but the lockdowns have hampered my inclination to spend all my money on eating, drinking, and going on holiday. It feels like a very weird and scary thing to do. I grew up in a council house (where my mum still lives) and my ideal would be that the vast majority of housing is social but, considering the actual world we live in, it’d be really nice not to be handing so much of my income to a landlord.
Knowing that I might buy a place and move, I’ve been trying to rethink how much stuff I own. I downloaded Olio because a friend loves it, and started giving some of the stuff that is useful but either unsellable or a pain to try and post. We also finally got around to finding the nearest clothes bank and dropped off the charity bags that have been sitting in our wardrobe for over a year. For the stuff I might want to sell, how do people do this nowadays?
We got some physical photos printed because we don’t have anything like that around the flat (except for Christmas party photo booth pictures). It feels quite nice and nostalgic flicking through actual bits of paper. This is one of my favourites of me and my siblings. I miss them.
We went to an online takeaway-themed celebration of a friend’s pregnancy (not allowed to call it a baby shower as she didn’t want one). Charlotte and I dressed up as fries and ketchup, I think the costumes were a success.
Charlotte went to stay at Luke’s on Saturday (he lives alone and is in our bubble), which meant I had the house to myself for the first time in forever! My new vacuum cleaner was delivered (it’s a Shark one, I love it) so I spent a large portion of the day cleaning the flat and marvelling at how much nicer all our carpets look.
On Saturday night I went to some birthday drinks over hangout. It’s been a while since I’ve felt thoroughly embarrassed at myself after a night of drinking, it was painful in the morning recalling that I performed a striptease on camera – dancing in my McDonalds Fries costume and removing my trousers behind the cardboard. The memory still hurts.
I found out we’re getting our annual bonuses at work for 2020, which is amazing and unexpected news. When the pandemic hit, this was one of the expenses that was dropped to make sure the business could stay afloat. It’s a pleasant surprise to have this extra money after a tough year.
The promotion round at work is over (finally), I was owning the process for Customer Products. Owning means I wasn’t making all the decisions but was responsible for making sure that everything happened at the correct time and that the process was fair and balanced. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve done at work for a long time, and while I think I was never going to be 100% pleased with the outcome I think we did the best we could when I consider all the factors in play (budget, number of applicants, etc). I spent a lot of time after the round documenting the process so that it’s more transparent in future.
It feels like there’s very little to differentiate this week from the last. I’m very bored of the monotony but have been struggling to push myself to do anything in the evening other than binge-watch TV.
I bought a blender recently, at the time it seemed like it was something we really needed, but we’ve since forgotten most of the things that we wanted to blend pre-blender. I settled for making houmous and then ate all of the said houmous.
I sliced my thumb open cleaning the blades on my blender. It’s quite deep, at least I know that they’re sharp. I’m currently having to use my phone like I expect my dad would – holding it in one hand and typing with just my index finger.
I hate cutting myself. It’s not the pain, it’s just the thought of my skin, which is supposed to stay together, having a hole in it. Similar with needles I guess (I’m not looking forward to getting vaccinated tbh and I’m sweating a bit just thinking about it).
This cut reminds me of a time in college during my Art Foundation. I was in the fine art part of the course, and I was cutting and melting together green toy soldiers as some bullshit commentary on war (I hated there having to be a tenuous meaning behind my work which is why I ended up specialising in illustration). The knife I was using slipped and I sliced into the tip of my finger right through the nail, then I came closer to fainting than I ever have in my life and threw up in the tutor’s office.
I perked up a lot after a long walk on Saturday, it makes me so happy when we hit the point in the year when I can go out in just a light jacket or a jumper. There’s a walk along a cycle route down towards Vauxhall which takes us through loads of small parks, and we made plans to drag our balcony bean bags to Archbishop’s Park if the weather holds up.
For the Product & Tech (my department) social at work, Glynn and I are making a treasure hunt to commemorate a year of remote working. Putting together clues has been the most fun I’ve had in ages, and it’s been lovely bouncing ideas off of each other. Side note: can we talk about how stylish Glynn’s Twitter profile is!? It’s beautiful. What an icon.
I hired a car and got out of London for the first time in months. It wasn’t for a fun reason, I went to my grandad’s funeral, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy being out in the countryside again. The service was all outdoors at a green burial place so it felt safe, and the sun shone for most of it.
