I feel a little shattered after work this week. I've actually started drafting this post on Friday after work, so I don't have to worry too much about it going out on time.

miscellanea

• learnt about the Phistomephel ring for solving sudoku
• friend of mine has created stat.ec, an actually good static hosting service that likely won't succumb to enshittification. API access is already a feature, plus there's a CLI tool coming soon, too! it's a strong contender for the static part of my failover system.
• Lu Wilson's thoughts on events resonated with me a lot. first and foremost, good events are about the people. your purpose as an event organiser is to make it as easy as possible for cool people to find one another.
• found out about shred as a command to securely delete files, from this article about migrating between two Hashicorp Vault instances
• I have a self-hosted cal.com instance, where I'd have to manually reconnect one of my Google accounts after a week. turns out this is a known issue with self-hosted connections, where a GCP project with an OAuth for external users and a publishing status of "Testing" is issued a refresh token that only lasts for seven days. simply needed to put the app "In production" without submitting it for verification so the keys last more than a week. I can't wait until Google decides to arbitrarily change this system.
• when it comes to documentation and tests, I'm absolutely rabid about using domains the organisation controls. (or even better, reserved domains and TLDs). I'm glad Terence Eden fixed this for curl!
• need to have a similar Pihole and Tailscale setup to this, so I can block ads on every device.
• found this interesting article about language learning, which says you need ~600-750 hours of effort to achieve a reasonable competency in Spanish. I only need an A1 qualification to move there, so I think I'll pick it up again after this talk.

musings

• been winning a lot recently, and it feels a little scary. I'm worried I don't deserve good things, for whatever reason
• considering switching from Ghost to Hugo and Listmonk because the lack of footnotes are absolutely irritating. I want pretty notes in the margins, a la Edward Tufte
• I had to complete a probation packet this week by hand! (shock, horror, I know!). had an idea to make annual reviews easier. if have an LLM scour my blog posts, weeknotes and other bits and bobs, it could make it easier to highlight my achievements (and it might even catch things I've missed!)
• networking is hard. had to wrestle with it this week for my homelab, when Tailscale and Wireguard conflicted with one another. interestingly, it seems packets were coming in on the Wireguard interface and then going out on Tailscale interface, so the handshake between the two machines succeeded but they couldn't speak to one another. I'd like to dig into it more.
• speaking to salespeople at software vendors feels like some form of advanced psychological warfare.
• glad I didn’t jump on the Apple Intelligence bandwagon. at the time, it seemed too good to be true at the time and this report from The Information reveals that there was a bunch of infighting, faked demos, no capabilities from the start. the article is behind a paywall, so here’s a video summary from Snazzy Labs
• really tempted to do a Rhiaro-like tracker of acquisitions, spending and eating. theirs is focussed on ActivityPub, but I'm not too much into the social web yet.
• listened to some music this week, namely
  • Take a Chance feat. Little Dragon by Flume
  • on first listen, I don't vibe much with MØ's new album, Plæygirl. the first track, Meat on a Stick, is reminiscient of Sophie's JUST LIKE WE NEVER SAID GOODBYE
  • Wings (Nu:Logic Remix) is a beautifully layered drum and bass song
  • HARD FEELING by EVAN GIIA is pretty good, and so is Unholy Hour by Chloe x Halle
• planning to have Bruno around sometime in June, and deciding on what fun stuff to do. maybe an art museum, theatre and dinner out?

misadventures

• solved the mystery of a memory leak on my homelab. seems like it came from a rogue containerised app.
• spent a little time doing some reverse engineering of apps on my phone. there might be an article coming soon 👀
• continued my spring clean on Tuesday, mopping the floors.
• absolutely on fire with my writing this week! published two blog posts this week, and working on a bunch more
  • a short blogumentation piece about moving repos from one Git provider to another, related to the source control migration I've been tackling at work
  • a 3,368 word masterpiece on Tuesday, the Cult of Done manifesto and my Journey to Becoming a Maker. it's a companion to my maker talk from HalfStack London last year
  • finally started my Ghent talk from my outline, which is good. just need to write a 4,000 word piece, and do some slides, which shouldn't be too hard. that being said, I've been struggling to come up with a good story for it
• my Teaching Programming Across Disciplines chapter got accepted, so now it's time to start writing!
• I also need to write a five minute set for next June, but that's far enough away not to worry too much about it now.
• had an external 1:1 with Josie this week, as usual. we've been really busy recently, so a lot of our shared projects have fallen by the wayside slightly. I'm hoping to pick them up in the next couple weeks, though!
• booked accommodation for my Ghent trip finally
  • prices actually went down from when I last checked at the start of May, so I'm incredibly lucky. the place is also a short walk from the venue, so I'm happy.
  • I'm a little nervous, but I've convinced Felix to come with me. he should be good moral support!
• bumped into my MP on the Tube on Wednesday. he remembers me! (from the time I accidentally slammed the door in his face, but he remembers me nevertheless). I do need to send him an email at some point
• I keep stumbling onto cool things. last week Friday it was an ambient jungle set, this week Wednesday it was cabaret. went to Amazing Grace for karaoke, but stumbled on Sinful Cabaret instead. somehow got a seat right next to the stage, and it was a grand old time
• coworked with Arora on Thursday. managed to get some actual work done while over at her's, including figuring out some dependency injection shenanigans. tried an ostrich burger (interesting, gamey taste) and Cotton Candy grapes. got converted into a Fornite girlie, too, playing it after work and scoring two Victory Royales. it's been years since I've played, so I'm glad I'm not too rusty
• had my probation meeting on Friday, passed with flying colours. I've been enjoying it a lot at Lumi
• spent a lot of time this week restructuring repos into Polylith and writing some incredibly elegant Python code. next week will be dedicated to interviews, code reviews and getting some CI/CD pipelines working if I have the time.
• got a GitHub Enterprise subscription all signed off on Friday. they said it would take two to four business days, but they turned it around in under four hours which is rather impressive. that's license negotiations done for another year.
• decided to bake some salmon en croute and cinnamon rolls on Sunday evening. just stuck them in the oven, so wish me luck!