This came around much faster than expected and I feel like I’ve acheived very little.

  • This may be a premature celebration – but if so, it’s only premature by a week or so – but Altmetric just finished one of the largest infrastructure projects we’ve had to tackle in quite some time. Ever, maybe? We’ve moved 35ish applications to be managed by Nomad. This involved us wrapping everything in Docker containers, double checking it all worked in a rather more vanilla OS than they’re used to, 12 factoring apps more than we expected. It was a big deal. Biggest problem now: we have much better monitoring on how CPU thirsty our applications are, after a lifetime of not optimising for that. Whereas previously we’d allow our not-so-micro services to have free run of the entire machine’s resources, now we have to start looking at that and deciding what it really needs. We’ve discovered, to run optimally in their current states, our applications need a bunch more CPU than our total cluster can handle. Maybe more on this to come.
  • JavaScript testing still seems totally up for grabs. Every time I start another project and look for a testing framework I end up using something different. I’m using ava now. Its output is hideous. But feels fine. I’m writing an algorithm to work out the challenge rating of a D&D 5e monster. It’s pretty fun owing to the English rules being written out fairly clearly. It was also a good reminder of how important the refactor step of red-green-refactor is and how the skill in refactoring is picking the right refactoring to do.
  • Two friends of mine are great at keeping an eye out for things to do in my city. They ended up going to see I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue being recorded, and I totally missed that it was even happening. Whilst looking around for what else I might be missing I found Trio Con Alma playing at Peggie’s Skylight. I’ve not seen a great deal of jazz in the past, but I fudging love it. Ever since seeing Chicago as a lad I’ve wanted to be a man that spends his time and money and jazz and liqueur. Now here I am, moments from 30 years old and finally living that dream. Something I never expected was that something is clearly missing from the atmosphere there (literally); the smoking ban has taken away that murky air that I think is at the heart of that sehnsucht.
  • Just today I’ve decided I’d like to get back into playing my ukulele. I figured I’d try recording this one song each week until it sounds like what it is supposed to sound like. Here’s week one which I honestly wouldn’t recommend listening to. It’ll be nice to hear myself get better at this though.
  • I tried reading multiple times this week and just fallen to sleep. It’s possible my beanbag chair is just too comfy to read in. This is annoying to me as I’d like to get those books finished. I’ve played a disturbing amount of Heroes of the Storm though, which I don’t feel terrible about. I main Murky for anyone that cares. I’m that type of guy.
  • I saw Tom Stuart make a cassoulet over on Instagram, and oddly the humour with which he was cooking put me in such a good mood that I immediately signed up for Hello Fresh again. I think I’d forgotten how much I enjoy cooking and so the reminder was a delight.
  • I also saw that Paul got so excited about descenders that he redesigned his blog to use them, whilst I was almost simultaneously reading about why we should ditch underlines altogether.
  • I came across a Julia Evans zine on management again, which I read with a whole new level of delight now that I actually am a manager. I highly recommend everyone with a manager to read it if for only one thing: a reminder that you can be an active participant in the manager-line report relationship!