Kara Brightwell

  • weeknotes #10: milton keynes

    i have nothing of substance to say about the war in Ukraine

    other than “fuck Putin”.

    chee puts it best:

    btw on world war 4, if you have the wikipedia page for ukraine open in another tab rn i do not need to hear from you

    💙💛

    come to the milton keynes snozone last saturday if you want an asskicking

    a selfie of a pale slim ghost riding a button lift up an indoor snow slope

    i hadn’t been snowboarding in two years. i had been going once a year, with university friends, to the French Alps. i miss it so much! our last trip was in February 2020, and i’m pretty sure all we thought about you know was feeling a bit weird playing the board game Pandemic.

    sometimes i remember “oh i’m an adult with money. i can just frickin, go to milton keynes and snowboard if i want”, so i did! i had one first slow, steady, careful run down the slope, letting my legs remind me how every turn, every carve, every stop works, and from then on nyoooom. it takes about four minutes to get to the top of the slope and twenty seconds to get back down.

    milton keynes is a fucking weird place. it’s like they decided to build the business park on the edge of a town but forgot to build the town.

    pizza time

    i have a list of the top ten pizzas i’ve ever eaten. number one is John’s, of Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, New York, New York. i was there (New York) for a conference in 2017 and ate at John’s, this massive anchovy pizza that i also ate cold in the hotel room for breakfast.

    third on the list is my own pizza i make at home.

    i mean it’s literally just the recipe from The Pizza Book but i’ve gotten pretty fuckin good at it.

    the recipe canonically ferments the dough in the fridge for three days. except, i’ve worked out you can just not do that, you can add too much yeast and use yoghurt instead of olive oil and let it overproof a bit and it tastes just as great and is actually slightly easier to throw, even.

    this means instead of having to plan pizza three days in advance, i can have it on a ninety-minute whim.

    i have eaten pizza for lunch five times in the last two weeks.

    spicy pork bun

    on Thursday, Alice and Rowan were in the office. we went for lunch at this little Korean place around the corner; i had spicy pork bun. we ate them around a big table in a breakout area at work and chatted about tech strategy and team gossip. felt like i was at the big kids' table. love you folks.

    i suppose, in terms of technical leadership at work, i am one of the big kids now. people keep looking around the room at meetings for a grown up to make a decision, and often that’s me, and i have to stop also looking around the room for a grown up and be the grown up. which is a great feeling, and also has caused at least two panic attacks.

    WFS(tudio)

    i (finally!) finished and programmed the keyboard i had built for my studio (the H keyswitch was just straight up not soldered in), and this monday i actually did my day job from there. i had such a lovely day, the weather on monday was lovely, i went for a walk at lunchtime along the Thames Path at Greenwich Reach and the world felt open and fresh again.

    i did an experiment and tried to get some packages delivered to the studio. the Amazon package arrived no problem and somebody received it and put it by my studio door. the Pimoroni package did not. i asked around, looked everywhere (including the large pile of flytipped rubbish on the street outside) but no. eventually i realised that the Iceland downstairs actually has the same address, so i went down there and asked (feeling a bit weird about it) and the manager went into the back and came out with a small cardboard box with my name on it.

    in the box is a raspberry pi based automatic watering system for my peace lily.

    new laptop who dis

    work finally came through and gave me this. it’s a thirteen inch pro with an M1. it’s,,, good? the fan is running never, instead of always, and the keyboard doesnnn’t ddo thiis

    i should wake up; grab a brush and put a little makeup (you want to)

  • weeknotes #7: surprise presentations

    new case who dis

    (sorry, this bit’s pretty nerdy, skip on if you don’t care)

    hand built 4u eurorack case full of modules

    i built a new eurorack case. this one’s designed to be a portable live techno set in a box. it’s massively inspired by the mylarmelodies Suggested System video with the same premise, except:

    • rhythms and modulation are handled by Pamela’s New Workout and the 6eqencer. no external clocks here
    • mylarmelodies uses Percall for a bunch of mixing, muting and drum envelope duties. i’ve got a Pico Drums and my own Mallards for that
    • the main voice is a Knit (a 6hp Plaits clone) which has a built in decay envelope so no envelope/VCA needed
    • i managed to get a μBurst in there. i love Clouds derivatives

    the box is actually just straight from Amazon. i happened to find one with internal dimensions that are exactly 58hp × 4u. it’s pretty cramped inside; the deepest modules are but millimetres shallower than the case itself, so i had to get creative to make the power bus and all the cables fit.

