being the week of Christmas, it's been rather quiet! almost everyone's gone for holidays, but I'm kicking about at work still. made my way to Hamburg on Christmas Day, got there on Boxing Day and met up with Willow and friends at the convention centre where Congress is taking place.

miscellanea

• in the UK, you're legally required to tell the government about company acquisitions in 17 "sensitive" areas of the economy
• the UK privatised its postcode database, the Postcode Address File, when it sold Royal Mail in the 2010s. I'm baffled by why that would even happen
• came across the really funny The Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law, which was active in Austro-Hungary in 1911. it's almost a parallel of The Official Monster Raving Loony Party
• came across this site by Boris Tane about how logging (the way most people do it) sucks. although I haven't read through it too closely, I'm inclined to trust him on this given his work on observability tooling at Baselime
• managed to read Don't Get Distracted on the way to Hamburg, and it got me... surprisingly angry. I left with no new perspective or different way of thinking.
  • the entire talk can be summed up as "I was told to build something when working for a military contractor, and I was shocked when I figured out it could be used to kill people!" what, exactly, did you expect?
  • the most irritating thing about the piece is that it barely acknowledges that you've got to be in an incredibly privileged position to say "no" to a client or manager's request. "I’m not gonna build this thing because I disagree with how it might be used" is a one way route to getting fired for "insubordination" (I think it's bullshit, too, don't worry) and permanently stunting your career.
  • yes, technology needs to be ethical, and we as engineers need to instill ethics in the systems we build. however, I reject that the onus is entirely on us to be the arbiter of good and bad, and steward of the ethical. one person cannot change entrenched systems alone.
  • the piece briefly alludes to this, but building unethical software is incredibly profitable. there's always someone willing to build it, for the right price. the rise of AI tools means someone can simply build something incredibly dodgy themselves.
  • I think there could've been focus on things teams can do to embed ethics into the way they work, including some focus on how engineers with tenure and trust within their teams supporting more junior engineers if those junior engineers have ethical concerns
• a much, much better read was Platformland, which I also managed to chew through on the way to Hamburg. I've written up a 3,000 word review, which I'll polish and put up sometime in the new year.

musings

• printers can absolutely smell your deadlines.
• "half again as much" is apparently 1.5x
• my AirPods have terrible audio quality. I'm genuinely shocked people buy these

misadventures

• purchased some printer ink from Argos on Monday, and printed off a bunch of reading material for the coach to Hamburg for Congress.
  • that included a YearCompass, which I sat down and filled in to look back on 2025. I still need to do the 2026 portion. I adore doing my life planning on paper, given how tactile it is.
• left some stuff at Mac’s on the weekend, so met up with him on Tuesday to collect it. bumped into Mat in Euston after in a pure coincidence, and went to a pub in Monument. Had lunch and caught up with him
• after Mat, met up with Iris and her girlfriend on Tuesday for dinner and drinks. I lost Whamageddon from some music playing on a cycle rickshaw in Covent Garden
• skipped this week’s 1:1 with Josie, as I’m gonna see her in Hamburg anyway
• fixed a bug where newsletter open rates appeared to be 0% in my Ghost dashboard. I now have figures flowing in!
• spent Wednesday packing for Congress. couldn't fit a blahaj in there, though 😔
• caught the coach to Hamburg on Christmas Day
  • journey started with a taxi to Victoria coach station. there was a shocking amount of traffic on the roads for Christmas Day. caught my first coach to Paris, which was surprisingly packed
  • saw a police horse in Lewisham
  • made our way to Folkestone to catch Le Shuttle, which was a surprise. I expected to catch the ferry. went through the EU's Entry/Exit System, which was surprisingly painless. I really do prefer the coach, given juxtaposed border controls mean it's much simpler and quicker to do immigration and customs checks
  • coach got into Paris 20 minutes early. had a 1h40 layover, so got McDonald’s at Gare de Lyon. got a McDonald's dog toy (namely the Sundae'Ball) for... personal reasons
  • managed to catch the second coach on time, which was also very packed. nobody on it was making their way to Congress, though
• got woken up by a German federal police checkpoint at 3am, which was the most terrifying thing ever. on our way rather swiftly following a quick check of papers.
• had a problem with tyres outside of Hamburg so got delayed by 3h. I wasn't in a rush anyway, and I managed to catch up on some sleep. eventually made it to Hamburg at about 1300 on Boxing Day.
• headed to CCH as soon as I landed in Hamburg, to pick up my wristband and meet up with Josie and co. the CCH is a massive, labyrinthine convention centre with so much to explore. I had an amazing Day 0, including getting a page moved on Wikipedia

• Congress was a bit of a blur, given how time functions weirdly in there.
• met up with Ole on Day 1.