Weeknotes #003: Writing code

What I did in the 4th week of September 2020.

Work

After a hiatus as we planned and discussed, this week I was back to writing some code. The social and team based parts are important, and enjoyable. However it’s a nice change of pace to slip back into working on a problem until your tests go from red to green. Give me a few more weeks I’m sure I’ll be complaining I miss the planning heavy days!

GOV.UK also announced to the public what our team has been working on. We’ve built a prototype using OpenID Connect and Oauth2. Government has also begun to talk more broadly about where this sort of work might go. It’s exciting stuff to be working on.

I should look again at the tools I’m using daily. I feel like I had quite a good setup when I was working in Javascript (VS Code, a few carefully chosen plugins, tmux). However since being back in Ruby, I’ve not made the time to tune up my working environment to get that same feeling of efficiency. I should ask some colleagues what their setups look like right now, and poke around the internet for some better ideas.

Otherwise

More decorating, endless decorating, slow progress.

A bit of walking. It turns out the hills round here are very pretty. There’s also a hidden web way of great footpaths and cycle routes that weave their way between the estates of the town. They’re well designed, many dip below roads to stay away from traffic. We walked for nearly three hours, out of the residential tangle to the edge of the countryside, up a hill and back. All the paths were set away from roads, we crossed a few on the edge of town and barely saw a car the rest of the time.

It’s good design, and I’ll enjoy finding where all these other paths go.

Also thinking a bit about nature documentaries. They seem enormously popular, yet I can’t find any good books on their theory, history or practice. I can get all of that on obscure art house films, or marvel blockbusters, so where are the popular histories of BBC Bristol?

Read

…not a lot of reading this week.

Articles:

Not really an articles but I also watched Wildscreen Festival 2016: Attenborough and Packham.

Listened to

Caught up on podcasts instead.

Absolute standout: #166 Country of Liars from Gimlet’s Reply All. Immaculately produced. Feels like the kind of landmark journalism about the internet that drew me to this show, and it’s predecessor TL;DR.

There’s so much mystery around QAnon, I think that must be half the allure. Such a credible journalism drags these semi-mythic figures back to earth and into the lives of fallible individuals using them for their own ends. It’s gripping stuff.

Thinking about

| Huw