    just need to learn how to play it now.

    i gave two surprise presentations on thursday

    by “surprise” i mean “i forgot they were happening until five minutes before”. still a disaster ✌️

    1. i talked to the Engineering Enablement group about Tool Kit. EE is the part of FT Technology that makes stuff for other parts of FT Technology. my team is the bit of Customer Products that makes stuff for other bits of CP. we’ve been working on completely rethinking our shitty ageing unreliable developer tooling, and EE was like “owo what’s this”. it went pretty well!

    2. our Tech Director, Anna, has been meeting with all the tech leads in the group to relearn how all our tech works after being on leave for a while. my team owns most of the weird old stuff in the group, so we had a fun hour chatting about what we could do about that and what the future might look like.

    speaking of old weird tech

    my team did another mobbing week. this time we were learning how the FT.com Fastly configuration worked. we started the week not knowing anything really about how VCL worked, and by wednesday were asking each other questions like “if this request is always doing PASS and then restart how would we ever cache that response”. i love my team.

    we also spent an afternoon drawing architecture diagrams. in person, on a whiteboard. god i miss whiteboards.

    photo of a whiteboard with a diagram of the containers in the FT.com CDN & routing stack

    it’s feeling kind of like spring

    okay it fuckin WIMDY out there as i write this but yesterday my brain presented me with a strange new emotion that i eventually realised was “lack of seasonal depression”. we’re almost there, lxds.

  • weeknotes #6: peace lily

    a year or so ago, when i still had a therapist, we worked out that i often lose habits because i felt guilty about not having done them, and that guilt transferred to the thought of starting back up again, and she gave me permission to not do that

    i have a studio space

    on trafalgar road, in greenwich, there’s an iceland. above the iceland is this 70’s pebbledash concrete box. i don’t know what it used to be, it’s a very odd building inside. now it is twenty-two small spaces, full of artists, makeup artists, florists, and me.

    i’ve put all my music gear (really just a midi keyboard and an ableton push) in there, and my big eurorack, and my soldering stuff and large collection of electronics parts, and a large peace lily, and i cycle there and make things. it’s really just an expensive way of tricking my brain into hyperfocusing but god damn does it work, i actually get stuff done there.

    it’s a fucking mess at the moment though so no pics for you.

    some of the things i’m making there

    i finally got my act together and learnt PCB design. did you know you can design something and give the files to a company in Shenzhen and they’ll just frickin make it for you for less than a fiver? it’s so easy that a problem i have is i keep sending off for things then having a new idea and having to eat the extra delivery charge when i could have just put them all in one order.

    photograph of five unpopulated circuit board with quirky designs and tantalising prospects, created by yours truly

    from left to right, top to bottom that’s:

    • Parakeets: a noise synth based around a 4093 schmitt trigger NAND chip. it goes WUB and ZHUZH ZHUZH ZHUZH and screeeeeee
    • Mallards: a eurorack 1U switched mixer/multiple. which means you have four inputs; each of those inputs has an A/B switch; all of the As get mixed together and all the Bs get mixed together. and four outputs with A/B switches; switch an output to A to have it output the mixed A inputs. you’re either going “why is that useful”, to which i’ll say if you’re live-performing eurorack, it lets you send stuff places without movinng patch cables around; or you’re going “holy shit i want one” in which case hmu
    • Ants: (probably) the world’s smallest eurorack power supply. spits out 0.8 amps on both rails which is actually really impressive because it’s tiny, it’s like 1×1.2 inches. designed to sit through a hole in a wooden case.
    • a bootleg black panel for Pamela’s New Workout: everybody has a Pam. it comes with a silver aluminium panel. all my other panels are black. “rectangular thing with holes in it and screen printing on the face” also describes a PCB
    • a eurorack power bus: there are lots of eurorack buses out there; but none of them have a pale slim ghost on them

    this is the year i get serious about making things people want to buy and then selling them to those people. which probably means making a Rails storefront app, yay

    i have a new line manager

    and it’s Alice! hello Alice. you’re fantastic already

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