Weeknotes 241

Nothing’s happened this week really. Only work.

All five days in the office to help welcome my new teammate, who’s settling in well. I’m looking forward to having another London office buddy for the foreseeable; it makes a huge difference to my mood when I get to see friendly faces in person.

Speaking of which, I had dinner with Chris, Leo and Paul at The Spread Eagle on Friday. It was the first time all four of us had met up since that fateful night almost two and a half years ago.

The pub itself was definitely better than the last time I went there, which I’m now willing to blame on Christmas. I enjoyed the pie & mash and sticky toffee pudding — as Paul pointed out, classic summer fare — and we managed a shouted conversation over the Friday night clamour, music and looming threat of karaoke.

For someone who’s ostensibly an expert in both Rails and (separately) test-driven development, it’s embarrassing how poor a mental model I have of Rails’ various test types. “Functional”, i.e. controller? “Integration”, i.e. also controller? “System”? There’s some kind of gem? Even the unit tests are actually integration tests? I’ve never understood the philosophy and, at this rate, I never will.

Relatedly: I went to dig out some information from the RSpec talk I gave a decade ago at LRUG, only to find that the video is gone. That’s unfortunate because the live demo portion had some useful tips in it which I was too lazy to write up, and until now I’ve been relying on the ability to peek at it every few years whenever I need a quick reminder of things I used to know.

The good news is that the Glacier archive I made in 2020 definitely contains a copy of that video, so in principle there’s nothing stopping me downloading it and sticking it up on my YouTube channel for posterity. The bad news is that AWS is so complicated, and Glacier so slow, that right now I’ve only got as far as requesting an inventory of my vault to discover which file I should even retrieve. When that job eventually completes — hours? days? — I might be allowed to begin the long process of downloading something.

It’s better than losing the file forever, but it’s not that much better.

Not long ’til the real bank holiday.