Aside from funerals being sad, it was lovely seeing a lot of my extended family at a distance. I miss everyone a lot, and we chatted for as long as we could before it got too cold to be out. I went on a long drive afterwards to nowhere particular while I had a legitimate excuse to be out on the road.
In incredibly shitty news, the trial I was supposed to be a witness in next week has been delayed again until January 2022. I’ve spent the last few weeks mentally building myself up to this, and to have it pulled out from under me is pretty devastating. All the energy and preparation I’d put in has just kind of dissipated; I feel a bit hollow.
There was quite a lot of drinking this weekend.
On Friday it was Keran’s leaving drinks at work; it’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed a post-work social this much. Keran’s a great engineer, has been a really important person in pushing the FT’s diversity and inclusion, and she’s a super fun person to hang out with. I’m gonna miss her (You should try and hire her if your company is fully remote or you’re based in Vancouver).
On Saturday our friend Alison had birthday drinks. We did a remote cocktail-making class which was a lot of fun, and then a virtual game night. I needed an evening like this to forget some of the bad news this week.
I’m loving Wandavision. I’m kind of glad I can’t just binge it all. Charlotte hates anything super-hero related, so it’s also some much-needed time to shut myself off from the world with headphones.
Celebrity Best Home Cook is OK, but I’m just never as invested in the celebrity versions of cooking shows.
I’ve been documenting some of our end-of-year review and promotions processes at work. It’s been refreshing to get some deep focus time on a couple of documents, and I feel good about making this part of my job more transparent. It should hopefully help us onboard new principal engineers (I’m really excited that Dawn is moving into my team and I’m gonna get to work with her more closely 🎉)
I’m having a break from boardgames through the first couple of weeks of February. I’ve been playing with the same group weekly for ~4 years, and while I enjoy it a lot, lately I just haven’t had the brainpower to learn new rules or get myself into the state of mind where I can be competitive. I’m hoping a small break will resolve this.
Part of Charlotte’s Christmas present was a box of tasting-sized gins. Now that we’re out of January we decided to spend Saturday evening trying these while we watched Lucifer (I still don’t like it that much after nearly 2 seasons). We developed a drinking game, you have to drink every time:
Chloe Decker says her surname,
A scene contains PG-rated strippers,
A song is played that contains biblical references,
Lucifer hits on someone,
The passage of time is unclear (really you rarely know what time of day it’s supposed to be),
The bad writing makes you groan (I only recommend this rule if you don’t need to do anything for the next few days).
I discovered a cool new life hack1 called “going outside”. On Friday I left the house for the first time this week, I fed the cat in the morning and went for a walk in the sun before work, and my day was so much better for it. I know this isn’t like a super insightful tip, I’m writing it to remind myself that going outside does actually make me a better-functioning person.
At work I had a good chat in my 1:1 with Anna (my line manager / tech director). I’ve been working at the FT for 5 years, but my move into Customer Products (the group that delivers FT.com) was around a year ago.
One of the things that’s been playing on my mind lately is that I was already good friends with a lot of the people in Customer Products before I joined, some of whom I now find in my reporting chain – being involved in decisions about things like career progression for these people is part of my job. I’m managing to compartmentalise, but I do end up scrutinising some of my decisions for bias.
The chat with Anna about this was good. She made it clear that it’s an option for me to change some of my management chain if I think it’s getting in the way. I don’t think it is right now but it’s comforting knowing that I can do this if I feel like I need to. The discussion also prompted me to actually talk to some of the people in question and make some of my boundaries more explicit, I’m left feeling better about this. Who knew talking to people would make things more clear eh?
The Handforth Parish Council Planning & Environment Committee meeting has given me such life this week. It made for more compelling viewing that a lot of my more recent TV watching. If you haven’t had the pleasure then you need to watch this, the best bits:
I love it when the internet jumps on and massively overcommits to something like this. I found myself reading commentary on law and policy on whether Jackie Weaver did, in fact, have the authority.
It was my Birthday on Tuesday, I turned 33. I didn’t make any plans, but ended up having a few nice chats with family. Charlotte baked me an amazing lemon meringue pie which I ate most of over the course of the week.
On Friday we ended our dry and veggie January a little early for a bit of a birthday celebration. My digestive system didn’t agree with the sudden switch back, but it was nice to have wine again.
Tootsie is being extremely cuddly lately, he keeps climbing into bed and I’ll wake up to him purring next to my head. Despite him occasionally being an asshole, I love this cat.
We watched all of Bridgerton over the weekend. It made me happy.
Work is super tiring at the moment. Rewarding but tiring. I’m exhausted but I have a few breaks coming up in February.
