Weeknotes 294

Hello! An antipodean-friendly early edition to welcome Tim.

It was a long, tiring week which stretched my patience to its biological limit. But there was some good stuff too.

Thrice gym despite spending all five weekdays at the office. Occasionally I can tell that sleep would benefit me more than exercise, but once I’ve automatically woken up at 5:30am it’s irreversible so I might as well just get on with it.

As of this week it’s now dark when I go outside.

On Tuesday I met Pat and other Ruby friends for dinner at Plants of Roselyn as he passed annually through town. The meal was tasty but notable mainly for the fact that the server carried a tablet which she used to mark off each person’s dishes as they individually paid at the end. Given how much I dread the logistics of splitting the bill after a group meal, this is probably the single best thing of any kind that I’ve ever seen and so I’ll definitely be back.

On Wednesday I had a team lunch at Aba-Ra! which contains too much punctuation (29%) for a restaurant but was otherwise good and I didn’t have to pay at all this time.

Thursday was my two-year work anniversary. My officemates bought vegan pastries to celebrate: a chocolate hazelnut swirl from Okja, socials from Ole & Steen and cinnamon buns from buns from home.

All incredible. I’m very fortunate.

It doesn’t feel like two years; it feels closer to either a month or a decade. I think I’m fully settled in now, and the continued loveliness of my London team helps me to hang in there through the less lovely bits.

Yesterday it was warm and summery and I wanted to feel like I was on holiday so I rode my bike to Maltby Street Market and enjoyed another slice of Biscoff chocolate tart in the sunshine.

I will not be taking any questions about my health & fitness regime at this time.

I watched episode two of Alien: Earth and, like Phil, struggled to care about anything that was happening.

Superficially it’s the sort of thing I should enjoy so I’m finding it hard to put my finger on why I’m so indifferent. It just feels, I dunno, sort of lifeless and cynical, like a fan film made by people who are so enthusiastic about hitting specific iconic beats that they forget to pay attention to the basics of story, character and dialogue. Remember ovomorphs? Remember the layer of mist‽

I also seriously do think that the editing is bad.

TEDIOUS GIT CORNER: I was delighted to learn (thanks Paul) that git switch and git restore are finally no longer marked as experimental. It’s about time, and if you’re still not using them, take this as a sign that you really should be.

now remove git checkout you cowards

For many years I’ve had git g aliased to git log -⁠-⁠graph -⁠-⁠oneline so I can easily see a graph of my current branch’s history. Running git g after every commit is the main way I orient myself while I’m working.

But I often work on branches which are themselves ancestors of other branches — for example, when I’m breaking up a long linear sequence of commits into multiple logical chunks, each with its own branch — and it’s unhelpful that I can’t see those descendant commits when I’m making changes. In that situation I resort to git log -⁠-⁠graph -⁠-⁠oneline -⁠-⁠branches or similar to give myself a more holistic view both forwards and backwards in history, even though it brings in other irrelevant branches which I then have to ignore.

At last it occurred to me that I could use git for-each-ref -⁠-⁠contains to list exactly the descendant branches that I’m interested in, so now git g is aliased to git log -⁠-⁠graph -⁠-⁠oneline $(git for-each-ref -⁠-⁠format='%(refname)' -⁠-⁠contains). It works perfectly and I’m very pleased.

While we’re on the subject, I reckon it’s worth using less -⁠-⁠chop-⁠long-⁠lines as the pager for git log -⁠-⁠graph (e.g. by setting GIT_PAGER or passing -c core.pager) so that long lines don’t ruin the beautiful ASCII art.

No work tomorrow!