Weeknotes 2024-34

On Tuesday I went to Isaacs (which I tend to avoid as a rule) for Stu’s leaving drinks. Another good developer who will be missed from the team, but is no doubt heading on to better things. That meant missing the normal FRR training session, but that worked out OK because …

Wednesday was a club track session, and instead of the usual intervals or whatever it was a one mile time trial challenge, with three different starts for different pace ranges. I ended up somewhere in the back half of the sub-7 wave, finishing in 6:09. That’s 12 seconds slower than my PB, but that was a while ago and I’m happy enough with it considering how tired I was feeling. Then we retired to the local pub for a few recovery pints (or halves in Neil’s case).

To prove the old adage that “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things” (attributed my Martin Fowler to Phil Karlton), I spent all of Friday working on a module called Queue – which used to be a job queue but when we switched our home-grown solution to Oban became just a cache of aspects of job state – fixing bugs where the cached values got out of step with the actual queue. As well as renaming it to QueueState, I ended up reversing some premature optimisation and just rebuilding the data from scratch on queue events (with a bit of batching), rather than trying to change values incrementally forever, which was asking for trouble.

On Sunday we repeated last year’s bike ride out to the Lindsey Rose beer festival, but without the extra pub stops and with much less falling off. We were lucky with the weather, got there in time to get a table, and spent a pleasant afternoon sampling the beers on offer. Unfortunately there were no sumo suits this year, and they also had a Neil surcharge, pricing all the beer at £5 a pint or £3 a half! It ended up being 31 miles of cycling all in all.

At some point this week an old leather belt appeared in my driveway (dropped by a fox, maybe?). The next day it was joined by a dead rat. I disposed of the rat on my way out, but when I got back the belt had disappeared. Now I think about it, a mousetrap briefly appeared then disappeared in roughly the same spot a while ago. Maybe my drive is haunted.