a pale slim ghost

angry (1) asymptotes (1) barbican (1) blogging about blogging (3) bracken house (1) burnout (3) camping (3) chess (1) choir (3) climbing (1) diy (1) eurorack (1) films (3) floorp (1) games (2) greenbelt (1) holiday (1) inlaws (1) kettricken (1) keyboards (1) lasers (1) leicester (1) london (1) melting (1) minecraft (2) modular (5) music (4) musical (1) need for speed (1) operation mincemeat (1) origami (1) ourple (1) peak district (1) photos (1) platforms (1) secrets (1) selling (1) skin (1) supercars (1) synth repair (1) tech lead (2) theatre (1) tool kit (1) weeknotes (19) work (4)

Tag: blogging about blogging

  • weeknotes 13: five dermatologists

    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).

    Read more…

  • 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
    Read more…

  • 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
    Read more…