I’ve had the Two Point Hospital soundtrack in my head all week. It’s weird to find myself humming very catchy elevator music while I make tea. Go listen.
Did you know that 21:36 on the 29th January 2021 marks 13.7 weeks since I started writing weeknotes?
The audience for this bonus content is a very small but dedicated group of people who are definitely not members of a cult.
In these troubling and slightly boring pandemic times, it’s difficult to explain the level of excitement I feel when I see 13.7
, 137
, or 1.37
in the wild.
These numbers appear so often when you’re looking for them.
You should keep an eye out for these numbers too.
Really.
On Thursday my grandad died. It was expected, but I’m very sad about it nonetheless. His name’s Wilfred (or Bill), but I’ve only ever known him as David – when they met my grandma decided she didn’t like the name Wilfred and so has always called him by his middle name.
I’ll miss his sense of humour, which was entirely focused on annoying people to the point where he’d get an exasperated response. Then he could proclaim innocence while chuckling to himself. Very annoying but more endearing as he got older, especially with the dementia as it meant a nice return to his old ways.
I’m dreading having to work out what the rules are for funerals, and evaluating whether it’s safe to attend even if it’s allowed.
Considering everything that’s going on, I think giving up drinking for January was a mistake.
Aside from the mourning, I’ve been playing a lot of Factorio with some friends. It’s very therapeutic slowly automating production and working together on different parts of a huge factory. It’s highly addictive. I’m addicted.
Big thanks to Rowan B, who recommended shredded memory foam pillows – they’re not as firm as regular memory foam and can be shaped like normal pillows while offering a lot of support. This was the next step I needed on my investment in good sleep. I’ve never spent this much money on my personal comfort and honestly I don’t know why.
It snowed. I went out in and walked around some touristy bits of London, and it was lovely but it’d mostly turned to slush by the end of our walk.
I had two cinnamon buns at the weekend, no matter how many I eat I still can’t shake the craving from all the way back in week 2. I found out that there’s a Gail’s 5 minutes walk from my flat and that their cinnamon buns are amazing.
It’s been a really rough week. I’m feeling pretty useless and helpless.
My grandad is very likely on his deathbed with what looks like pneumonia. He’s still at home because taking someone as frail as him to a COVID-ridden hospital is probably a death sentence. Mum’s staying there for the foreseeable future to help out, and they have lots of carers attending throughout the day. I’m kind of mentally prepared for the worst, and there’s now a DNR in place
My grandma collapsed within half an hour of my mum arriving to help out. She’s been in bed since and is sick. Paramedics think it’s exhaustion – for a woman in her 80s she’s been doing far too much care work for my grandad as she doesn’t want to lose their independence. I really hope she’s OK and it’s not something more serious.
So my poor mum is now stuck at my grandparents looking after them. Normally you can rely on my two uncles to help out in this kind of situation, but (and you can’t make this up) an hour or so after the paramedics left my mum got a call to say that one of my uncles has had a positive COVID test and so has to self-isolate. Half an hour after that, my second uncle called to say the same thing.
To top off the week, I got a call on Friday about a trial. I’ve been called as a witness, and this was supposed to happen last year but it got postponed. My ideal scenario is that I never have to think about this again, but it looks like I’m going to have to travel back and forth from Luton during the lockdown and give evidence on something I’d rather forget.
I’m going to be OK, it’s just a lot all at once.
We’re doing our first COVID tests. We’re both fine, but have been coughing enough that it seems sensible to avoid leaving the house and make sure we’re not infected.
My new duvet arrived! It’s extremely comfortable, like sleeping under a cloud, and I’m glad I drunkenly bought it. I have plans to replace pillows at some point, 2021 will be the year that I get really good at sleeping.
We’re not eating meat or drinking for January. So far it’s been easy, we have quite a lot of go-to vegetarian and vegan recipes, and there have been a few occasions recently when I’ve felt weird about eating bits of animal.
I don’t want to talk about what’s going on in the US really. Holy shit.
I’ve been doing a lot of D&D planning in the evenings, including migrating part of my world-map to use a more modern mapping system. It’s fun to be creative again! The map below links to an interactive version.
