Weeknotes for week 16, 2023
The week of April 17th.
Earlier today was nice and sunny. I walked along the towpath to the garden centre. Stopped to watch a cricket match for a few minutes. Met a guy on a penny-farthing bike.
Now having blood orange tea and a baked apple at my desk with a light rain falling outside.
I wasn't sure last week if I wanted to continue writing weeknotes. It's one more chore.
But I enjoy it on balance. It's nice to make little notes through the week and then reflect on them. Especially capturing some of the substance of the weeks where nothing very spectacular happens.
I intentionally started out just copy-pasting previous weeknotes pages, since I wasn't sure if I'd stick with it. Yesterday I finally automated it a bit.
Now each weeknote is just a Markdown file named 2023-w16.html.md and so on, and Middleman will figure everything out from there.
ChatGPT wrote the week_of code with some minor back and forth. It may end up taking our jobs some day, but currently it just feels like a good tool. I would miss it if I had to give it up.
We watched Legends of the Fall (1994) which wasn't good exactly, but pretty entertaining.
I tentatively started rewatching Rome (2005–2007). Two episodes in, it holds up better than I thought it would. I love that they make the city feel bustling. TV worlds often feel underpopulated.
I did my UK taxes, which is a bit of a chore with a Swedish employer, though I now mostly have the hang of it.
The first few years after moving here, I'd spend a few anxious days in December doing it last minute. This time I spent maybe an hour or two, some 9 months before deadline.
There's an ongoing discussion with my employer about moving my employment to their UK subsidiary. It would be nice to get paid in GBP to my UK account, and for taxes to be easier, but there's a lot of details that would need working out.
I helped look after friends' cats. It was a pleasant little routine.
Driving across town in the evenings, letting them in, feeding them, playing a bit (with our CatDancer), giving them cuddles and attention.
We drove to the neighbouring town on a busy Saturday. I was reminded I'm really quite bad at parallel parking. I watched a few videos on it and am now looking forward to the next time.
I had somehow missed regex character properties. I used /\p{Dash}/ this week to match all dash characters.
We're nearly ready to release some ID checking features we've built at work. Probably tomorrow.
I generalised our code for running interactions in the background – it's been fairly coupled to the things it was originally made for, and I wanted it for the ID checks. A lot of fun to tease things apart.
I got good flow and worked into the evening, which is fun if done sparingly.
I'm ever grateful that I enjoy my job.
I also enjoyed: