Week Notes 23#42

A busy - and cold - week prepping for TechMids

• It's been very cold this week, and then the end of this week the storm has led to lots of flooding across the country
• It was TechMids, which was good, nice to meet some folks, catch up with folks I've not seen for some time
  • Some great talks, there'll be a full write up at some point
  • Had some good folks in-person and afterwards getting in touch to chat about dependency-management-data, which has been cool!
  • Headed up on Thursday evening - fairly late - to make sure that I was there on time, as it would've been an early start to make it a single day trip, and I'd been struggling to wake up at normal time, let alone being able to take a 0700 train 😅
  • While doing my runthrough with breakfast, my slides' GIFs ended up not loading, making it look like they were deleted from Giphy and I then had a panicked check when I got to the venue trying to replace the GIFs - after doing my tech check - and it turns out it was just that the Premier Inn WiFi was blocking it 😅
  • Had some tech issues when setting up my laptop for my talk - despite it working OK when I did it before the day started, but enjoyed Jim's fun lil' dig at me using Arch while trying to resolve it. I'd rehearsed something similar to say but he beat me to it
  • Was nice to see Mihaela and spend the day together
  • Had a rather bad journey back, with all the flooding, leading to a lot of trouble on the lines. Wasn't too bad in the end time-wise based on the original train I was gonna take, but still not great, but better than others' journeys I'm sure. Was glad to have Mihaela with me so at least there was a bit of company. An hour of cancellations, not being allowed on the platform because the train was too busy, and then being told to go via Derby, instead of Leicester, only to get to Derby and find there were no trains or buses running from Derby 😡 We were lucky to get an Uber via Nottingham and on to Mihaela's because apparently no taxis were able to get into Derby. Looking at the status of Derby and the surrounding A roads on Saturday morning, I'm so glad we managed to get out
  • Nice to catch up with Mike for the first time in many years!
• Set up my cal.com a little better and wasn't sure if I ended up breaking it as then the site broke for a few minutes, or it was just poorly timed
• Nice to have my brain able to start thinking about all the things I've been putting on hold with the 6 weeks of talks, like ...
• We've booked a holiday to Gran Canaria in a few weeks ✈ super excited!
  • Also think it'll be interesting to see how I cope with not doing my Week Notes until I get back
• In dependency-management-data, it's mostly been a documentation-heavy week ahead of my talk at TechMids
  • Revamped the documentation site, and pretty happy with the new structure and a bit more linked data, as well as some much more in-depth cookbooks for doing stuff with DMD, which also seems to vaguely fit into the Diataxis framework
  • Found a few broken links 😅 Fixed them today, and was again bitten by Netlify's case-sensitive URLs
  • Was cool to see a feature request for a new datasource, from an interesting project, too
• My office radiator isn't working, and there's a bit of a leak from one of the kitchen ones, but I've not had brain capacity to get our plumber over - that's a problem for this coming week
• Not been feeling particularly great towards the end of the week, definitely feel like I've pushed myself a bit much, and although I've taken the weekend easy, I'm still not feeling quite right 😷
  • It's been particularly hard to wake up this week, maybe in part due to it being nice and warm in bed and cold outside, including on Tuesday not waking up until Anna and Cookie got back from their walk
• Cookie's also been feeling a bit under the weather today, most notable because she's been more cuddly, and this morning was happy getting up much later
  • This morning on the sofa she slept with her head on my knee, and her butt kinda on my lap 🥰
• Found out this week that I won the Packt competition at DevOpsDays London, but not sure if a book about Packer directly applies to me right now
• Had some nice cuddles on the sofa with Morph on Saturday while Anna and Cookie were out for a walk
• The electric blanket is back on the bed
• Found that Doodle's easy planning of meetings is now gone and it seems to be a Calendly alternative, but at least there are alternatives now like Rally

Played:

• Apex Legends as usual
  • Been very annoying this week having lots of code:tap errors when trying to start games
  • But been enjoying the LTM Trick N' Treat
• Super Maro Wonder
  • Almost at the end of World 3 after playing it a fair bit this weekend and enjoying it so far, it's quite varied and every level within the same world seems to be very different which is cool!

Watched:

• Loki
• Kim's Convenience
• The Crown
• The Fall of the House of Usher
  • (In the background, as Anna was watching)