25 August 2024

Wednesday to Friday

Working. I was asked to help with a pitch for some central government work which was a good prompt to get back in touch with a few ex-colleagues.

The start-up I'm working for now has a marketing website. A few of us went for after-work drinks. £7.85 for a Neck Oil! wtf.

Saturday

The boy and I went to Brighton on the train to meet up with my sisters and my nephews. Annoyingly I bought single fare train tickets. Returns are marginally more expensive whereas two single trips is double the price. Doesn't seem like single-leg fares have been realised yet. The train journey was time to play more Front Armies.

Sunday

Early morning walk, quickly followed by addressing the aphid infestation on one my plants in the front of house flowerbed with the help of Claude, packed away the last bits from last week's camping trip, weeded the back garden and lugged the tent from garage to car to dry it in K's garden.

📺 Watched the first episode of Celebrity Race Against the World.

🏃‍♂️‍➡️ I went for a 5k run. I've changed the running screen on my Coros watch to remove pace as I'm only focussed on zone 2 running at the mo, which means keeping my heart rate between 125 and 145 BPM.

I bought compost and mulch and two varieties of spinach seeds. This autumn I'm going to see if I can turn the raised beds into food producing beds. I need to do a second, more intricate weeding session this week, and I'll pop the seeds in after the forecast heat wave.

📺 Alone, series 11 is on the History Channel. We watched three episodes!

🎧 Geeky listens

Great discussion about DuckDB on Software Engineering Daily. Kind of like SQLite but optimised for analytical use-cases.

Learnt a lot about lambdas and containers from two AWS developers who work on the serverless team.

I love Andrea Goulet's work. I first came across her on the Legacy Code Rocks podcast. Her main focus these days is empathy in tech. This conversation features systems thinking, a great cog metaphor for influence and a great description of systems engineering.

Douglas Crockford was the guy who came up with JSON data format, amongst other things. He received a death threat from someone in the XML community in the early days of JSON! He's writing a book on mathematics for kids without all the historical mistakes that's still used when teaching maths today. Might get that for E.