Celebrating 2 consecutive years of not being tricked on April fools day. Maybe it's a good thing that it fell on a weekend this time.
Spring is here! I left the office on Monday and for the first time all year it was still light. I tied both of my Martenitsi onto a tree that was blossoming directly opposite St Pauls, and then made it my mission this week to convince others to add theirs to the same tree. My mission was successful. It is now theMartenitsa tree.
Went on a tour of the infrastructure supporting our office on Wednesday. The amount of behind-the-scenes work going into keeping the building running is just incredible and in particular the climate-control: Some of the chonkiest machines are controlling variables like CO2 balance, humidity, temperature and more are all continuously across many small zones for all five tiny floors.
Friday was CityJS conference, set in the delightful Royal Geographical Society. Most of the talks were bangers, although my clear fave was Mike Hartington's talk on Delighting Users with Performant Apps. Great examples of how to make the UI/UX of web-apps fantastic. Still more difficult to get to a great state than it should be, but, the web is great and this talk reminded me of that.
Didn't enjoy the hall-way track, but, did enjoy the pub afterwards. Nice to see some people I haven't seen in years. Opted not to talk about my exciting journey with British medicine because that's a proper bummer. This has persuaded me to start going to the Future of Coding meetups. Maybe see you there?
Spent Saturday in Canary Wharf, which has become considerably more fun than I remember it being several years ago, and was littered with NYPD police cars because I guess someone was filming there. Watched the sun go down from One Canada Square. See you at the next CRISPR party, yeah?
One thread connecting many conversations I had this week was a general sense of needing to take a break from the routine we've all been in some version of since March 2020, to think about where all this is going and to course-correct where we need to. My plan to do this is to take some time off work in the coming weeks and work through the Stanford Life Design Lab's materials. It's not quite a holiday, but, it'll help.
The Browser Company shipped Arc's mobile app this week - it's not a browser, but it does connect the mobile & desktop browsing experiences together in a really nice way. I really like this web-browser. It's changed how I browse the net for the better and I no longer have thousands (yes really) of tabs open. Here's an invite.