The rest of this weeknote will be very work-focused, because I’m back at work and it’s on my mind. It’s been pretty tiring but I’m enjoying having some structure to my days again. This year, during the lockdown, I moved into Customer Products (the team responsible for delivering FT.com). After most of a year, I did well in my annual review and met a lot of my objectives for 2020. I ended the week on a bit of a high:
I pushed myself to be more active when it comes to Diversity and Inclusion – in the past I’ve let this aspect of my role be fairly passive. I can always be better but I think after this year it’s something I’m thinking about in my day-to-day rather than occasionally, and I’ll carry forward some new goals into 2021.
I contributed more proactively to the FT.com tech strategy. Part of this objective was getting all of our repos and packages to have an owning team assigned, this has highlighted that we own far too many things and the maintenance burden on some of our teams is huge. This isn’t a new problem, but the benefit of assigning ownership is that it’s a more visible problem that we can start to do something about.
I’ve also been working on improving the accessibility of FT.com. I think I could have done a better job on this, and I definitely found it difficult to make this a priority alongside other work. We did still get a lot done though, mostly thanks to rest of the team I was working with (Shirin Jessani, Matt Bailey, and Nick Colley).
I better understand the technology that powers FT.com. It’s been quite tough moving into a new team as a principal engineer, where my role doesn’t involve working on code day-to-day. I wasn’t getting opportunities to fully understand our tech estate, and this lead to me feeling like a bit of a fraud. Getting to work on a well-timed production incident and involving myself in some tech proposals has eased this, and I don’t think I needed to worry – I should trust that I’m able to quickly learn what’s necessary when I’m needed for this kind of thing, as evidenced by quickly recovering a production database that I knew nothing about 🙈
I stepped up more. In my mid-year review I got some feedback on my visibility, and having joined a new team I had let myself slip into the background a bit. It takes me quite a while to build confidence in a new role and I don’t like to speak up unless I’m sure that what I’m adding is useful. Second-guessing myself a bit swung the balance in the direction of staying quiet just in case, when actually I should have some more faith in my ability and be less scared of making mistakes.
Since receiving this feedback, I’ve stood in for Anna (my tech director) in meetings a bunch of times and made an effort to speak on her behalf. I’ve taken ownership of a lot more, responding to requests that come into tech leadership. I’ve pushed myself to be more active in our meetings with Product and Delivery roles, and started to do the same with recruitment. Anna has been very supportive in helping me to do this, in particular highlighting that I should expect to make mistakes, and that tech leadership is behind me when I do.
Happy New Year! I drank too much on New Year’s Eve and fell asleep, but not before drunkenly buying myself a new duvet in the sales. I was already vaguely thinking about investing in better sleep, but the impulse buy was after learning that…
Our rent has been reduced! Or it’s looking very likely anyway. I feel like this never happens. We wondered if it was a mistake in our rental agreement renewal, but then we looked at other flats in our building on Rightmove and they’ve all been reduced by quite a lot. If it turns out it was a mistake then we might just move across the hall to an identical but cheaper flat anyway.
It’s been a really lazy week, which I’m fine with.
We watched all three Lord of the Rings films in a virtual marathon with some friends. Extended editions obvs, which took up a solid 12 hours. It’s nice to accept that you’re not going to move or think too much for 12 hours. The two best bits of these films (tied for first place) are:
The beacons being lit, mostly because of the soundtrack
Denethor eating cherry tomatoes
(These choices may be that’s because it was a long night and I remember more of The Return of the King)
We watched two seasons of The West Wing, which I’ve never seen before. If you’re able to ignore the occasional war crime and embarrassing levels of patriotism, then it’s great and I don’t really know how I missed it.
I’m looking forward to the structure of going back to work, but also I’m not really ready to stop lounging around all day. Anyone want to pay me to sit at home and do nothing?
I’ve spotted a 13.7 variant in the wild every day of 2021 so far. It’s really weird how often you see this number when you’re keeping your eyes peeled for it:
In The West Wing, during a situation-room scene, a missile is off-target by 137 miles
A Nestle Caramel Whip is 137 calories (we bought some this week before knowing this)
My AWS bill for this month was £1.37
If 13.7 is a cult and Arjun is making this happen somehow, then I’m very impressed.
I really enjoyed Christmas, we woke up late and spent most of the day cooking. We had a spreadsheet for all the meal timings which was very helpful, and I wasn’t even the one to instigate it. We spent the evening on a bunch of different video calls with friends and family, and I ate and drank too much which is exactly how I intended on spending my day.
We tried our Christmas cake. It tastes like actual Christmas Cake and is delicious! I’m good at anything that involves beating egg whites so of course the royal icing is perfect.
On boxing day we ordered a pizza and ate it in bed.
