#burnout

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.

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.