These can be only sort-of weekly, right?

Moving

• This week & weekend I moved home. Sort-of.
• I now live in Putney. It's rather sunny here.
• Unfortunately that also came with a commute. Previously I had a 30 minute walk to work. Now there are 2 trains taking roughly 45 minutes.
• So, this post comes to you from an apartment with no furniture† and no internet‡. So that's been fun!

Catching Up

• This weekend I helped my friends Lucy & Tanya move home. Or, rather, I assembled a single IKEA drawer before distracting them with dinner plans at CoCo Ichibanya.
• Did you know “Bestå” means “Consist”? You do now. Also “Blåhaj” means “Blue Shark” - you're welcome.
• The day before, my friends Gallal & Ayo helped me move home. It took us about 15 minutes to load the comically oversized van and about 5 minutes to unload it.
• Other highlights of the move include eating drive-thru McDs in Battersea Park next to the river, and ambling through Spitalfields for 15m trying to locate a car.
• Honestly though? This & last week have been pretty great in terms of exploiting the recent bout of good weather to catch-up with friends. Some I hadn't seen since 2019? That's wild.
• Is this how people felt with long-distance friendships in the 1900s? Send a letter (or, Signal/WhatsApp message) every few months, and occasionally brave the harsh seas (or, train) to see them?
• Correspondance compilations are apparently a thing - if you were ever curious about what George Orwell talked about with his friends, you can actually find out. (Spoiler: It's still kind-of weird.)
• George Horace Lorimer's “Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to his Son” is entirely fictional but has definitely made me wonder.
• (Just like in modern times, "Self-made" might be code for "Made-up")
• I wonder how they'd feel about Signal's push for "ephemerality", aka, configuring an automatic disappearing messsage timer. Real-world conversations don't get saved into a logfile forever, why should digital messages?
• Most importantly, CoCo Ichibanya is fantastic. Slowly working through recommending that everybody I know go there. Chances are if you're reading this and you know me - you're on that list!

What about technology?

• Oh right yes, I forgot that I work in technology.
• My personal technical debt keeps climbing and I just haven't had a chance to really fix it ...
• Most of that technical debt is to do with NodeJS dependencies starting to fall out of date: Some dependencies are doing hard updates to ES6 Modules. Some consumers depend on very-wide-version-ranges, or worse, very old version ranges. It leads to an interesting situation where by installing some security patches, some software is just left broken. It either won't build, or more annoyingly, it has random runtime errors.
• NodeJS - how I want to love you so - but you sure aren't designed for large, long-lived applications.
• Ah well, back to Rust I go.
• Currently designing a Compute@Edge service in Rust which I am very excited about. More to come on that.
• There's also like, a LOT? of outstanding blog posts for me to get to. Guess I now know what to do while waiting for more furniture to arrive.

Oh, also, I've started trying to compile a collection on neurodivergencies that either have helped me or have been recommended to me and I haven't got to yet. If you have recommendations please send them through. The list is here.

On reflection “Bestå” is a good subtitle for the last year, and for this previous week.

† A bedframe and sofa are both apparently arriving soon. ‡ 5G is a blessing. A new router apparently arrives soon.