Normally for Christmas and birthdays Charlotte and I buy each other gifts that are an activity we can go and do, or a trip somewhere nice. This year we decided to give each other physical gifts. Charlotte got me a chef’s knife which is amazing, I’ve wanted good knives for ages and I spent part of the day slicing food items into ridiculously small cubes.
I binge-watched all of The Queen’s Gambit, which was really good. I’m impressed that they managed to have me on the edge of my seat for a chess montage, good work.
Charlotte downloaded Two Point Hospital in the Steam sale and we built a hospital together. It was a very nostalgic experience, there so many nice nods to Theme Hospital which I spent far too many hours on as a kid.
This is my last weeknote of 2020, what a year! 😬 here’s hoping that 2021 is less exhausting, I’m not going to hold my breath though.
What even is time? I’m very firmly in holiday mode, where I’ve forgotten what day of the week it is and I have no routine. The only constant is Tootsie waking me up at 7:30 to be fed and Tootsie meowing to be given his dinner.
So Christmas is cancelled. We have a lot of food already as we were planning to have Christmas day with some friends, which we can’t do now, I guess we’ll be eating leftovers for a while! I’m still excited for our first Christmas not going to either of our families – we can do things the way we want at the pace we want and that sounds delightful. Nobody can judge us for opening champagne at 8am 🥂 (Aldi, naturally).
I’ve been staying away from coding a bit over the last week to moderate my pace and not burn out. The small bits I did get done are integration tests for Audrey. I love writing tests, I get more satisfaction from them than any other aspect of programming – nothing beats the warm secure blanket of >90%
coverage and a cascade of green ticks.
✅
✅
✅
✅
✅
✅
✅
Wasn’t that nice?
Oh I did do one more thing, I made Yeehaw give all horses Christmas names for December. It was a small job which will bring me a lot of joy. My favourite horses so far have been Merry Firewood, Jolly Chimney, and Bethlehem Vixen.
I had a lovely chat with Becky (my sister), it’s been ages since we caught up and it’s so weird that I’ve only seen her once, maybe twice this year. We laughed a lot and I didn’t realise how much I needed it.
There’s just been too much TV, I feel like a bit of a zombie. I’m loving His Dark Materials and getting some strong nostalgia from reading the books as a kid. But we’ve also been watching a lot of cooking shows (maybe too many cooking shows):
MasterChef: The Professionals is a fixture, I really want Monica Galetti to tell me nice things about my food.
Snackmasters is such a good concept and a lot of fun, but I find the presenter really annoying.
Great British Menu, Christmas has felt much nicer than the regular show, Andi Oliver is great as a presenter.
Love Bites (on ITV2) should be a guilty pleasure but I’m not guilty about it. It’s very cringey watching people in their early 20s try to impress each other, especially when they’re trying to do it by cooking things they have no clue how to make.
OK I think I won’t write anything until after Christmas now! I hope you enjoy the festive period despite everything that’s going on 👋
The title of this weeknote refers to me. Yes, I’m the culinary genius, because on Tuesday I added a dash of truffle oil to my Heinz cream of mushroom soup and it really lifted the dish. I’ve never thought of myself as the kind of person who owns truffle oil, but I bought the tiny bottle a few months ago on a whim – I really was craving La Tua’s black truffle and ricotta tortelloni in the first lockdown.
We’ve been making Christmas gin to give to some of our family as gifts. It’s essentially mulled gin, we just left a bunch of spices in it to infuse. The thing is it’s really starting to taste like Jägermeister, so much so that aside from slight juniper undertones I’m not sure if I could tell the difference. I need to remember to save some for Arjun to try.
Wow what a week at work, I felt extremely reactive – didn’t finish most of the things I planned to, but ended up super busy with things that needed doing quickly. Sometimes weeks are like that, I was stressed but mostly in the energising “I can cope with this” way. I think it was easier to deal with knowing that after 11th December I was finished for Christmas! I didn’t use up enough holiday in the year and I’m really enjoying the prospect of a long break. This will be the longest break from work I’ve taken in ~13 years as an engineer 😳
I just got massively side-tracked by trying to find out when the 13.7 year anniversary of me being a professional engineer will be. It’s 19th September 2021, I’ll pop it in my calendar.
I had to find out my very first start date. I went down a LinkedIn hole to find it, I haven’t been on there in a very long time so I spent a while updating things and accepting connections from people who I haven’t worked with for years.
