Kara Brightwell

  • it's got webmentions now

    and it’s all Rowan’s and chee’s fault

  • weeknotes #4: gaslit by apple maps

    1.hello from the surrey hills

    • we are camping and it is raining, a lot
    • i just barbecued some smoked mackerel fillets and oh my god. then they got rained on and we ate them in the car
    • last time we came here apple maps navigated us to a dead end seven miles away and then said “you have arrived”, very clearly nowhere near the pin on the map
      • imagine being gaslit by apple maps
      • this time we got it to give directions to the pub in the village
    • we put a kettle on and almost immediately ran out of butane. and then it got rained on
    • i love it here

    2. i sold a lens to a friend of a friend

    • i basically never sell anything apart from to CeX
    • the whole deal was struck via twitter dm, it was very civilised
    • i spent half an hour scouring the office for a box of the right size that i hoped might have been abandoned on March 12th 2020
      • eventually i found an amazon box for a logitech mouse. thanks gallal

    3. did another minecraft “speed”run

    • with gallal and rowan and luke and chris
      • i’m on my phone can’t be fucked with hyperlinks sorry lads
    • i tried to solo the nether again and died, a lot, this time
    • next time we’re instituting a “no villages” rule so most of the group don’t spend their time camping
      • im not salty i just died a lot okay

    4. my small eurorack case is dead

    • idk what happened one day it just didn’t turn on
    • i tried taking it apart and it turns out epoxying the power supply to the case isn’t helpful maybe
      • i broke the bus board clean in half. lol
    • i can rebuild her. stronger. faster. I have the technology

    5. i am trying to write this on my phone and wow is it bad

    • who even wrote this blog app

  • weeknotes #1: fried liver attack

    1. WOW I HAVEN’T BLOGGED IN A WHILE

    • hahaha funny ironic meta blogging joke

    2. okay so i’m the Tech Lead of the FT.com Platforms Team now, what’s up with that

    • my(!) team solves common developer problems so every other team can spend time doing not that
    • we own a lot of stuff, like seventy repositories out of the three hundred ish in the Customer Products group
    • we’re a fairly new team, there were predecessor teams but basically none of the knowledge about what we own has survived
    • we’ve got a lot of catching up to do! we started rewriting our documentation last year and we have a hitlist of what knowledge we’re missing
    • but also we’ve jumped in the deep end with a beeg rewrite of the FT.com developer tooling
      • the line i use in presentations is “they’re used literally every day by literally every developer in Customer Products, and they’re broken”
      • they’re actually public, that’s odd
      • this week is the second “mob programming” week we’ve done on this project
        • we cancelled all our meetings
        • we set some goals
        • we worked on VS Code Live Share (for a couple of hours at a time! pairing is exhausting, remote pairing is gggggggggggg)
        • we’ve written more than a thousand fucking lines of code with three developers in one week, what the heck
      • find out next time on dragonball z

    3. i am burning out holy shit

    • holy shit, i’m burning out
    • may day bank holiday soon
    • going camping soon
    • need some time off wow

    4. i saw some friends, irl

    • okay so that was like two weeks ago fine okay
    • i went to Flat Iron Square with chee and Rowan and Jake and KJ
    • i got very drunk and we went and made music in a park
    • also i finally signed 2 Deed 2 Poll. now to send it to literally everybody that might have ever heard my name in the last two years

    5. okay so speaking of music

    • i’ve gotten big into Eurorack in the last year
    • i put together a little, USB powered case a while ago and i’ve been slowly filling it with modules
    • recently i outgrew it, and also little portable case obviously needs to be for generative ambient, so i started planning a bigger desktop case in like November
    • i finished it last week!!! 6u eurorack case made from birch plywood with Pale Slim Ghost Synthesisers and Bork Systems stickers
    • i mean wow look at that thing. i made an Object

    6. i got mildly good at chess

    • i’ve got a 700~ Rapid rating babes
      1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc5 Nf6 4. Ng5 d5 6. exd5 Nxd5 7. Nxf7 Kxf7 8. Qf3+ Kg8 9. Bxd5+ Qxd5 10. Qxd5+ Be6 11. Qxe6# is the only correct game of chess. every other game is a shitty imitation of that
    • im actually kind of bad if you don’t cooperate with my Fried Liver Attack or Stafford Gambit okay

  • it's got rss now

    hi Alice! hi Rowan

  • oops i broke it

    see the thing with writing a blog yourself in rails is you have to maintain it and stuff

    i upgraded to Ruby 3.0 because fast but it turns out major versions have breaking changes? weird

    apparently URI.decode isn’t a thing and also hashes don’t become keyword args any more and i can’t be waiting for gems i use to fix their shit so back to 2.7 it is

  • imagine being able to upload images to a blog

    using ActiveStorage it’s kind of not even a thing? i drag a file on to the browser and send a form and it just goes into the database? like this frog on a unicycle:

    frog on a unicycle

    that’s stored in Postgres as a Large Object, isn’t that neat

    i added dragging in markdown files to save them as posts a while back. soon i’ll be able to drag an entire folder of things, like the markdown export of a Bear note with its image files, or a TextBundle (which is the exact same thing) and it’ll upload everything and submit the markdown files. it’s like half an hour away from being able to do that but it’s eleven so

    this blog is an open source rails app: https://github.com/apaleslimghost/ghost-computer. maybe you’ll find the secret log in button

subscribe via RSS