OK, so it’s week two and I’m posting this four days late (just edited that from the original “a day late”). At this rate, expect the final post of this year some time in 2028.
A couple of weeks ago I took my Strava heatmap and drew round it to show the area enclosed by places I’d run to starting and finishing at home:
Someone on Facebook saw it and mentioned CityStrides, which is what in the early 2000s we would have called a mashup of activity tracker data with Open Streetmap, showing you how many of the streets in your town you’ve run along. I’m always a sucker for this kind of nonsense, so I signed up and synced it with Garmin (Strava didn’t work for some reason – I suspect API rate limiting). It turned out I was in third place for Ipswich, with 461 of 1,412 streets completed (and I know both the people above me in the table). Of course when I mentioned this three other people signed up, pushing me down to 6th, but I did add some convoluted meanderings to a couple of runs this week to pick up another 24 streets.
With the end of the grace period for free corporate use of Docker Desktop fast approaching, I finally got round to switching to MiniKube. I tried the default option of Hyperkit, but it wouldn’t start (maybe something to do with security settings on my work Mac), but it was fine with VirtualBox, and actually seems much quicker than Docker Desktop. I don’t use Docker for anything fancy – just to create dummy instances of other systems that my application can ssh to for integration testing, and to allow me to compile the OTP application for Linux on my Mac – and the only change I had to make was to have the app connect to the containers using the VM’s IP address, whereas the previous setup had automatically mapped the ports to the host address. I feel slightly guilty about being part of the problem of big companies using open source without paying anything back, but apparently someone else is looking at getting a company licence for Docker Desktop, so maybe they’ll get some of our money eventually.
Friday saw the third “agile fest” at work, with a variety of talks (I wasn’t involved this time). All good stuff, although I did get into a minor disagreement in the chat when someone suggested we needed a single mandated structure for Jira, rather than teams doing what works best for them (it would be bad enough if someone told me I had to use Jira at all, let alone also telling me how to use it!)