Then I dug out my original offer letter and found the date there. Fun fact: my first salary as a “Web Developer” was £14,000/year, which I remember being a so much money to me at the time but for a 19-year-old me it was just above minimum wage 🤔
I’ve lost one and a half stone since lockdown began. That’s over a really long time because I’m trying to be healthy about it, but I’m quite pleased with myself tbh (I love food and I don’t love exercise). I don’t really notice normally, except I put on some smart trousers for the first time the other day and they just fall down now.
We finally went to The Cinnamon Club for Charlotte’s 30th birthday. We kept having to push it back because of rules changes, but decided to try and go before Christmas. It was really delicious (we went for the tasting menu) and it was so nice to do something that wasn’t sitting in the house or being outside in the rain! Although we were safe and within the rules, I do still feel a bit nervous/guilty about doing things indoors.
Until next time! (I imagine my next few weeknotes will involve me lounging around in my pyjamas eating Christmas chocolate)
We started making a Christmas cake! Yes I know it’s a bit late, but really it already smells delicious. Also when you feed a Christmas cake it’s wrong not to have a little bit of the brandy.
I released a beta of Audrey, which is the first useful side project I’ve worked on in many years. It’s a feed reader and I’m really proud of it. What’s a feed reader, I hear some of you ask? Well I also wrote a little blog post which explains: I like RSS. I built Audrey to encourage me to read more, and it’s working.
I’m trying to do Advent of Code this year, it’s a daily code challenge leading up to Christmas. I’ve managed six days so far and it’s a nice way to kick my brain into gear in the morning. Some of the puzzles are a joy, some are horrible and probably far easier to solve if you have a Computer Science background. I just go ahead and nest 3 loops.
It’s definitely Christmas when you put up a tree. Ours is really really pointy; the point is like a good third of the tree. We couldn’t find the coloured lights I bought last year so there’s a more muted gold/green theme going on. We listened to Christmas songs, which masked the cursing from many pricked fingers.
I said I was reading more, here are some good things I read this week:
Making Moves: How These Black Women Made The Switch from Junior to Senior Engineer - thanks Keran and Jennifer for the POCIT recommendation.
Meet The Black Women Trying to Fix AI - good overview with lots of further reading. I read this just before finding out that Google fired Timnit Gebru, which is infuriating.
Engine Room 2020: going virtual - Sarah writes about running our internal tech conference fully remote for the first time. The conference itself was amazing this year and there are some good tips in this post.
I didn’t watch a single Christmas film this week, maybe I overdid it in late November 🤔
Next week is my last week at work before I’m off for Christmas. I didn’t intend on saving so many holiday days, but it’s just how this year worked out. I’m feeling a bit of last week panic, mostly because I still have 12 peer reviews to write as well as making sure the more important things on my to-do list are ticked off. I need to get better at dropping things that aren’t important.
I wrote “Christmas” 10 times in this weeknote. Goodbye 👋 I’m going for a walk.
Because I just kicked back and had toasties served to me last week, it’s my turn to cook for the foreseeable future. I made carbonara on Tuesday and it was so delicious, we rarely cook meat at home which makes it a bit of a treat when we do. I always had this impression that the “don’t scramble the egg” part of carbonara was really difficult; either it’s not, or we can put down this success to beginner’s luck
Work felt unproductive but when I look back over it maybe it wasn’t? I think because I’m off from the 12th December this year (didn’t take enough holiday), maybe the feeling of a Christmas lull is kicking in a bit early. Some good things happened:
I had a great catchup with Maggie who’s on maternity leave, it overran in the nice way where there’s just a lot to chat about
I stood in for Anna, my tech director, in a workshop. Sometimes this part of my job is nerve-wracking and I occasionally need somebody to point out the hidden businessy meanings behind things, but I think I did OK and I’m more confident than I used to be
I got some useful feedback in my one-to-one. I won’t share the specifics, but one of the aspects of Anna’s one-to-ones I really like is the exchanging of feedback: every session, I give Anna one positive and one constructive piece of feedback, then she does the same for me. It’s really useful to have a tighter feedback loop to get a sense of how I’m doing, as well as having a regular chance to practice delivering constructive feedback to someone face-to-face
Last work thing: Tara wrote a really excellent post on Technical Leadership in Customer Products at the FT – she interviewed each of our tech leads and used this data to outline what this role means in our group. There’s a lot of useful info in here, thanks Tara!
