Weeknotes 2022 W34: Insomnia
This week I’ve been plagued by insomnia. It’s partly due to the hot weather, and partly because my brain keeps chattering and won’t shut up. I’m not quite sure what’s going on.
Gremlins:
- Notifications continue to be the bane of my existence. I’ve missed more meetings this week because sometimes the notifications work, and other times they don’t. This has been a problem across multiple laptops, multiple employers, and multiple kinds of calendar software. I truly do not understand.
I got a small surgery on Monday, to remove an epidermoid cyst. It’s in a spot on my back that was causing me some bother. I previously got it removed a few years ago, but clearly not properly, as it came back in full force. Hopefully, this time it stays gone!
I couldn’t use my bike for a couple of days after surgery. Not being able to get around quickly and easily made me feel disconnected from the world. My bike is magic.
I bought a Santoku knife. This one replaces my old IKEA chef knife, and that’s been quite overdue. I got the nicely-affordable Victorinox one.
This week I haven’t really had the energy to prepare food, but I did cut up raw vegetables with my new knife. I did so not because I needed to, but rather purely because I wanted to slice things up. This knife is fun. I can’t wait to use it more often. Slicey slicey!
Despite my lack of sleep, I feel like I’m doing good stuff at work. In particular, I’ve been working on a tool called dev, which is absolutely inspired by Shopify’s tool of the same name (refer to this article). It makes setting up development environments so much easier. This is how it works:
- You clone a Git repo
- You run
dev upin it
Now you have all the dependencies installed, with the right versions, the right environment variables configured, and the right services (Postgres, Redis, …) running.
Then there’s dev serve, which starts the server, and dev test, which runs all the tests.
For all of this, no manual configuration needed. It all works out of the box, for all repositories at work. That’s the end goal, at least — it doesn’t quite work that way just yet.
The dev tool is so useful that I’d love to make it public. I would love to use for personal projects as well.
For the implementation of dev, I’ve taken inspiration from an old project of mine, released, which I sadly never got to a usable point. The ideas behind that project have been on my mind forever though, and it’s nice to put them to good use.
Entertainment:
-
Ooh, the new Destiny 2 season has started! I wasn’t planning to get the season pass, but the pirate theme is rather nice. Perhaps I’ll get it after all.
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I started watching The Sandman, but somehow the first episode made my insomnia feel even worse than usual and had to stop and just go to sleep. Besides that, one thing that stood out (not in a great way) in the way the show is told is that there is quite a bit of explicit exposition: two characters explaining something to each other that they already know but the audience doesn’t, and that always feels out of place.
Links:
- Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven (Richard Marmorstein). Yep. At so many companies I’ve worked for, hard data is needed to justify work. That’s annoyed me frequently, as some ideas just are intrinsically good and don’t need data to be provably good.