weeknotes for w/c 24/03/25

spent a lot of this week contributing to in-person cross-team meeting at work and mentally prepping for two conferences, State of the Browser 2025 and Cloud Native Rejekts. the weather throughout this week has been lovely and mild. apologies if this is a bit scattered, as I'm super sleepy while finishing this off

• I'm shocked people read the blog! hello! thank you for keeping up with me. it does mean a lot
• I’ve been painfully busy recently.
  • need to sit down and take stock in all the projects I'm involved in and cross things off as they're complete before picking up more. I've instructed my usual co-conspirators to not tell me about anything cool going on over the next month, so I can focus exclusively on completing everything in the backlog.
  • making a conscious effort not to join new things feels pretty weird, especially since everything seems like such a good opportunity and it would be a shame to miss out on something good
  • committing to things to the point where I have little time left for myself. that's is very silly and I should probably stop. I think I just need a week where I escape to the forest and catch up with everything, but I first need to put the spinning plates down. that's hard because I tend to be the glue between a lot of groups of people, and I like bringing people together
• ...in other news, I've also picked up a few new things...
  • I'm now a Programming Committee member for the OpenInfra Summit Europe 2025!
  • responded to an ad for an NHS research study in The Metro
  • got an ARK identifier registered. need to set up the resolver soon, but I've got some big things planned
  • emailed for a comedy gig slot at the Freedom Fridge, need to put together some material and respond to them. wanted to go since I helped Jethro out there
• spent a lot of my Tuesday working in London
  • worked from the Wellcome Library before lunch on Tuesday, then got some food. Euston is a broadly decent part of London, but it's devoid of any good, reasonably priced food places
• registered for a British Library reader pass, and worked from one of their pleasantly quiet reading rooms after lunch
• found an obscure CSS property for breaking a large API key up, such that it wraps when the screen width decreases. I hate CSS, but feeling like a "real" front-end dev was lovely
• met Felix and Alex for pub in the evening
• had dinner with Hugh on Wednesday evening
  • he gave me stickers in support of my archival stuff, but there’s no more space on my laptop. my situation is getting dire as I can’t stick new stickers on now 😦
    • I need to get a hard-shell case for my laptop to stick my current laptop skin on, so I can preserve it
• got Hugh on board with stickers project
• spent a lot of this week in infrastructure and process meetings, but there's light at the end of the tunnel! had a team day at work on Thursday.
  • had a Tesco version of an egg McMuffin in the morning, and it was not too bad
  • met a lot of people I'd only worked with virtually, including my direct manager and the company CTO. it was lovely to meet them in person, finally
• did an organisational meeting and set out an execution requirements into outputs. it was very fun facilitating the meeting and it feels good shaping the team and developing good working relationships with people. I'm putting myself in a good position to empower others to do their best work
• might need a new backpack as the buckle on the old one snapped, was thinking about 3D printing a new buckle with Willow's help.
• Sir Mark Rowley keeps personally messaging me on LinkedIn to become a police officer. I don't like it at all
• knocked out a few things on Friday
  • finally picked up my dry cleaning!
  • hung my clock up in the kitchen. I also just set it back, but the clocks spring forward next week. sigh
• went to State of the Browser on Saturday at the Barbican Centre, with Willow. it was a really fun conference!
  • arrived on time to State of the Browser! it was a brilliant day. a massive thank you to London Web Standards
  • it was a small, cozy single-track conference. there wasn't much of a hallway track, even though it has the perfect venue for that
  • a few takeaways...
    • spec-driven development is a very interesting concept, and Ladybird is a very cool project. I think it’s fully possible for them to become the reference implementation for the web, given their stringent adherence to standards.
    • first-time speaker Niya Dobazova on using CSS light-dark() instead of media queries. this a great talk (especially so given the fact it's her first time doing this, and the topic is so complex), with zero fluff, no filler words, I'm very impressed
      • the BBC has really good slide decks with Reith Sans. also learnt about some very important principles for designing APIs.
        • bikeshedding is a great tool for coming up with good names that stand the test of time. this is especially important given names tend to stick
        • a good API should communicate intent, be future-proof and ready to evolve, make the simple things easy and the complex possible, and should be nice to use. front-end APIs can benefit from greater separation of concerns by enabling people to 'slot' in components. API design is something to be practiced
        • when a roundabout becomes large enough, it becomes a gyratory!
        • masonry layouts are coming to CSS
      • the old web still exists, and it can be made accessible. also, I should add cursor trails to my website using canvas and requestAnimationFrame.
• conferences beget conferences. a new conference was promoted before each speaker. there are too many events to go to but they all look amazing!
• met James Basoo, and read an interesting post of his about whether or not to use Tailwind, and treating external dependencies in codebases as libraries and not frameworks. there was a nice metaphor about roadblocks versus speed bumps, and how friction helps us stop to evaluate whether we’re taking the right approach to solve a problem or whether the problem needs to be solved at all
• Josie flew over from Zurich the evening and joined us for pub after SotB. she's in town to join me for Cloud Native Rejekts <3
• went to Cloud Native Rejekts on Sunday with Josie
  • had breakfast at the place up of the road. I have learnt she does not like beans (she's right, they're weird)
  • at the Institute of Directors building at 116 Pall Mall. it's very snazzy but also a bit stuffy. I had to leave for fresh air halfway through
  • we had a lovely lunch in the park!
  • a few takeaways from Sunday...
    • metrics are useful for measuring success and progress, obtaining buy-in from decision makers and justifying investment into platform initiative, and to understand and prioritise future improvements
    • developer experience is important as you develop and standardise ways of interacting with the platform. those standards are crucial to record and maintain as you scale
    • we shouldn’t place too much emphasis on technology, but on the people using it. if developers don’t buy in, then nobody will use what your internal tooling
    • we should focus on business composability as a final goal for a mature platform, including having ready-to-use pieces to compose new and more complex applications to handle new and more complex business cases
    • platform personas are an interesting concept
    • SPACE metrics are useful for measuring DX in the context of platform
      • developer satisfaction, the performance of the system (in terms of outcomes), activity (for actions or outputs), communication (how people work together), efficiency (ensuring many high-quality uninterrupted outputs)
    • defining proress and outcome metrics will demonstrate a correlation between how productive the platform is and the business outcome (derive a ‘chain’ of metrics which relate platform changes to business outcomes)
    • a WASM based plugin system for extending a project without knowing the original programming language is interesting
    • slimtoolkit is an interesting tool to minify container images
• screwed up the date on my last post, because of changes to my n8n workflow. it was an off by one error that’s been corrected. I now better understand the importance of obfuscated permalinks!
• been a while since I’ve collected new tube posters, and I need to do it again soon
• found I quite like Volvic Touch of Strawberry water. can’t wait to find out it causes cancer or is flavoured with lead or eats away at your insides
• my prepper urges have been validated by the European Union, which is reassuring.
• arranged to walk in Richmond Park with David (and maybe some other friends) on the 20th. I'm excited for the deer!
• considering an AWS certification after this GCP one is done! however, there are two or three different certification accounts and the whole process is maddeningly frustrating
• food house's jumping the cacc is beautiful, with some absolute lyrical genius. the epitome of hyperpop.
• even the people I admire the most are a little bit messy, because they’re human and I take comfort in that.
• came across the concept "any object of sufficient complexity naturally becomes ensouled. as something ensouled becomes commoditised or ephemeral, its soul departs." the magic switch captures this nicely
• shattered, but looking forward to next week! excited for day 2 of Cloud Native Rejekts on Monday and doing some backend work