I saw Jacob Rees-Mogg get out of a taxi with his brood of Victorian children. This beats my only other politician sighting (Justine Greening), and gives the tories a solid lead. I’m not counting seeing Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a protest
Permit me to talk about my cat. There are lots of cardboard boxes in our house now, Tootsie isn’t a box cat at all, but he has fallen head over heels in love with this one. I don’t understand what’s special about it but his favourite game is to chase toy mice around the bottom of the box and try to dig them up. It’s pretty adorable and I hope this is a new fixture because boxes are cheaper than cat toys
On Saturday we watched all three of the Christmas Prince films, using Teleparty to watch with a group of Christmas-dedicated friends. I do enjoy these films, and it was only my second watch of films 2 and 3 so I caught a few more details, but I really do think Netflix peaked with The Princess Switch.
In related news, Luke started a Netflix Holiday Movie Universe Wiki and I’m a little in awe at the effort he’s put in 😂 this level of overcommitment is something I can get behind, but I’m keeping an eye in case this goes too far and we need to intervene
I’ve been spending pretty much all of my other spare time working on a side project, and I don’t know where this energy has come from. I’m building a free self-hosted feed reader (RSS and Atom), mostly for myself but I’ll probably release it publicly too. I’m kind of on one with “own your own content” and “if it’s free then you’re the product” at the moment and I’d like to ditch Feedly. Audrey 2.0 [screenshot] is mostly working! If you’re interested in beta-testing a new feed reader then give me a shout.
I went on a much needed long walk on Sunday. I’m finding it far too easy to spend lockdown holed up in my flat and not going outside, which isn’t very healthy.
Until next time 👋
I wrote a blog post for the first time in nearly 5 years, it was kind of spur of the moment and I enjoyed writing it. It’s about how I manage time spent on side projects. I think it could touch more on mental health and how having time to spend on side projects is a privilege, but maybe I can save that for a follow-up. You can read the post here
Charlotte bought a toastie maker. I ate 13 toasties this week. I thought I’d never want to see a slice of bread again, but once the weekend arrived I really fancied scrambled egg on toast so I guess I have a high bread tolerance
We started playing Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time. I like it so far, there’s enough classic Crash but also a few nice new mechanics. “Platformer” is the only genre that Charlotte and I align on when it comes to video games, and I think that’s because she’s better at them than me
When I rebuilt my website, I finally ditched Google Analytics because it’s just super creepy how much they track and I don’t want to be part of that. I was fully intending on not measuring traffic to my site, but after a quick look into privacy-focused analytics I ended up trialling Fathom (note: this is an affiliate link).
I decided to stick with it after the free trial, I really like it! It’s so much simpler than Google Analytics and I feel good because it’s not logging anything personally identifiable but I still get a rough idea of how my site’s doing
I started trying to play Dungeons and Dragons again in one of the groups I’m the Dungeon Master for (online via Discord). I love creating non-player characters, working out their background, and developing them over the course of a game. It’s very easy (especially when you’re setting a game in a mostly western Europe-inspired world) to end up with these characters being white by default and quite homogenous, so a couple of years ago I started making a concerted effort to include a more diverse cast of characters in my games.
That’s when I discovered this amazing blog for writers: Writing With Color. It’s enormously in-depth and has helped me to write characters and world history that avoid common tropes and stereotypes. You should absolutely have a look at this site if you’re doing any kind of creative writing, and consider donating to help keep it running
On Saturday we had a viewing party for The Princess Switch: Switched Again. I love The Princess Switch (treat yourself to a watch if you haven’t seen it), and it’d be really tough for the sequel to live up to the hype, but I think it was good! There was a lot more adversity and mild peril in the plot than the original, and I’m not sure about the recasting of Olivia, but I’d watch this film again. Realistically over December, I expect to watch it 3–4 more times, and then maybe I’ll come back with a more in-depth review
I had a snowball-in-a-can on a whim and it was delicious, I should buy some advocaat
I really need to eat some vegetables after toastie week
Tootsie (our cat) has been super cuddly and clingy this week, like squeezing between us in the night and purring loudly in my ear or persistently trying to sit on us while we’re working. Behaviour changes like this always worry me a bit because of his conditions, but after observing him more I think he’s just stealing our body heat.
