weeknotes for w/c 28/04/25

quite a busy week overall, with the highlight of this week being an exhausting AWS Summit on Wednesday! likely going to take it a little easy next week, given I’m absolutely winded from that

• I woke up on Monday sneezing uncontrollably, hope I don’t have hay fever because my insides already get inflamed enough as it is.
• went to the London night cafe on Monday night, and met a few interesting people! hacked away at the blog post, as usual
  • got the Feminist Server Manifesto recommended to me. it's a short read, and I think it aligns with a lot of what I want to see out of computing. I particularly agree with the principle that "talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible"
• had a Student Engagement Committee meeting for OpenInfra Summit on Monday, where they laid out some next steps
• had kickoff for exciting new project on Tuesday, which I'm looking forward to working on
• hosted my first Codebar workshop in ages on Tuesday, got shadowed by Arora. it was a swinging success!
  • learnt a lot about porridge, and I'd like to start eating it during the day!
• got two engineering proposals reviewed and approved this week, which I'm happy about. excited to roll up my sleeves and get down to business
  • I enjoy making decisions with consensus, and I’ve used engineering proposals in the past to discuss changes engineers need to make and open up the relevant information to non-engineering stakeholders.
  • I believe software engineering is a creative job and requires a degree of creativity, but I’m not sure where and how that fits into management style
• the Spanish Power outage that occurred this week was scary to see. I'm worried it could happen in the UK too. I'm not sure what our capacity to recover from a black start is, as it doesn't seem too well-documented
• Sir Mark Rowley messaged me on LinkedIn again. he's really insistent that I'm the change the Met needs, and I'm not sure how to feel about it
• went to AWS Summit London on Wednesday! had an alright time
  • ran through something I plan to build at work with a solutions architect
  • met with some Summit friends! bumped into Ryan Lee, and we went around the floor. also managed to meet up with a friend from Manchester I met a year or two ago! we went around the afterparties
• got water at fancy station which dispensed electrolyte water and flavoured water. one of the stations was controlled by a Raspberry Pi, which broke 😭
• I've discovered a new pet peeve: people asking me whether I’m queuing when I'm clearly standing in a queue. with a little bit of observation and deduction, I’m sure you could figure it out
• I feel like my innate love of karaoke makes me C-suite material, and I should be given an executive job post-haste
• helped with two interviews this week!
• picked up some new inhalers, so my stock is replenished
• renewed two important domains, and the price came to £75, holy shit this doesn't bode well for my domain estate
• miserably leap-frogged three heavy bags of shopping down the road on Friday, and it was a terrible experience. it would be so useful to have a car
• finally started the Sisyphean task of spring cleaning
  • finally cleared out my workbench
  • got new Formil washing pods from Lidl. I'm a powder guy, but I decided to try them with a few washes this week. they seem to perform well.
  • washing the bulky stuff has been a bit of a pain, because of the size of my washing machine. managed to churn through a bit of it, though
  • washed bathroom and living room mats with detergent and disinfectant. the washing machine's hand-wash setting did a surprisingly good job
  • cleaned my Mac screen
• recently started using liners for my food waste container inside, and it’s been life changing
• joined friend for a birthday pub crawl on Saturday night in Waterloo. got locked out and had to knock on the neighbour’s at 3am to get me my spare key. not my proudest moment.
• finished BBC's Daddy Issues while hanging up clothes, which was an alright series. it felt a little short at six episodes, but it told the story it wanted and was funny enough
• planned some me-time for this weekend. that, of course, did not come to fruition.
  • had Ollie over for Friday evening, watched Zoolander with him, and I fell asleep two thirds of the way through. made him an egg sandwich on Saturday morning, and sent him on his way
  • had Maciej over on Sunday, we watched The Island (which is a pretty good film which does more with the "they're in a fake reality" trope than many films do). we started YOU, on Netflix. made him English breakfast muffins from scratch on Monday morning, we also started making some raspberry jam for a cake I’m baking for work next Tuesday
• accommodation booked for holiday with the lads in July. it seems the plans have made it out the group chat