Highlights this week include watching the outcomes of a design-sprint, validating the core technical idea in my new project and watching someone implement image transformation with matrices by hand.
This is my hundredth weeknote, and I'm nearly the point where these outnumber my other posts 10:1. I'll probably change how the RSS feed works or something to celebrate!
September's scorching weather is brutal. Much like has happened with the Central line, an entire summer's worth of heat has built-up in my building, meaning that when I get home I'm greeted by warm water from my cold taps and that my portable air conditioner has met its match. Avg. 29C, Max 34C, Min 26C.
So: I'm pretty deep in the rabbit-hole of JavaScript bundling formats right now, but it's OK - it's for a good cause: micro-frontends. One challenge that we will face is interoperability between ES modules and our current chosen polyfill format: SystemJS. I enjoy these rabbit-holes, but much less than I used to.
Our internal conference comes up next year, and I've joined the organising committee. I'm also planning on submitting a talk to cover one of the bits of work I'm currently involved in. Is this too much? We'll see.
I think I now understand the mental models behind SageMaker now, and I'm genuinely appalled at the documentation behind it. AWS have some pretty sketchy documentation, but never before have I found it to be genuinely wrong or misleading. When it works, it's magic: You can train beefy workloads in hours, and it costs a maximum of a few dollars. Inference is also fairly affordable. Maybe I should write this stuff up?
I didn't disassemble an old couch and assemble a new couch on Wednesday. Went to Mercato instead. Love that place: If you're reading, please help me find more excuses to go to Mercato.
Managed to dodge not one, but two social commitments on Saturday. Honestly the heat wiped me out but I feel awful because I was really looking forward to both.
Holiday is BOOKED: Japan, for about three weeks in late October. I'm still wincing at the cost, but I think I've managed to make it as price-efficient as possible.
Plans on Sunday fell through, so I ended up doing a bit more work on my C++ final, on the DJ app which I'll probably rewrite as a serious project after the final is submitted. I've implemented rudimentary playlist support, including waveform displays (which are one of my favourite features from Rekordbox) which I'm particularly happy with because - with it already relying on caching, it means that music is pre-analysed before you play a track. Cool!
My new kinda-sorta side-project is this cursed thing: the Beepy. I got a 3D case printed, painstakingly tracked down the right screws (I now know how metric screw specifications work) and got all the software running. It's very cute, but I don't have any real use for it: Maybe it'll make for a neat portable Metasploit platform?
Watched a few movies this week, including Tenet: Interesting idea, great sound-track and definitely a bit of a thinker. But honestly, all round refreshing to see a science-fiction concept like this be fleshed out and executed in such a short run-time. Also appreciated the quick reference to Oppenheimer: Starting to see where Nolan got the idea from.
