Highlight of the week was our first-ever away-day for tech-leads and principals in my team. After a great ice-breaker we ran through many group activities including charting all the technical interactions needed to serve articles to users, which I loved but which pulled on enough of my esoteric knowledge that it was surprisingly draining: We covered an entire wall. Conversations over the day were all a genuine joy.
For a proposal I’m working on, I’ve been combing through many systems and codebases to identify how they interact with a notorious area of our architecture. I’ve learned a fair bit about the methodology: I tried to automate classification several ways but found the results consistently variable and unreliable. In the end generating dependency trees starting with our software catalogue, charting in a spreadsheet and then reading parts of source-code by hand has been far more effective.
It’s always DNS.
No improvements to the site this week, instead I focussed on the CMS: I write a lot on my phone and for the longest time have been unable to write on this website without a computer. This week I moved my CMS to the Decap distribution and added in styles to make it mobile friendly. Pretty happy so far.
My friend RBI is moving to NYC to do an exciting masters, and this week marked her London leaving drinks in a pub full of bankers and Jubel. Met lots of nice people and added a fair few trashy films to the backlog in the process. No karaoke (probably for the best). We’ll miss you - godspeed!
Recipes with Alex™: 2x mini-Ciabattas, 8x slices of Hermes de Provence Salami, 4x slices of Bavarian smoked cheese, 1x jar of M&S truffle pesto. Slice the mini-Ciabattas and apply 1/2 of the ingredients to each. Surprisingly good, right? (Probably have a salad for dinner).
AG and GS coincided in the same place for their shared birthday for the first time in recent history, which proved dangerous: Missed my last train by a hair.
Made it out to Peckham for KB’s birthday. More Jubel. Added some films and books to my backlog, decidedly less trashy. Learned about black holes and political history. Easiest longest journey home ever (the 37 bus, almost the entire way).
I had the ambitious plan of getting out to Boston Manor Park for Junction 2. Feeling too tired to endure a peak-time techno crowd after the week, my ticket sold within 10 minutes on the resale market and so I ventured to Surrey Quays for Deadpool & Wolverine with the Canary Wharf crew. Superhero movies are normally cliched, but this was much lighter, called out many of Marvel’s tropes and several moments had the whole cinema laughing. Unironic recommend.
Sunday I went to see MS’s stand-up comedy debut in Belsize Park, where nearly every single set was good. I’m interested in how formulaic stand-up is, yet knowing it, it all still works. Followed by Persian food at Tandis on Finchley road where I tasted the best lamb shank in years.
