Weeknotes 128

Quick one today because of, and/or despite, it being a busy week.

On Monday my team made a change to RubyGems that starts the process of enforcing multi-factor authentication for authors of popular Ruby packages. This has been a long time coming and involved a lot of people-wrangling work on top of the comparatively mild technical work, so it was a relief that everything went smoothly and nobody kicked off; even The Register was nice about it. I’m proud of my teammates for getting this over the line.

In the middle of the week I worked on my conference talk and so discovered the fun of using an Apple Pencil to draw directly into a Keynote presentation on an iPad. My iPad’s not signed into the same iCloud account as my work laptop but the multiuser collaboration feature is good enough that I can have the presentation open on both at once and everything works fine.

I wish macOS Keynote had the same drawing functionality as the iPad version since I own a Wacom tablet and could easily draw into the desktop UI if that was allowed. But the two-device setup is a novel and somewhat futuristic compromise.

On Thursday afternoon I saw a therapist for the first time ever, which was strange in the moment but, you know, probably good in the long term.

In the evening Aleks & I went to Reema’s Kathak dance performance in Waterloo. It was properly impressive and I got a lot of enjoyment out of the show itself and the beers in a sketchy pub garden afterwards.

It’s the first event I’ve been to where there were no signs of any COVID safety measures and nobody was wearing a mask. Perhaps the pandemic was all a dream.

It was 32 °C on Friday. No.

I sat glazed in a thin film of sweat and ran my teammates through a first draft of my talk. It was basically terrible so it needs work.

Maple arrived in London yesterday in advance of Brighton Ruby. We walked around east London and Soho and I pointed at buildings and pretended to know more than two restaurants.

I’m writing this from my parents’ sofa because I’m visiting them for Father’s Day.

I can’t get through an episode of Homeland without thinking “Carrie likes jazz, man”, which makes me think about Craig Bierko, who reminds me of the abysmal pilot for the American remake of Red Dwarf, so that’s a difficult train of thought to enjoy. I expect I’d enjoy TV more if I’d never seen any TV.

I found The perception of rhythm in language — by Anne Cutler, who died earlier this month — really astonishing.