Week 43

Weeknotes

I have been very much enjoying reading peoples weeknotes, some in blog form, some as newsletters. Here’s a few I’ve been reading, let me know if there’s others you recommend.

• Phil Gyford — https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/
• Alice Bartlett — http://alicebartlett.co.uk/
• Warren Ellis — http://orbitaloperations.com/ (newsletter)
• Matt Webb — https://medium.com/@genmon

It seems like a good way of monitoring ones headspace and project progress — though I think sometimes the project progress bit stops people writing them so I’ll be careful of that! Anyway, I’m going to try it and see what happens.

Ill

I had a bout of flu or something last week which ran into this week, felt a bit more viral to be honest, took a while to shake off, as usual makes you hyper-aware of how much one should appreciate being healthy, especially as you get a bit older.

Work

I don’t know that I’m going to write about work that much in future but I’ll put a bit here as it’s the first one. Currently I’m contracting as a Senior UI Dev for a bank and have been for a few years. So far it’s the first financial sector work I’ve done, and the first time I’ve had a traditional contract, although in practice the contract bit doesn’t make any difference. I suppose it makes it all a bit more official?

There’s quite a few reasons why I moved to the financial sector for a bit. Some big ones are money related — there’s a lot of startups and ‘tech’ businesses that are extremely flakey when it comes to money, and it became a real problem trying to get money out of them even when they didn’t go bust owing me thousands. I was moving out of London at the time so needed something reliable and some money to do up our new house — financial work ticked a lot of boxes, it’s very well paid, and they are desperate for experienced UI devs. The other main driver was to get back to doing programming for a living rather that sales/marketing/client service/everything else you do when you run a business. I like programming and I missed it.

Finance is one of the big tech employers and it’s always interesting to get some experience of a new industry, especially as there’s a lot of “DISRUPTION!!” going on with new banks like Monzo, Revolut, etc. and things are in a transition period. In this job I’m very much not in charge of the project — I get to have some input, quite a bit when it comes to the UI engineering, but this is very much a full-time programming gig, and I spend most of the my work hours coding. Having spent so many years being in charge of both projects and people it was definitely a welcome change to concentrate on programming again, and the work is complicated enough (real time foreign exchange trading systems} for me to have learnt a huge amount — I don’t just sit around doing CRUD all day. I may dig further into ‘the learns’ at some point, if I do it at all it’s probably better to do it while it’s fresh in in my head instead of having to dig it out later.

One thing that is probably a relevant data point is that you can easily make as much on a well paid contract as you can in a senior/VP position in a startup. In fact if you pro-rata it there’s absolutely no competition — a vast majority of the time my hours are 9 to 5.30, good luck keeping to that in upper management!

Audiobook: Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do, Michael J. Sandel

Listening to Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? by Michael J. Sandel. It’s a great book, good enough that I bought the Kindle version as some of the content was worth going over a few times, will review when I’ve finished it. Also one of those books that is quite a different experience when listened to than read — it’s read by the author which I’ve found is something common to all the audiobooks I’ve really liked.

Music: Pitchfork 200 Best Songs of 2000s

I quite like a bit of structured listening so I’ve started going through some of the Pitchfork lists of ‘greatest song/albums of X decade.’ First one I’m doing is best songs 2000–2010 https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/7693-the-top-500-tracks-of-the-2000s-20-1/?page=1 (why does it say top 500 in the URL? bad CMS or overreaching?). I’m just going through making a Spotify playlist of it (didn’t seem to be one already) and picking interesting stuff out. There’s a band called Life Without Buildings that I’d never heard of before, like someone stuffed The Sundays and Talking Heads in a teleporter and this is what came out. Only made one album though, which is probably why I missed them — is it better to just do one amazing album then disappear or keep making albums until you descend into mediocrity? What does ‘better’ even mean in that context.

Music as a time marker

It’s weird that 00–10 sort of blanks out for me musically, I know most of the artists but there’s definitely some good stuff there that I wasn’t aware. The 80s and 90s seems so vivid to me, but then it gets’ harder to remember. Is it an age thing or just a function of music becoming more atomised? Spotify did come out in 2008 after all. To be honest it could just be a ‘spending more time on the career’ thing though, Yahoo! was pretty hectic, my work memories definitely seem hyper vivid. Once you start thinking about the time period in general it’s all there in your head, just not so tied into music as it was in your teens/early twenties.

Watching: Daredevil

New season of Daredevil came out. last week, not without problems but pretty solid, and still the Netflix Marvel that I most enjoy as it’s way more consistent than the other series. This season is basically a mash up of Born Again & a Bullseye origin story which gives them a lot to work with. Fisk/D’Onofrio is back and, again, the best thing in it by quite a distance, they should really sideload him into the MCU at some point, maybe through the Spider-Man movies? Main moan is that the pacing is off as usual, should have probably condensed it down an skipped 2–3 of the episodes. I guess brevity isn’t really a thing these days, all films seem to be over 2 hours, all series seem to have episodes where nothing happens and no discernible character progression is made.

Books: The Saga of the Exiles, Julian May

I’m re-reading these classics at the moment, it’s a crazy SciFi/Fantasy mashup where humans from Earth’s future go back through a time gate to the Pliocene period and find humanoid aliens are already there. It’s chock full of tropes — mind powers, goblins, spaceships, whatever feels good has been chucked in — and it mostly sticks together. It’s nice to read something that doesn’t feel like it’s been written to satiate the great sales algorithm in the sky, May really seems to be enjoying herself knitting all this stuff together. HBO should do this after Game of Thrones as it’d be perfect for a big series, probably need a bit of fixing of the more ‘problematic’ bits though.

Wrkbk

What is Wrkbk you ask? Apart from the side project that never ends, it’s probably best described as a level of abstraction down from a Content Management System — a Data Management System if you will. It is a ridiculous thing to be building and has tonnes of shonky code but for some reason I like it and am going to carry on until I release it so everybody can tell me it’s a stupid idea.

“Why don’t you release an MVP and get feedback?” you say. Well, it’s not written anywhere that MVPs have to be small, sometimes the M and the V mean you have to do a lot of work for your idea to make any sense. We will see.

Did some work earlier in the week but illness intervened. started preparing for actually releasing this thing (by making a folder called ‘RELEASE’ because folder names like that make it happen, right?) Lots of refactoring of wrkbk-core, added lots of test coverage and found lots of bugs which is helpful. Still going to months before I have it all straightened out, which is fine - I made peace with taking my time ages ago.

Random thoughts.

• These will probably be a lot shorter in future.
• The sentence “What does ‘better’ even mean?” above is very my brain at the moment.