Lately I haven’t had as much chance to code in my day-to-day job, and it doesn’t take long to start wondering if you’re actually capable any more. However this week I helped fix a production issue for the first time in ages. It felt really good to jump into a technical problem, especially in a repo I didn’t know at all, and I feel more qualified again 😅
Every year, FT Product & Technology run an internal conference called Engine Room. It’s normally good, but this year was amazing – I work with some really talented people. The talk that really stuck with me was by Nayana Shetty who has been measuring her time-at-desk and hydration to make sure that she’s taking care of herself while we’re all working from home. I’m hoping there will be some kind of write up on the Product & Technology blog
Friday was a challenge and I’ve spent a lot of the weekend with work stuff in the back of my mind. This isn’t healthy and I’m normally very good at compartmentalising. I have app limits on my phone but what I really want is for Screen Time to completely block me from opening Slack at the weekend
On Sunday we played The Hunt for the Cheshire Cat which is like a treasure hunt across part of London. I love this kind of thing and it was super fun, and this particular game has been designed to work with lockdown rules. I haven’t felt the benefit of living so central since the pandemic started, but getting to just leave my flat and do this reminded me why I’m here
I started reading. I used to read so much but it kind of tailed off in my mid-20s and I haven’t read a book for months. It’s kind of cheating because it’s a re-read but I needed something to get me back into the swing, I picked up The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde which I read about 15 years ago and loved. It’s fun, not too heavy, and some good escapism. This time I’m definitely going to keep picking up books and will not be deterred by trying to read The Picture of Dorian Gray again
Oh dear, our washing machine has started leaking into the flat below (very likely related to our plumbing issues). It’s been disconnected until Wednesday 😩
We binged all of Fleabag over the weekend, one sitting per season. I enjoyed it a lot, especially Olivia Colman
I rebuilt this website in Hugo earlier in the week. It’s been ages since I’ve done a significant amount of programming, and it was a lot of fun learning how to use something new. Hugo is super fast and super flexible. I also modernised the CSS a lot and I didn’t realise how much I’ve missed styling websites.
I read too much news this week (well, mostly I compulsively refreshed the FT’s election coverage). Well done America!
I finally got around to playing Gloomhaven again, my group has been consistently playing other games on Tabletop Simulator throughout the pandemic but we let Gloomhaven slide for most of the year.
We’ve been trying to cook more vegetarian and vegan food. I’ve always used the internet for recipes but recently we bought our first cookbook, East by Meera Sodha – we’ve tried loads of the recipes from it and EVERYTHING TASTES SO GOOD. One that we keep going back to is kimchi fried rice which I could eat pretty much every day.
We’re locked down again. We didn’t really do much leading up to it, but on Friday we did walk to borough market (which is all still open for takeaway). I got a cinnamon bun, which I’ve been really craving for weeks. I thought having one would fix the craving but now I want more.
Occasionally I get far too into a song and it’s pretty much all I listen to for a week or more. Right now that song is Islands in the Stream by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. I think it might be that my subconscious mind is still sad we didn’t get a Dolly Parton remix of Old Town Road.
Charlotte has made several threats about what will happen if I keep singing it. I probably shouldn’t push my luck now that we’re less able to leave the house.
Through the pandemic I’ve gone from being a person who reads every tweet on my timeline to opening Twitter every couple of days, scrolling to the top, and closing it again. I think it might nearly be time to get rid of my last social media. I’m enjoying reading weeknotes from Alice, James, and Lee so thought I’d give it a go.
Plumbing. We went from Thursday to Thursday without running water. Not being able to wash our hands properly was anxiety-inducing, as was having to go to the gym to shower. On the positive side I’ve got lots of practice doing angry phonecalls. Eventually Leo (plumber #4) got it fixed, he texts me every couple of days to check things are still working which is quite sweet.
Charlotte and I haven’t been drinking through October, this weekend we had champagne and watched Christmas films (it’s Christmas now). Holidate was terrible in a way that I really enjoyed, 7/10, would watch again. Christmas Wedding Planner was just terrible, 4/10.
Agricola is one of my favourite board games, this week I played its successor Caverna. If you like worker-placement games then give this a go because it’s so good and makes lots of welcome little changes to the original.
I felt really ineffective at work this week, I’m not very resilient to any kind of adversity lately and the ongoing plumbing issues just killed my ability to think properly. I’m feeling better now, and spent a bit of the weekend rebuilding this website so maybe motivation is creeping back.
Getting more nerdy the further down the page we go, I’ve been playing a lot of Minecraft again (noticeably more since it got darker in the evenings). The tower on the left, the pub, and most of the terraced houses were this week 😬 For anyone not familiar with Survival Minecraft, stuff at this scale takes hours. I think I’m the only one still playing regularly on our server now though so maybe my play time will tail off.