Kerry Buckley What’s the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong?

On Tuesday I went to Isaacs (which I tend to avoid as a rule) for Stu’s leaving drinks. Another good developer who will be missed from the team, but is no doubt heading on to better things. That meant missing the normal FRR training session, but that worked out OK because …

Wednesday was a club track session, and instead of the usual intervals or whatever it was a one mile time trial challenge, with three different starts for different pace ranges. I ended up somewhere in the back half of the sub-7 wave, finishing in 6:09. That’s 12 seconds slower than my PB, but that was a while ago and I’m happy enough with it considering how tired I was feeling. Then we retired to the local pub for a few recovery pints (or halves in Neil’s case).

To prove the old adage that “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things” (attributed my Martin Fowler to Phil Karlton), I spent all of Friday working on a module called Queue – which used to be a job queue but when we switched our home-grown solution to Oban became just a cache of aspects of job state – fixing bugs where the cached values got out of step with the actual queue. As well as renaming it to QueueState, I ended up reversing some premature optimisation and just rebuilding the data from scratch on queue events (with a bit of batching), rather than trying to change values incrementally forever, which was asking for trouble.

On Sunday we repeated last year’s bike ride out to the Lindsey Rose beer festival, but without the extra pub stops and with much less falling off. We were lucky with the weather, got there in time to get a table, and spent a pleasant afternoon sampling the beers on offer. Unfortunately there were no sumo suits this year, and they also had a Neil surcharge, pricing all the beer at £5 a pint or £3 a half! It ended up being 31 miles of cycling all in all.

At some point this week an old leather belt appeared in my driveway (dropped by a fox, maybe?). The next day it was joined by a dead rat. I disposed of the rat on my way out, but when I got back the belt had disappeared. Now I think about it, a mousetrap briefly appeared then disappeared in roughly the same spot a while ago. Maybe my drive is haunted.

A long-overdue week off work (finally used some of my 2024/5 leave allowance! I tried to use a dash there instead of a slash, and had to fire up the character viewer to find an en dash that didn’t look weird with the old-style numbers that this blog theme uses. I was glad to discover that U+2012 FIGURE DASH is a thing), but annoyed to find that for some reason WordPress mangles it, regardless of whether I paste in the character or insert it as an HTML entity.

Obviously there were a million jobs I needed to do, and obviously I did very few of them. I did manage to do a small amount of gardening (some of the clippings from the top of the front hedge were taller than me, as were some of the weeds from what I’ll optimistically call the lawn). I finally got fed up with my 20-year-old petrol tools, and bought a rechargeable strimmer, pole hedge trimmer and chainsaw from the Ryobi Max Power 36V range. So far I’m very happy with the first two (I’m yet to use the chainsaw).

I also spent quite a while washing washed seven or eight years’ worth of old running shoes (27 pairs), ready to send for reuse/recycling. Then I looked on the site and it said you don’t actually need to wash them. Oh well.

I’d been vaguely thinking about picking up my abandoned attempt to work through GOOS in Elixir. I was using Scenic for the UI, but that was hard to test, so I was wondering whether to backtrack and try using wxWidgets instead, as it has bindings in the Erlang stdlib. That led me into a couple of diversions to learn about Erlang macros and records, how to use the latter from Elixir, and why you can’t call the former, and I ended up porting the code from Arif Ishaq’s tutorial to Elixir. Still didn’t get round to looking at the GOOS stuff though.

On Saturday I went to a barbecue at Jen and Alec’s, with most of the coffee running crowd. I nearly forgot to go altogether, but I’m glad I didn’t because it was a pleasant afternoon/evening.

Nothing very exciting on the running front this week. I ended up cycling to Felixstowe (about 11 miles) for the Tuesday club session, which ended up involving a possibly unprecedented 8.5 miles of running, including some warm-up laps of the tennis courts, running to and from the session location, then a 2?4?6?8?6?4?2 minute pyramid session (there’s that figure dash again!). I’d hoped for a gentle ride home after that, but Dave had other ideas and I ended up being dragged along at an average speed of nearly 17mph.

