Every time I come to my blog to post a new set of weeknotes it asks me to log in, and every time I tick the “remember me” box in forlorn hope that it actually will. Thanks to lethargy this is all still the same self-hosted WordPress installation on Dreamhost that it’s been since 2006, so presumably I could fix that, but … yeah, lethargy.
On Monday I actually had to do a scheduled upgrade to the EE network monitoring application that I’m responsible for (ie design, develop, test and support. I know, single point of failure and all that, but I haven’t failed yet). Normally I just deploy changes as soon as they’re ready (usually at least once a day), but this one involved a fairly major change to the main dashboard, switching over to the reworked version we’ve been building up as a beta for a while, so they went through the official change process so the network operations people weren’t taken by surprise. Naturally an hour beforehand my broadband went down, but fortunately it returned in time (and actually tethering to my phone would have been fine), so all went well. Also, no-one complained about the change, and one person said they liked it, so I’ll count that as a win. Still a few performance kinks to iron out, but the GenServer actor model makes it relatively easy to reason about and benchmark the way messages sometimes backup.
Also two rare trips to the office, both for completely separate interview/assessment processes (I was on the assessing side of the table). One was for a group of applicants for a new cohort of women developers in conjunction with Code First Girls, and the other for an internal promotion. Thankfully these things are generally pretty informal these days, as I used to find interviewing almost as stressful as being interviewed.
Friday evening saw one of the big Ipswich races – the Twilight 10k – with the temperature already starting to ramp up (though nowhere near as bad as it could have been). It didn’t feel great, but it turned out I’d got my fastest time yet for that event (though a way off my PB time). We went for a couple of beers (literally just two, mainly thanks to the rather glacial service in Wetherspoons) afterwards, but it felt like I’d had far more when I woke up on Saturday, which I guess was probably dehydration.
I got woken in the night by some loud scuffling outside, which didn’t quite sound right for the fox or the cats, and when I shone a torch out of the window there was a badger on the patio. I went down to have a proper look, and it turned out there were two or three cubs running around, which was pretty cool. They didn’t hang around for long as I couldn’t see them in the dark and they didn’t like it when I turned a torch on (hence no photos), but I’ve ordered an infrared trail cam to see what else it detects in the garden.
Not looking forward to the heatwave, and glad it’s not going to be quite as bad here as in other parts of the UK. It’s funny how when you say you don’t like the heat people tell you you shouldn’t complain, as though they somehow haven’t grasped the concept of not liking something.