Weeknotes 2023-18

Much excitement in certain segments of the populace this week at the prospect of a rich old bloke being given a shiny new hat by a man in a dress on behalf of his imaginary friend. Not my cup of tea.

We’ve got a developer event at work at the end of next week, and I’ve ended up volunteering to run a coding challenge by way of a bit of friendly competition to break up the day. I’m basing it on something someone else ran years ago, involving writing a script/program to play a simple game against other people, but decided it would be “simpler” to have people play moves using a simple HTTP interface, rather than everyone uploading code and having it run on a server (with all the nightmares of supporting multiple versions of multiple languages that that would entail). As usual this has snowballed into a bigger project than intended, and I’ve already broken my “the company has long since used up any goodwill that might justify me working on it in my free time” rule. Ah well.

On Friday we were discussing Friday pub lunch plans on WhatsApp, and it turned out I’d be cycling there from the office as the other people going this week were all working at home. Convinced I was running late, I rushed to leave, then was confused to find the car park virtually empty when I arrived and worried that they were shut. Then the truth finally dawned on me, and was confirmed when I got my phone out and found a confused reply to my “leaving now, be there around 12.40” message asking whether I was aware that it was currently only 11.26. Fortunately I persuaded them to meet at 12, so didn’t have to wait around for too long. It was finally warm enough to sit outside, although we’d barely finished eating when a massive (but fortunately brief) thunderstorm started.

This weekend was the Stephen Williams 10k, near Bury St Edmunds. This is only the third year it’s been going, and the other two were held on insanely hot days. This time the temperature was much more reasonable, and it’s hard to fathom how we managed to run it when it was 10–15° warmer. All I could remember was that the first 5k was mostly downhill, obviously meaning you pay for it on the second half, but I’d forgotten about the big hill near the end. I finished with a nasty stitch, and an OK but not great time (albeit much better than last year, which was in turn much better than the year before).