Busy week. No video-games for Alex this week.

Summarised a few months of design-work into a technical-design-doc this week, and circulated it around to get a bunch of feedback. It speaks to including code in FT articles, in a similar way to something I'm considering doing on this blog. Very excited about this work!

Had my first 1:1 with Alice this week which was great. Given that it was one of the first meetings in her new role, it prompted me to write what I'm calling reverse-manager-README: It's an experimental document inspired by a conversation with Nick about how bringing context about the quirks of managing you would be nice for managers. I've never written a manager-readme because they seem a bit impersonal, but this exercise has given me second thoughts.

On Thursday evening I went to a Nikkei dinner with Luke and JK at a steakhouse where - after talking about how it's a long-term aspiration - I was floored by someone asking me "What's your strategy to move to Japan?". I hope I handled it well! For now I am only focusing on language. We talked a little bit about cyber-attacks and This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends came up — an absolutely phenomenal read.

At the weekend I went to the memorial and wake for my late uncle. Getting to Sutton wasn't fun, but the ceremony was beautiful and I really enjoyed catching up with family who I hadn't seen in ages. I still haven't processed the whole thing, but all of the memories are nice ones and that's what's most important.

Sunday marked Lucy's birthday and drinks which were lovely ... until they got weird real fast after some guy [sharp intake of breath] attempted to assault a bartender, got violently booted out, skulked outside for over an hour in the rain while peering through the windows, and snuck back in and sat with us before finally being walked away by the police. And exhale. Fun!

Week 1 of 2 of midterms this week, hence the being busy. I cobbled together an acceptable walk-through of the maths behind RSA, and a short essay on some of the cyber-threats a shopping center might face.

More exciting was a piece of data-analysis I did exploring if (as the headlines claim) large UK airports are performing worse in 2023: It included datasets on inflation, passenger numbers and flights between 2018 and 2023 and through a mixture of statistical analysis and creative charting I concluded that:

• The large airports are sort-of performing worse. They now have slightly higher delays but proportionally fewer cancellations compared to all other airports. Meanwhile delays are slightly worse everywhere.
• High inflation hasn't reduced the numbers of people travelling, and in fact air travel trends are returning to what they were before the pandemic.
• There's also this curious little statistically relevant link between passenger numbers and flight delays. Who'd have guessed that more passengers means more flight delays? 🙃

Not so excited about the fallout from working on this blog last week. Migrating to an NPM Workspace monorepo has introduced bugs through hoisting (though not as confusing as ones with Yarn). Worse: Some of my Cloudflare workers are misbehaving and I've had a really hard time trying to debug them. If you've seen an error page on here recently, I'm sorry! Working on it!