#blogging about blogging

weeknotes 13: five dermatologists

blogging about blogging burnout dermatologist modular weeknotes work

oh wow it’s actually joever, didn’t see that coming.


we’ve been trying to diagnose a Weird Problem at work, the kind you’d see in breathless Medium posts or SCP containment reports. me, Ivo and Rowan had each spent a few days trying to understand what was going on before getting burnt out, and the CDN support engineers were clueless.

on tuesday i got everyone together around the breakout area table in the office, trying out stupid things like editing the CDN config live to add more logging and point it to a temporary app i wrote and deployed in five minutes to log full request details we weren’t getting from the CDN logs themselves. by the end of the day things were pointing to the WAF as the culprit. the next day we narrowed it down with the help of a WAF support engineer to the WAF's CDN loop detection (crucially not the CDN's CDN loop detection, which we'd already configured our way around).

the support engineer told us we had an "interesting" architecture, which is support engineer for "what in god's name are you doing".

thursday was a bit of a piecemeal day, but I did manage to crank out a 1600-word internal work blog post, a crash course in Splunk. might syndicate it here, because apparently a technical blog post is on brand for me now.


another community dermatologist appointment for the Chronic Skin Problem. she'd told me this was a supervision session, and her consultant dermatologist would be sitting in and might be able to offer better advice. what she didn't tell me was there would be three more (trainee question mark?) dermatologists, and that they'd spend the next twenty minutes basically doing a table read of an episode of House. which was great in terms of getting me treatment, not so much in terms of anxiety.

i ended up with some downtime in Herne Hill on the way to the appointment, so i grabbed lunch (a chorizo and anchovy pizza) and ate it sitting on a log in Brockwell Park, then worked on the Splunk blog post for a bit.


at the studio i have two larger Eurorack cases, both 6U by 84HP, that stand together to make one bigger 12U case. except, sometimes for a live set i want to use a case bigger than the portable techno groovebox, i can’t possible take both big cases out with me, and half of a 12U system is not a 6U system, it’s a bunch of modules designed to work together with the half you’re not bringing. my studio’s default state is a mess anyway without me having to rearrange all my modules every few weeks and leaving half of them on the desk.

12x84 ≈ 9x110. one single bigger case, slightly wider, with the modules curated to (hopefully!) fit both the studio and live set use cases.

soldering all 800+ power header connections on the bus boards took three hours and all my stocks of solder

as for the old cases: hey do you want a free Eurorack case? one is still available, the other is Alex’s dangerous new hobby.


friday i went to the local hipster brunch cafe for avo on toast, then saturday on the way home from Kensington Palace we grabbed olive bread and blue cheese for lunch from Whole Foods in Kensington, then went to the local rooftop bar for drinks. living my best bougie life.

we were planning to go to the other rooftop bar in Peckham, but as we walked out of the stairwell they were blasting music loud enough to immediately trigger my apple watch "loud environment" warning. look lxds i love Crazy In Love as much as the next girl but i also love having a) ears and b) conversations.

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weeknotes #4: gaslit by apple maps

blogging about blogging camping minecraft weeknotes

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

3. did another minecraft “speed”run

  • with gallal and rowan and luke and chris
    • i’m on my phone can’t be fucked with hyperlinks sorry lads
  • i tried to solo the nether again and died, a lot, this time
  • next time we’re instituting a “no villages” rule so most of the group don’t spend their time camping
    • im not salty i just died a lot okay

4. my small eurorack case is dead

  • idk what happened one day it just didn’t turn on
  • i tried taking it apart and it turns out epoxying the power supply to the case isn’t helpful maybe
    • i broke the bus board clean in half. lol
  • i can rebuild her. stronger. faster. I have the technology

5. i am trying to write this on my phone and wow is it bad

  • who even wrote this blog app

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weeknotes #1: fried liver attack

blogging about blogging burnout chess modular music platforms tech lead tool kit weeknotes

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

3. i am burning out holy shit

  • holy shit, i'm burning out
  • may day bank holiday soon
  • going camping soon
  • need some time off wow

4. i saw some friends, irl

  • okay so that was like two weeks ago fine okay
  • i went to Flat Iron Square with chee and Rowan and Jake and KJ
  • i got very drunk and we went and made music in a park
  • also i finally signed 2 Deed 2 Poll. now to send it to literally everybody that might have ever heard my name in the last two years

5. okay so speaking of music

  • i've gotten big into Eurorack in the last year
  • i put together a little, USB powered case a while ago and i've been slowly filling it with modules
  • recently i outgrew it, and also little portable case obviously needs to be for generative ambient, so i started planning a bigger desktop case in like November
  • i finished it last week!!!
6u eurorack case made from birch plywood with Pale Slim Ghost Synthesisers and Bork Systems stickers
  • i mean wow look at that thing. i made an Object

6. i got mildly good at chess

  • i've got a 700~ Rapid rating babes
    1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc5 Nf6 4. Ng5 d5 6. exd5 Nxd5 7. Nxf7 Kxf7 8. Qf3+ Kg8 9. Bxd5+ Qxd5 10. Qxd5+ Be6 11. Qxe6# is the only correct game of chess. every other game is a shitty imitation of that
  • im actually kind of bad if you don't cooperate with my Fried Liver Attack or Stafford Gambit okay

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