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sound experiments #1: planets
i’m sick and when i’m sick i always try making web art and this time i made something i’m proud of and want to show people:
it’s a simulation of lots of little planets doing gravity at each other, and when they collide they say “blong” in a C minor pentatonic scale. that’s it! it looks like this:
and you can click that to hear what it sounds like too.
Read more…
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weeknotes #5: varnish hotbox
1. oops where did three months go
holidays always throw my habits entirely out of the window. i also managed to gate posting my next weeknotes on having edited my photos from camping, which was a terrible thing to do to my brain.
2. whistlestop tour
- went camping
- went and saw my parents in Yorkshire
- went and saw my in-laws in Cornwall
- went to the welsh borders and bathed in a hot tub watched by sheep
- went camping again but this time it was sort of a festival
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last week i made some cold brew. two litres of it in a big Kilner jar. an entire bag of peruvian coffee from a three month coffee subscription my parents bought me for christmas.
today i poured some and it smelt kinda bleachy and there were floating white things. an entire litre down the sink.
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weeknotes #4: gaslit by apple maps
1.hello from the surrey hills
- we are camping and it is raining, a lot
- i just barbecued some smoked mackerel fillets and oh my god. then they got rained on and we ate them in the car
- last time we came here apple maps navigated us to a dead end seven miles away and then said “you have arrived”, very clearly nowhere near the pin on the map
- imagine being gaslit by apple maps
- this time we got it to give directions to the pub in the village
- we put a kettle on and almost immediately ran out of butane. and then it got rained on
- i love it here
2. i sold a lens to a friend of a friend
- i basically never sell anything apart from to CeX
- the whole deal was struck via twitter dm, it was very civilised
- i spent half an hour scouring the office for a box of the right size that i hoped might have been abandoned on March 12th 2020
- eventually i found an amazon box for a logitech mouse. thanks gallal
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weeknotes #3: business horoscopes
content warning: wild animal injury
1. been watching the Fast & Furious films with friends
- once a week, on a sunday afternoon
- we sync up the films, hit play, and pretend we’re mst3k via Slack
- they’re actually pretty good, even the bad ones
- also i’m spotting how much of an influence they had on the Need For Speed franchise in the early 00s
- speaking of which:
2. i’ve been playing a lot of Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005)
Read more…
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weeknotes #2: a real burger made out of cow
1. i went to the office, and it was normal
- i went to the office, and it was normal?
- i’ve gotten weirdly good at self-administering a lateral flow test
- Kara Brightwell: skilled at scraping her own tonsils, and inserting things too far up her nostrils
- imagine showing that my to myself eighteen months ago
- she’d probably go “oh okay so, uh, ‘Kara’, i see, that’s a thing we did, okay. wanna make out”
- i had a desk assigned to me, and it was by a window, and it was in a building that isn’t my flat, and i got to go there and not be in the same 46m² forever
- i saw like. twenty people. in an office that has capacity for like fifteen hundred.
- i had a burger, a real burger made out of cow, from a fast food restaurant, with cheesy fries
- it was so normal!
- this is genuinely the best thing i’ve been able to do for my mental health during the entire panettone
- i’m going back like. twice a week now, fuck it
2. trying not to burn out
- even though i quit therapy a while ago it turns out i have a tiny simulated version of my therapist in my head now that says things like “be kind to yourself” and “what makes you say that” and “you don’t have to feel like this”
- so last week when i wrote “holy shit i’m burning out” it turns out that wasn’t a self deprecating joke, and i actually need to do something about it?
- which i noticed immediately after writing that post, and requested access to the office, and a bunch of fridays off
- doing normal things, which i have not done in some time, is helping reset my brain
- also taking time off and not giving myself pressure to achieve things(? what), good for my energy turns out?
- and i’m going camping in two weeks now and not having any internet and cooking fish on charcoal
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weeknotes #1: fried liver attack
1. WOW I HAVEN’T BLOGGED IN A WHILE
- hahaha funny ironic meta blogging joke
2. okay so i’m the Tech Lead of the FT.com Platforms Team now, what’s up with that
- my(!) team solves common developer problems so every other team can spend time doing not that
- we own a lot of stuff, like seventy repositories out of the three hundred ish in the Customer Products group
- we’re a fairly new team, there were predecessor teams but basically none of the knowledge about what we own has survived
- we’ve got a lot of catching up to do! we started rewriting our documentation last year and we have a hitlist of what knowledge we’re missing
- but also we’ve jumped in the deep end with a beeg rewrite of the FT.com developer tooling
- the line i use in presentations is “they’re used literally every day by literally every developer in Customer Products, and they’re broken”
- they’re actually public, that’s odd
- this week is the second “mob programming” week we’ve done on this project
- we cancelled all our meetings
- we set some goals
- we worked on VS Code Live Share (for a couple of hours at a time! pairing is exhausting, remote pairing is gggggggggggg)
- we’ve written more than a thousand fucking lines of code with three developers in one week, what the heck
- find out next time on dragonball z