miscellanea

• this week, courtesy of Felix, the story of the onion in the varnish. when Primo Levi, an Italian chemist, took a job in a varnish factory, he didn't understand why people kept chucking onions into the varnish. turns out, the recipe was created before thermometers were a thing, and slices of onion would fry if the linseed oil base was hot enough. when they started using thermometers, people obviously forgot why they were to add an onion, but kept doing it anyway! and this says a lot about old code.
  • this comes from a collection of Levi's short stories, The Periodic Table, which is going in my reading backlog
  • there's quite an interesting article which touches on how this principle interacts with Chesterton's Fence. in short, don't do things because it's how they've always been done, but understand why principles and traditions exist before making changes
• GBR's new livery launched on Monday, and by goodness I think it's atrocious. I'm also dreading the large-scale timetable changes coming in on Sunday.
• also on Monday, a House of Commons debate on digital ID.
  • first off, who the fuck is advising Keir Starmer, and why are they so bad at it? this is political suicide
  • there's a really good briefing about the potential impacts of digital ID by EFF and a few other NGOs. besides the points about privacy, cybersecurity and discrimination, I particularly appreciate how it could change the relationship between population and state to one where you need to seek permission to interact with services that are supposed to serve you as a citizen.
• found a website which analyses open source projects and their licenses, to determine whether they're really FOSS. this'll come in useful, especially for pointing out the projects which are open-core, impose an SSO tax or are otherwise questionable. I think it would be good to add a section which proposes alternatives to software which isn't fully FOSS.
• ThinkPads are call ThinkPads because there used to be actual IBM Think pads, made from paper. also IBM has a merch store. what the heck?
• came across this LinkedIn article (ew, I know) on how developers’ brains avoid resting, because we often “rest” by engaging the same part of our brain that’s used for our day-to-day work
  • I’ve genuinely thought about how working with me is like playing tug with a dog and its rope toy. I really struggle to switch off with certain problems, but that's because I like solving problems. 🐾
• Hugh dropped an article on how he's used Aiven's free-tier Kafka in his bird feeder project. quite the read, even if it is propaganda for his employer's managed Kafka services 😆
• apparently, Amazon runs buses in London to get its staff to and from their fulfillment centres. I saw one in Woolwich this week
• new 3D incident investigation video by the US Chemical Safety Board dropped this week, and these things are like catnip to me. shame they're shutting down
• found an article about WhatsApp's interoperability with third-party messaging apps, spurred by the Digital Markets Act. the technical overview is quite interesting (although light on detail), but I'm quite worried interoperability will result in a lot of buck-passing when an inevitable breach occurs. I don't trust Meta, but I trust third parties randos even less
• you win, Willow. I'm sick of React. the first patch for the remote code execution CVE enables denial of service and exposes source code.
• I've been interacting with the UK Government quite a bit recently, and like GOV.UK service design has been getting a little sloppy. people are now required to verify their identity for limited companies. it's a little confusing given the flow for verifying your identity and linking it to a company are the same. there's no obvious distinction between the two, so it seems you need to go down the same flow twice which is counterintuitive.

musings

• will I still be full of joy and whimsy when I hit 30?
• you have free will, and you can just do things.
• although I'm a big advocate for self-hosting, the one thing I appreciate about the cloud is how easy it is to increase network throughput. I've done a really good job setting up engineering where I work such that if I need to parallelise a task to do network-bound tasks faster, I just can
• I’ve been in two situations this week which have made me really surprised there hasn’t been a crush on the Tube yet. in my mind, that's two too many

misadventures

• every week, my decision to post weeknotes is validated. got a lead on house hunting algorithms piped directly into my DMs on Monday, from last week's post
• on Tuesday, I went to a session on AWS and Tailscale, which helped me figure out exactly how Tailscale can solve some of the problems I'm facing at work. the most interesting pattern I've come across is using a subnet router in an EC2 instance to access resources in AWS, and directly connecting to resources in a VPC using peer relays.
  • if you're interested, the workshop is available on GitHub here.
  • during the session, I got pointed to an article on how NAT traversal works. haven't had the chance to read it, but I've heard it's pretty accurate
• started watching Pluribus on Tuesday, too! I thought it'd turn out like 3 Body Problem, but it looks a lot more interesting
  • one of the characters tries to drunk-drive, but she's stopped by a smart breathalyser (or alcohol interlock) installed in her car. it's wild that technology exists and it's even more wild that it might become commonplace in the UK
• headed into the office on Thursday for a team day and Secret Santa
  • had a nightmare about being late to work because the Central line was delayed, but ended up making it in on time in real life
  • got to present some of the work I've been doing on Platform to the rest of the org and make plans for 2026
  • got a railway calendar for my Secret Santa, and my colleague told me about how there are railway cameras for steam trains
• made some custard to have with apple pie. Bird's tastes like an absolute mimicry of custard, probably because I've made my own egg-based custard before. it's got a shockingly one-dimensional taste, probably because of the imitation vanilla?
• got a package in the post on Friday, consisting of some really good merch for a video game coming up. I got stickers, temporary tattoos and a some real life copies of an in game magazine! 😄
• got new insoles, and by goodness do they make walking a lot more comfortable!
• went to Felix’s Christmas party on Saturday, which was really fun! I'm glad I got invited. went to Two Magpies near Limehouse for lunch on Sunday, which was a really nice café I can highly recommend. had eggs Benedict with scrambled eggs, because I can’t stand the texture of poached eggs
• upgraded Plane on Sunday, and it didn’t take half an afternoon! I'm quite happy I’m getting better at homelabbing, with the right tools in place
• after a few weeks of pure slog, I feel I've made some really significant headway on my to-do list. I feel well-prepared for the coming week
• I'm now Airflow certified in both Fundamentals and DAG Authoring! I feel like that'll make me more effective at work
• I need to make some time next week to do YearCompass. I think it'll be useful for planning next year, even though I've already got some very well-fleshed out plans