Kara Brightwell

  • 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 #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

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