Weeknotes 105

Back to work, then. I’m not delighted to get up on time every morning but I’m coping. 😰

On Tuesday morning, when I was feeling especially not delighted, I gritted my teeth and signed up to attend a February in-person work event in London. I wasn’t completely relaxed about the idea but I’d said I was going to make an effort to Mix Things Up & Get Out More in 2022 and it felt a bit soon to renege on that initiative.

On Tuesday afternoon the event was cancelled out of an abundance of COVID caution, so that was the end of that. Thus I win.

At work it was also time to write an indulgent “self reflection” as part of my impact review. I’ll spare you the details but the executive summary is: I think I’m doing a decent job of supporting individuals (e.g. my mentees) and my wider department (Ruby & Rails Infrastructure), which is good, but sagging in the middle when it comes to supporting my immediate team, which is less good.

I’m not sure what to do about this. As time goes on I’m becoming naturally less interested in managing individual projects; I just want to hang out with friendly people and solve technical problems together. This might be unreasonable so I need to work out how to get better at organising & motivating my team rather than always gravitating towards the relative comfort of smaller (more technically focused) or larger (more social) groups.

In a classic move directly antagonistic to what I literally just said I should be doing, this week I got the ball rolling on a departmental book club for Crafting Interpreters which my teammates are already excited about even though I haven’t done anything yet.

Scheduling aside, the main task ahead of me is to decide on a format: I already know I want everyone to build their own individual implementation of the book’s interpreter and virtual machine, but I’m unsure whether we should do that before the meeting for the relevant chapter, or after the meeting, or together during the meeting somehow. There’s strong demand for some social pressure to stay engaged and not fall off the wagon, so perhaps I should prioritise accountability for the reading itself and give people the freedom to work on their implementations whenever’s convenient. Watch this space I suppose.

I bought the Mela recipe app for myself & Nat now that it supports shared recipes. It’s really good and we’ve already spent an enjoyable few minutes populating our shared collection with some Anna Jones, Ruby Tandoh, Meera Sodha and Felicity Cloake faves. It looks great, has some killer features (“cook mode” is fantastically humane) and does a surprisingly good job of scraping both web pages and actual paper cookbooks. Definitely recommended.

I’ve finally found a way to play along with the Cracking The Cryptic puzzles. Until now I’d only been watching Simon Anthony’s videos because I find him more appealing and personable, but I realised I’ve been missing out on Mark Goodliffe’s GAS (“genuinely approachable sudokus”) videos in which he solves puzzles that are easy enough for me to complete. So now I’m working my way through the GAS back catalogue, trying the puzzles myself and then watching Mark’s solutions to confirm (or occasionally unstick) my own.

It’s really fun and I’m relieved to discover I’m not too hopeless to ever enjoy this as a hobby. I’m definitely very slow but I rarely get completely stuck which is a huge improvement over my universally unsuccessful attempts to solve the puzzles that Simon does.

A secondary revelation is that I find the puzzles with extra constraints (e.g. thermometers, arrows, lines, cages) far more approachable than “classic” sudoku because they give me something specific to focus on and work with, versus the daunting regularity of a plain sudoku grid. But I suppose I must gradually be improving my general sudoku skills too; I forgot basically everything I learned from Good Sudoku because it depended upon rote memorisation of opaque strategies, whereas I now feel like I’m better grasping the fundamental structure of the puzzle and building an understanding of how to approach it from first principles.

Speaking of constraints: unlike everyone else on the Internet I’ve been unable to get hooked on Wordle, and I think it’s because the first move is always a total guess based on no information, which I find completely unappealing. But I appreciate the ingenuity of its Twitter sharing — you can show your friends how well you did without spoiling today’s puzzle for them — even though it’s already become a bit relentless.

(I’d like to point out that this item felt fresh and relevant when I wrote it earlier in the week. I acknowledge that, days later, we’re well past peak Wordle and it now seems as timely as a withering takedown of MySpace. I kiss you!)

My sources (i.e. Phil) inform me that Phil did read out my last weeknotes, so that’s that sorted. ✅