• weeknotes #3: business horoscopes

  May 16, 2021

  content warning: wild animal injury

  1. been watching the Fast & Furious films with friends

  • once a week, on a sunday afternoon
  • we sync up the films, hit play, and pretend we’re mst3k via Slack
  • they’re actually pretty good, even the bad ones
  • also i’m spotting how much of an influence they had on the Need For Speed franchise in the early 00s
  • speaking of which:

  2. i’ve been playing a lot of Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005)

  Hi, I’m Josie Maran, and I play Mia in Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Make sure you do all your racing in the game. On the streets, drive safely and responsibly. And wear your seatbelt 😉

  • that unskippable opening video is burned into my brain
  • last time i played this game i didn’t let myself like pink, and cute things, for some reason. so this time i’m making my cars look as cute as possible

  3. i’ve also been playing a lot of Minecraft again

  • we (me and Rowan and Luke and Chris) did a multiplayer “speed"run on the latest snapshot version with the new cave generation datapack
    • turns out snapshot versions are not at all optimised and it was extremely laggy
  • to spice things up a bit we had secondary goals we could pick up, silly stuff like “place a live fish in the End”
  • i was racing ahead to get to the end first and do as many goals as i could while the others were doing pointless things like preparing for the dragon fight
  • but when i went through the portal the lag hit hard and i fell into the void and lost all my stuff
    • including my fish in a bucket i was going to free into the End. can i get an F in chat

  4. i went to a technical leadership workshop

  • it was okay. it was exhausting.
  • a lot of it was things like:
    • “if i wanted to be a good tech lead and still wanted to code, i would simply no longer want to code”
    • “here is how to lead an engineering team well: *list of engineering practices the Financial Times does anyway all the time*”
    • one hour of Business Horoscopes (“StrengthFinder 2.0”)
  • i’m glad i didn’t pay for it myself

  5. Kettricken (my cat) caught a bird

  • she’s never done that before
  • it was terrifying
  • i was getting dressed, i couldn’t do much about it
  • i could hear this awful screaming, getting louder
  • she walks in, i assume she’s injured or something, i look down and there’s this mess of feathers in her mouth. still screeching
  • she runs away from me into the living room and drops the bird. it’s a female blackbird
  • it plays dead but it’s still breathing, heavily
  • Sophie locks the cat in the bathroom
  • the internet says to take it to the vet so it can be put down humanely. there’s another option. it probably won’t survive itself.
  • it suddenly leaps up and scurries into the corner.
  • we can’t bring ourselves to do anything about it.
  • we let it go.
  • i’m not sure we did the right thing.

• weeknotes #1: fried liver attack

  Apr 29, 2021

  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
      • n-gage
      • n-heroku-tools
    • 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!!!
  • 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

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