Weeknotes 4

A lot of pottering this week between the meals & coffees with friends. I’m starting to feel a little guilty about not doing any Productive Work, even though I know it’s totally okay to rest and get healthy.

But it isn’t January any more, so technically it is time to stop being on holiday. I don’t feel hugely incentivised to jump back into work yet although some money would definitely be helpful.

I submitted my tax return and paid a significant income tax bill. This stung a little because all my income should’ve been taxed at source so I hadn’t expected to owe anything, but it’s ultimately fine; taxation is good actually and I’m glad to contribute to the social safety net that I massively benefit from. I just wish I’d planned for it.

For Friday dinner I was too lazy to open a cookbook so I made a five bean chilli:

(I still haven’t worked out how to export these videos with properly synced audio, so as usual the original story sounds better.)

I made a bit of an effort to explore London by bike this week. I rode to Kensington on Tuesday (about a 21km round trip) and Greenwich on Thursday (about 25km). Neither is a huge distance from Hackney but it’s further than I normally cycle and I’m not very familiar with those parts of the city. After many years of living & working here it’s still fun to have more bits of London join up in my brain.

For these unfamiliar routes it’s frustrating that I can’t get cycling directions on my watch: Apple Maps has great watch support but doesn’t provide bike directions, and Google Maps does good bike routing but doesn’t have a watch app. My current compromise is to listen to Google Maps’ turn-by-turn voice directions through bone conduction headphones, which is neither completely safe nor fully reliable but feels less risky than fumbling with a phone while riding.

The Kensington trip was to visit Rob at Imperial’s Department of Computing. He’d organised a Q&A panel with me and two other (albeit current) CTOs — Jules Coleman and Paul Dyson — for his Software Engineering for Industry students. This was a lot of fun and it was basically flattering to be included.

I was reassured by how much the three of us agreed on the substantive issues of what a CTO does and how they’re meant to do it. I don’t know whether I’ll be a CTO again any time soon, but this panel was a useful reminder that it’s something I’m interested in and have experience with.

Speaking of which: I was happy to see myself crop up in a video on Tom Armitage’s new Learn to Code for the Web FutureLearn course.

Nicky and I are pretending to pair on a React component. Acting! React is completely inappropriate for the introductory nature of the course but it’s all just multicoloured nerd gibberish isn’t it?

The Greenwich trip was to visit the newish IKEA there. It was surprisingly bearable on a weekday afternoon. I bought a SYMFONISK sound remote which is nice and works exactly as it’s supposed to.

We watched Uncut Gems. It was good but very stressful.

On Friday my EU citizenship was removed, against my will, to indulge the nostalgic fantasies of a bunch of delusional xenophobes. What a loss. ♻️