Weeknotes 2022 W32: Heat II

This finishes up the second week at work. This week was far better than the first one, which isn’t surprising as last week was chaotic due to nearly everyone being on an offsite — but not me.

This week’s calendar was one of the busiest in many years, too. I built plenty of connections across teams, which will be invaluable.

I had to call it a day at only 4 PM on Friday, because the heat broke me. Brain mush. (Not looking forward to the heat over the next few days either.)

I’ve been slowly leaving my COVID-19-induced shell over the past few months, meeting up with people more regularly but also trying to start dating again.

The COVID-19 situation is not too bad in Berlin (take a look at COVID-19 Berlin dashboard). I’m fully vaccinated and recently got another booster, so I’m not too worried about COVID-19.

However, Berlin is unfortunately becoming a hotspot for Monkeypox. There are very few vaccinations available, and they’re prioritized for people that need them the most, which does not include me. I hope that many more vaccination doses become available in Berlin soon.

The gremlins are back!

• My work laptop had a kernel panic. Hopefully it won’t happen again, or at least not often. It seems like every work laptop has that problem, while my personal laptops have been spared from that. I don’t understand why.

• My terminal crashed after I carefully set up about 10 services with their correctly configured environment variables. Tears. (This is why automating things is useful.)

• On Friday, notifications stopped working, and I missed two meetings because of it. I persistently have issues with notifications on macOS: see Week­notes 2022 W06: Technical failure, Week­notes 2022 W09: Viral, and Week­notes 2022 W15: Mostly recovered for details. Strangely, my personal laptops have been spared from that.

I’ve been slacking when it comes to making an inventory of all the old Macs that are still at my mom’s place. I took detailed photos of all of them when I was over in Belgium last month, and the plan is to build some sort of inventory web site with photos and all relevant details.

Once that’s done, a web site with all that inventory will go up. If you’re interested in acquiring some old Macs, stay tuned!

At work, I’ve constructed a list of about a dozen topics that I’d like to work on. I’m bringing considerable experience to my new employer, and as a staff engineer I also get to apply that experience to improve all the things. I’ll need to be strategic though, and tackle the topics one-by-one, so that I (and others around me) don’t get overwhelmed.

A handful of these topics come up at every company I’ve worked for. Getting changes into production is one of those topics that I want to tackle sooner rather than later.

My goal is to make deployment so simple, so fast, and so safe that people won’t even think about deployment or release as a process anymore, but rather as a simple step — one that could even be automated. That will require process changes and a mindset shift, which I feel will be a good challenge. I’m hoping to document my findings publicly, so others can benefit from it as well.

Entertainment:

• I watched Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s enjoyable, but suffers from the Marvel problem where villains need to be more plentiful and weirder and stronger. Does the Marvel Cinematic Universe never catch a break?!

• I enjoyed The Green Knight. Mysterious, surreal, tragic, yet also funny. It takes its time to set the mood, which I’m a fan of.

I have entirely given up on Wordle.

Links:

• A Taxonomy of Access Control (Bruce Schneier): Neat!

• A Deep Dive into Memory Leaks in Ruby (Tony Rowan for AppSignal): Always nice to learn more about tricky Ruby subjects like memory.

• Media Queries Level 4: Media Query Range Contexts (Media Query Ranges) (Bramus Van Damme): I love the way CSS is evolving.