#tech lead

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)

Hi, I'm Josie Maran, and I play Mia in Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Make sure you do all your racing in the game. On the streets, drive safely and responsibly. And wear your seatbelt 😉

• that unskippable opening video is burned into my brain
• last time i played this game i didn't let myself like pink, and cute things, for some reason. so this time i'm making my cars look as cute as possible

3. i've also been playing a lot of Minecraft again

• we (me and Rowan and Luke and Chris) did a multiplayer "speed"run on the latest snapshot version with the new cave generation datapack
  • turns out snapshot versions are not at all optimised and it was extremely laggy
• to spice things up a bit we had secondary goals we could pick up, silly stuff like "place a live fish in the End"
• i was racing ahead to get to the end first and do as many goals as i could while the others were doing pointless things like preparing for the dragon fight
• but when i went through the portal the lag hit hard and i fell into the void and lost all my stuff
  • including my fish in a bucket i was going to free into the End. can i get an F in chat

4. i went to a technical leadership workshop

• it was okay. it was exhausting.
• a lot of it was things like:
  • "if i wanted to be a good tech lead and still wanted to code, i would simply no longer want to code"
  • "here is how to lead an engineering team well: *list of engineering practices the Financial Times does anyway all the time*"
  • one hour of Business Horoscopes ("StrengthFinder 2.0")
• i'm glad i didn't pay for it myself

5. Kettricken (my cat) caught a bird

• she's never done that before
• it was terrifying
• i was getting dressed, i couldn't do much about it
• i could hear this awful screaming, getting louder
• she walks in, i assume she's injured or something, i look down and there's this mess of feathers in her mouth. still screeching
• she runs away from me into the living room and drops the bird. it's a female blackbird
• it plays dead but it's still breathing, heavily
• Sophie locks the cat in the bathroom
• the internet says to take it to the vet so it can be put down humanely. there's another option. it probably won't survive itself.
• it suddenly leaps up and scurries into the corner.
• we can't bring ourselves to do anything about it.
• we let it go.
• i'm not sure we did the right thing.