Weeknotes for week 19, 2023

The week of May 8th.

I had an errand to run in Hebden Bridge, the next town down the valley.

Traffic was hugely backed up due to roadworks and trains were on strike, so I dusted off my bike.

It was really nice. About 30 minutes at a leisurely pace along the canal, past allotments and the hippie canalboat community and pubs and angry geese.

It's not the ideal bike for it, though – the canal overflows are rough and cobbled and it's a rather fair-surface bike. I walked it across those bits.

I'm thinking about getting a more appropriate bike, and it's hard to separate the overly aspirational from what I think I'd actually do.

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We watched the Eurovision finals with friends.

I'm not a Eurovision fan, but it was a lovely social event with delicious food.

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I watched season one of Barry (2018–2023) and liked it. Good balance of humour and drama; deftly flawed characters; interesting developments in the relationships between various characters.

I watched the first episode of season two and it went way heavier on the humour in a way that felt completely out of character; hopefully it gets better.

We watched Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). Excellent modern (👴🏻) noir.

We re-watched Alien (1979). Great lived-in future. Appreciate the evil corporation angle and Jonesy the cat upping the stakes. Great pacing. Pleasing title sequence.

It was hard to take that scene seriously having seen Space Balls.

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We had the plumbers here to fix an outdoor tap, and I asked them to also install the new bathroom tap since I hadn't gotten around to it.

I'm glad I did – it was more complicated than expected. It's always tricky as a homeowner whether to DIY or pay someone to do it.

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I'm proud of how much better we've gotten at resolving conflicts at work. In the early days, we were not.

This week I was in a Slack discussion (about calendar conventions!) that was heating up, and a first shot was fired in a would-be documentation edit war.

I suggested "Tuple?", got a "👍", and we had a constructive and friendly 5 minute discussion where we happily agreed on some changes.

Increasing bandwidth when text-based communication runs into conflict is a good habit.

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I modernised a Slack integration and took the opportunity to introduce Zeitwerk in our internal Ruby-but-not-Rails chat bot app. Worked really well.

I also cleaned up some magic encoding comments that haven't been needed since Ruby 2.0 was released a decade ago. This app has been around a while.

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I enjoyed: