This week has had a strong theme of self-reflection, off of the back of researching and forward-planning for one project, and running a team workshop to start building out a new technical stack.

• After neglecting it for a long time, StormBit’s DNS is now partially automated. I built a new tool for idempotently managing DNS records within a zone, and have hooked it into the same CI process which manages and distributes server configurations, meaning that now DNS is completely democratised. I’ve written up some of the reasoning and methodology here.
• In actually building this thing there was the opportunity to start using Golang 1.11 modules which turn out to be seamless, hassle-free and actually incredibly awesome if also poorly documented. Really fantastic that there’s so much investment of time and effort into improving Golang’s developer experience.

Reflections

• This week I have been reading Thinking: Fast and Slow and it provides a great model for examining interactions. Aside from prompting me to reexamine many concepts and conversations which I have taken as "just so", because I may have avoided exerting the effort to check their logical consistency, I have lately become so easily distractible that I have forgotten the joy and value of reading. As a theme for coming weeks, I will be paying more attention to my energy levels and to trying to introduce unitasking.
• This week has also been pretty rough. Maybe it’s related to the clocks going back and is an early indication of SAD but motivation feels harder. On the upside, Gyrosco.pe have updated their mood tracking and have (apparently) added a feature to nag mood check-ins, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some useful data out of it.
• It was my mother’s birthday this week and together with my sister we out for dinner to celebrate. It’s kind-of surreal how different the dynamic is now that we’re all a group of adults, leading entirely and completely different lives. I suppose it’s not that big a deal since every other family will have gone through this same transition at some stage, but it’s quite remarkable to have gone through it.

• Loads of good conferences on this week: In no particular order, Sharp intake of breath. FFConf, PerfNow, WebPerfDays Amsterdam, muConf, SeaGL, DACHFest and P3X. Seems like by far this was this busiest conf week all year! Wish I could’ve gone to most of these because they all sounded awesome: Oh well, at least I got to play with a JamBoard.
• Holy carp there’s a lot of hype going on right now about React Hooks. Haven’t had a chance to look yet, but going by examples like this one, implementing slider interactions we may see much more portable user experience pattern libraries springing up. Also these seem like a good replacement for mixins?
• The FT hosted NodeGirlsLondon today. Nice work to everybody involved!
• With Black Friday coming up, an interesting tidbit came up during conversation this week: Singles Day generated $3B for AliBaba in just a couple of minutes. I can’t help but wonder how much revenue will be generated this season. At peak, $1 million per minute was spent last year. Can we top that?
• Missing: The island of Esanbehanakitakojima. Have you seen it? In all seriousness, coastal erosion is scary and climate change is making it happen quicker. And it’s happening—rather quietly—at an unprecedented rate in the UK. Don’t know about you but I’m not a fantastic swimmer.