Innovation days at work this week, which is where we take three days every six weeks to work on (or learn) something not necessarily directly related to normal day-to-day project work, then share it with the team afterwards. I started revisiting an early attempt to replace some graphs in our app with Grafana dashboards (the current graphs were rendered using Chartkick and Chart.js, reading historical data from Postgres, and could be very slow to load). We’ve been duplicating the data into Prometheus for long enough to have a full set of values for the maximum period users can go back, but every time I look into embedding Grafana dashboards into a web app without requiring people to authenticate separately it seems like an unrecommended/unsupported nightmare. This time it finally occurred to me to go for the middle ground, forget about Grafana, and just source the values for the existing graphs from Prometheus instead of Postgres. It wasn’t too hard and has barely changed the UI, but is at least an order of magnitude faster, which has made our users happy.
On Wednesday we had our annual club “Run Bike Run” event, which involves two short runs (totalling four miles) with a six-mile bike ride sandwiched in between. The twist is that there’s no set start time, but a cut-off for the finish, and the winner is the person who set off latest but still got back in time. I was never in any danger of winning (especially having already cycled 11 miles to get there), but did at least time it right to get back inside the cut-off, and finished slightly quicker than last year. Then after stopping for chilli and a beer I had to ride home again – it felt like a high-mileage day, but for a change most of it (38 miles or so, including the commute to work earlier) was on my bike.
I wasn’t expecting much from parkrun, but also didn’t have any excuse not to try, with no racing this weekend. I surprised myself with a 21:30 though, which turns out to be my joint second quickest ever on that course (probably the toughest and hilliest of the various ones Ipswich has had over the years). Then to Colchester Art Centre in the evening to see the Pet Needs Fractured Party People film, plus an acoustic set from the band. Weird to see them in a seated venue, and also to almost immediately spot myself in the crowd on the screen.
On Sunday Holly and I did a long(ish) run along the Gipping to Needham Market. We stopped at Bramford for a paddle, where a dog-walking lady told us we shouldn’t have gone in the river, because someone tested the water quality recently and it was 8. She wasn’t that clear about what the 8 represented though, other than that it should have been zero. There was another delay not far from the end when we realised we’d have to divert out to the road because of a closed “unsafe” bridge over the river, but opted instead to return to the bridge and cross it regardless (it was hardly Temple of Doom level stuff!)
The plan was to grab an ice cream once we reached Needham Lakes before getting the train back, but the queue was a bit long so we decided to pop into the pub for a quick drink instead. By a stroke of good fortune it turned out they had a beer festival going on in the garden, so we accidentally got stuck there for two and a half hours in the sunshine.
