Weeknotes 2023 W51: Back to work

Quick bits:

• I finished a three-weekend acting course last Sunday. It was excellent, and now I want more. 2024 needs to bring more acting training.

• I’ve been removed as moderator from the r/myst subreddit. I suppose that’s fine; I think I’ve never actually done any moderation since I was added, many years ago, more as a honorary role than anything else. (My involvement in the Myst community ended probably a decade ago.)

• The amount of fireworks in Berlin could make one think it’s already the new year.

I am back to work as of last Monday, after a four-week burnout leave.

I’ve had difficulty this week figuring out what to work on. Granted, it is the end of the year; it certainly isn’t the best time to pick up something new. The project that I was working on has been discontinued as far as I can tell.

I took two days off this week because I’ve got too many leftover vacation days, which I likely can’t transfer to the next year. I tried to figure out the vacation-carryover policy, but I couldn’t get a straight answer — so two days off it was.

On my work laptop, notifications are still broken. Some meetings have no calendar notifications at all. Other meetings get five notifications in a row. For some meetings, I get a notification after the meeting is already over. And I sometimes get notifications for meetings that haven’t existed for months.

I started learning Spring Boot, because some services at work are being rewritten in Java. My Java is rather rusty, and I’ve never so much as looked at Spring Boot. I imagine it will take me a while to become comfortable with the framework.

Two of the codebases that are being rewritten were initially written by me. I am not sure why these projects are being rewritten rather than being taken to the finish line. One of them was never finished because of a lack of requirements,¹¹¹ I wrote about this disaster of a project for the first time in Week­notes 2023 W21: Anniversary, more than half a year ago.  but the requirements are still missing more than a year later, so rewriting is, in my opinion, a waste of time.

At any company, there will be some waste in effort. My gut feeling is that typical companies have a waste of 20%, and well functioning companies perhaps 10% (still not zero!). For my role at my current employer, I estimate the waste to be north of 90%.

You can tell where the burnout is coming from.

Entertainment:

• Season three of Only Murders In The Building²²² Only Murders in the Building, written by Steve Martin and John Hoffman (Rhode Island Ave. Productions, Another Hoffman Story Productions, 40 Share Productions, 20th Television, 2021).  was good. I was overly harsh on season two. This series touches on so many personal topics (friendship, purpose, loneliness, …) and I might need to rewatch it (some day) to get it all.

• The Night House³³³ The Night House, directed by David Bruckner, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski (Searchlight Pictures, TSG Entertainment, Anton, 2021).  verdict: ★★★★★. A layered horror story with a strong female protagonist, building tension with atmosphere rather than jump scares (just the way I like it). It inspired me to start drafting up a new horror story of my own.

• I’m making my way through How Long ’til Black Future Month?⁴⁴⁴ N. K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month? (Orbit Books, 2018).  — a fantastic collection of short stories, with plenty of variety.

Links:

• I am a poem I am not software (Robin Rendle): I’ve been having similar thoughts about my own personal web site.

• How to write about blogs (Frank Meeuwsen): Lots of interesting reading on the topic of blogging and personal publishing.

• New bollards on Auguststr./Tucholskystr in Berlin (@bertapetra@chaos.social): Love it! Cycling infrastructure continues in the right direction in Berlin.

• Making God (Emily Gorcenski)

• Should You Wipe Off Your Sweat? (minutephysics): Eww. Gross. But interesting.

• What The Prisoner’s Dilemma Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything (Veritasium)

Tech links:

• Dial-up over a Discord Call (Lily Siwik): So cool. (And useless. But that’s not the point.)

• Getting an Unread Badge Count For the Docked Gmail Web App in macOS (Jim Nielsen): I don’t use Gmail, but it’s neat to learn about navigator.setAppBadge.

• We can :has it all (Ryan Mulligan): The new :has CSS selector is quite powerful!

• Largest Dataset Powering AI Images Removed After Discovery of Child Sexual Abuse Material (Samantha Cole for 404media): Yikes. Very few things in tech surprise me anymore at this point.

• Advice for new software devs who’ve read all those other advice essays (Hillel Wayne): Sensible advice.