Kara Brightwell

  • weeknotes #11: leman locke

    i guess i write weeknotes on wednesdays now

    we’re on holiday this week

    we stayed two nights in this frickin, hotel:

    a studio apartment with a millennial-pink sofa overlooking the city of london

    for millennial hipsters (hi). we did hipster tourist things like Brick Lane and the Thames Path. i went to a gin pub with Rowan and Charlotte and drank a chilli negroni and played Subjective Guess Who and i went to a spa and i wore a bikini in front of real people and everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

    tonight i made roast beef short rib and if you ever want to make Pub Roast Beef, buy some short rib from a supermarket and just like cook it any way you know because oh my god

    top rope climbing

    so those queer climbers have a weekly meet up at a different climbing wall in London. last week was The Castle: it’s this ridiculous victorian water pumping station that’s, well, it’s a castle, and in the nineties some people built a climbing wall in it.

    top rope climbing is a different beast to bouldering. you need a partner to belay you (hold your rope and catch you if you fall). so it was pretty much “hi! i’m Kara” “i’m Lisa” “i trust you with my life now” “same”

    i used to be good at climbing but that’s okay, i will be again

  • 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 #9: fucken wimdy

    it fucken WIMDY

    Storm Eunice hit two days ago and it was actually kind of scary to be told by the Meteorological Office “hazard to life from flying debris”. we shut the cat in, charged our battery packs, made sure we had enough candles and butane and didn’t go outside.

    around the corner a row of houses' garden walls fell down and are blocking the pavement. the vent on the boiler flue is still going ham rattling as i type.

    Storm Franklin is on the way, i hear.

    queer climbing

    i went climbing, again, this afternoon. i tried less hard, and things still hurt. climbing is pretty social: i actually talk to strangers when i climb? i got chatting to some people about this one route we were taking turns on, that i apparently made look easy (sorry! i climb only for me), and it took them about two minutes before inviting me to their queer climbers' Discord server.

    we spent the next hour and a half following each other around and chatting and taking turns on bouldering routes, and if you’re reading this Emma and Beth and Amika(? sorry i didn’t quite catch your name, it was loud and i’m awkward) you are all cute and lovely and i can’t wait to see you again

    laptopn’t

    work said i could have a new laptop. i said “i’ll be at the office on tuesday”. work said “”. i went to the office and they were like “you never booked a slot with us”. i said “whatever, book me a slot please”. they said “we don’t have any 32GB ram laptops”. i said “whatever, 16GB is fine”. they said “would you like this 16” pro"; i was like “oh dope, i didn’t know you had those, sweet. is it an M1” and they said “oh, no, lol, it’s a 2019 16"”. i said “please just give me whatever new macbook you have, i literally don’t care” and they said “cool can you be in the office on tuesday”.

    it’ll still be fucked up with jamf and sophos anyway. i don’t know why i bother

    things change

    a bunch of people i love are leaving my employer and istg i’m gonna be still working there as a sixty year old lady that nobody can get rid of because she knows how all the Spicy Code works

  • weeknotes #8: real things

    i went bouldering

    first time in six months; second time since march, twenty-twenty.

    everything hurts.

    that was sunday.

    i uh. i did a v4 grade? which was surprising. there’s a large hole in one of my climbing shoes and i bought some replacements, except there are two types of climbing shoes:

    • cute ones
    • ones that fit

    and, fuck everything

    i made a synthesiser, for my dad

    well okay so i made one in december for him for christmas. it was built on stripboard in an altoids tin, and looked like this:

    a prototype synth in an altoids tin

    it’s somewhere in a Hermes depot, or a ditch.

    so i started again (this is your strength)

    i designed a circuit board for the thing:

    three-dee render of a pale slim ghost synthesisers parakeets

    and got it printed by a company in Shenzhen. because it turns out you can just, do that. and it’s just a bit of soldering, and troubleshooting, and working out the headphone amp you added never would have worked because of something something capacitance something phase inversion. and now it looks like this, which is a real thing, that i made, i can design and make real things:

    a real thing

    designed and hand built in Nunhead and Greenwich™

  • 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

  • weeknotes #5: varnish hotbox

    1. oops where did three months go

    holidays always throw my habits entirely out of the window. i also managed to gate posting my next weeknotes on having edited my photos from camping, which was a terrible thing to do to my brain.

    2. whistlestop tour

    1. went camping
    2. went and saw my parents in Yorkshire
    3. went and saw my in-laws in Cornwall
    4. went to the welsh borders and bathed in a hot tub watched by sheep
    5. went camping again but this time it was sort of a festival

    3. what if solvent fumes, but too much

    when we renovated our kitchen in 2017 we got solid oak worksurfaces, for some reason. never get solid oak worksurfaces, you’ll spend the rest of your life oiling them and they’ll get waterstained anyway. this weekend i finally cracked, bought a tub of the varnish they use in pubs and basketball courts, and spent saturday with a headache.

    beautifully varnished oak worksurface

    4. cute keyboard alert

    cute minimal split keyboard with white, pink and purple keycaps

    it’s a Corne Cherry v2, with hotswap sockets, gateron green switches, and a cheap etsy knockoff of DSA Hana (but in XDA profile).

    the keyboard shop sent me the wrong kit; i bought the cheaper, non-hotswap version. that version was also through-hole soldering; this one is surface-mount.

    i’ve never done surface-mount soldering before, and it was way easier than i expected, and now i want to buy every eurorack kit i’ve dismissed because it was surface-mount, and also start designing surface-mount PCBs.

    5. things i can’t talk about yet

    there’s this one thing, and this other thing, and they’re both really exciting, and maybe i’ll be able to talk about them in a future weeknotes. ggggggggggggg

  • weeknotes #3: business horoscopes

    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 #2: a real burger made out of cow

    1. i went to the office, and it was normal

    • i went to the office, and it was normal?
    • i’ve gotten weirdly good at self-administering a lateral flow test
      • Kara Brightwell: skilled at scraping her own tonsils, and inserting things too far up her nostrils
      • imagine showing that my to myself eighteen months ago
      • she’d probably go “oh okay so, uh, ‘Kara’, i see, that’s a thing we did, okay. wanna make out”
    • i had a desk assigned to me, and it was by a window, and it was in a building that isn’t my flat, and i got to go there and not be in the same 46m² forever
    • i saw like. twenty people. in an office that has capacity for like fifteen hundred.
    • i had a burger, a real burger made out of cow, from a fast food restaurant, with cheesy fries
    • it was so normal!
    • this is genuinely the best thing i’ve been able to do for my mental health during the entire panettone
    • i’m going back like. twice a week now, fuck it

    2. trying not to burn out

    • even though i quit therapy a while ago it turns out i have a tiny simulated version of my therapist in my head now that says things like “be kind to yourself” and “what makes you say that” and “you don’t have to feel like this”
    • so last week when i wrote “holy shit i’m burning out” it turns out that wasn’t a self deprecating joke, and i actually need to do something about it?
    • which i noticed immediately after writing that post, and requested access to the office, and a bunch of fridays off
      • doing normal things, which i have not done in some time, is helping reset my brain
      • also taking time off and not giving myself pressure to achieve things(? what), good for my energy turns out?
    • and i’m going camping in two weeks now and not having any internet and cooking fish on charcoal

    3. i made a music

    • it’s an accidental homage to Ambient 4: On Land by Brian Eno
      • serendipity and coincidence and taking ownership of your surroundings
    • from my eurorack that i mostly built myself
      • not all of it is soldered with lead solder

  • 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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