Innovation days at work this week, which is where we take three days every six weeks to work on (or learn) something not necessarily directly related to normal day-to-day project work, then share it with the team afterwards. I started revisiting an early attempt to replace some graphs in our app with Grafana dashboards (the current graphs were rendered using Chartkick and Chart.js, reading historical data from Postgres, and could be very slow to load). We’ve been duplicating the data into Prometheus for long enough to have a full set of values for the maximum period users can go back, but every time I look into embedding Grafana dashboards into a web app without requiring people to authenticate separately it seems like an unrecommended/unsupported nightmare. This time it finally occurred to me to go for the middle ground, forget about Grafana, and just source the values for the existing graphs from Prometheus instead of Postgres. It wasn’t too hard and has barely changed the UI, but is at least an order of magnitude faster, which has made our users happy.

On Wednesday we had our annual club “Run Bike Run” event, which involves two short runs (totalling four miles) with a six-mile bike ride sandwiched in between. The twist is that there’s no set start time, but a cut-off for the finish, and the winner is the person who set off latest but still got back in time. I was never in any danger of winning (especially having already cycled 11 miles to get there), but did at least time it right to get back inside the cut-off, and finished slightly quicker than last year. Then after stopping for chilli and a beer I had to ride home again – it felt like a high-mileage day, but for a change most of it (38 miles or so, including the commute to work earlier) was on my bike.

I wasn’t expecting much from parkrun, but also didn’t have any excuse not to try, with no racing this weekend. I surprised myself with a 21:30 though, which turns out to be my joint second quickest ever on that course (probably the toughest and hilliest of the various ones Ipswich has had over the years). Then to Colchester Art Centre in the evening to see the Pet Needs Fractured Party People film, plus an acoustic set from the band. Weird to see them in a seated venue, and also to almost immediately spot myself in the crowd on the screen.

On Sunday Holly and I did a long(ish) run along the Gipping to Needham Market. We stopped at Bramford for a paddle, where a dog-walking lady told us we shouldn’t have gone in the river, because someone tested the water quality recently and it was 8. She wasn’t that clear about what the 8 represented though, other than that it should have been zero. There was another delay not far from the end when we realised we’d have to divert out to the road because of a closed “unsafe” bridge over the river, but opted instead to return to the bridge and cross it regardless (it was hardly Temple of Doom level stuff!)

The plan was to grab an ice cream once we reached Needham Lakes before getting the train back, but the queue was a bit long so we decided to pop into the pub for a quick drink instead. By a stroke of good fortune it turned out they had a beer festival going on in the garden, so we accidentally got stuck there for two and a half hours in the sunshine.

This month’s Run for Beer was in Felixstowe. It was still very warm, but I figured that although a vest would have been more comfortable to run in, it might get a bit chilly sitting outside afterwards. Of course what a sensible person would have done (and everyone else did) was take an extra layer and leave it in the car for afterwards. I found the run a real struggle (maybe I’m coming down with something – there seems to be a lot of it about), and the beer very welcome. Only five of us actually ran, but a few more joined us for a drink.

I re-downloaded and watched the 4k77 Star Wars films, having noticed that there was a new version of Empire since I last watched them (also that was on my old projector, which was only 720p and didn’t have great contrast). It’s nice to be able to see the trilogy in 4k (albeit sometimes fairly grainy 4k), without having to suffer Greedo shooting first, the CGI Jabba etc.

I finally got round to getting EmuDeck running on my Steam Deck, and have been really pushing the machine’s limits with the latest games …

With Friday racing having finally come to an end after nine straight weeks, I had no excuse for taking it easy at parkrun. Nonetheless I did take it easy – in fact it was my ninth slowest of all time! I did briefly put on an exaggerated sprint (and what turns out to be a ridiculous face) on seeing a photographer as we slogged up the evil hill.

Saturday was also the day of the SVP 50k/100k ultra, and while I was most definitely not running it again, I went along with Robin and Jo in the evening to cheer in the people who were, and to drink beer.

Shamed by having stood around drinking while watching other people finish running stupid distances, I felt I really had to drag myself out for something vaguely approaching a long run on Sunday. In tribute to the ultra runners, I also walked up a lot of the hills! For less than half marathon distance at an incredibly slow pace, it felt really tough – maybe the fact that I got home at 4.30pm not having had any lunch didn’t help. I did see some llamas though.