Monday I took the day off to do some personal shopping as a follow-up to the image consulting. The hardest part was buying new shoes, because virtually nowhere stocks my size. But it was great and I got a few new ideas.
Yeah so anyway the shoes have already chewed through one of my heels. Let’s try this again in a few weeks.
We’re in evaluation season, and as well as doing my own, for the first time in a long time it’s my turn to hear other people’s evaluations and later to calibrate them. This is interesting because — I realise that — since arriving in Japan I have been guessing what evaluators want to hear based on my experience in the UK & BG, and I wish I had known the differences a year ago.
Met up with ROL, in town on holiday, for some okonomiyaki and a natter. We walk around Shinjuku for a bit before noticing a place off to the side of a road and saying, “Huh, that looks interesting”. My first time doing the okonomiyaki dance by hand, and gosh, it’s both more fun and much harder than I expected. We absolutely botched the monja but it still tasted great.
Thursday I end up in Nichome for the first proper time, and get a spot tour of its highlights. What a great vibe.
Had a nice little nomikai with some of the technology leadership team which was very nice, and especially nice to speak to people I’d only seen on video-calls and slack, and we got to catch up about some recent happenings.
Wore a new outfit for this, and got a few complements. Chuffed.
Lots of hardening and CI work on my side-projects over the weekend: All my CI is now tracked in Honeycomb, most of my dependencies are now pinned and grouped, and more excitingly following Origami’s example several years ago I finally dropped Lerna in favour of Mise+PNPM Workspaces plus some scripts. The result? Blog publishing is now 2x as fast, and I have the data to prove it!
I also released a GitHub action for validating RSS feeds called feed-validator-action, and this blog now uses it. It’s basically an improved version of what I already had here, but now other people can use it too.
Hath endured torment, to find the end of the journey.
