Weeknotes 59

I finished Control and was really enjoying it by the end. It never stopped being a bit too obtuse but it redeemed itself with a bravura sequence late in the game which was so unexpected and well-executed that it left me with a big grin on my face.

I got a second laugh out of Arrested Development, and as predicted it was when someone said a funny word in a funny way. I wasn’t expecting Gob to be my favourite character but I think this means that science says he is.

For All Mankind is back! It’s very good! I like space!

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve ended up doing a lot of devops fiddling on both work & personal projects. Some aspects of this are enjoyable — it’s satisfying to make a computer do a boring task automatically — but it’s reminded me that the fundamental requirement of any continuous integration system is that it must have its own unique and baffling ontology.

As a user of these systems I’ve never properly understood why they need so many nouns to make a computer execute a program. Pipelines, workflows, builds, jobs, steps, actions, commands, runs… it’s kind of exhausting, especially when you switch to a new system which uses a different-yet-overlapping set of words with similar-yet-distinct meanings.

I can dimly see that all this complexity comes from a desire to give the system a declarative model of the task’s structure ahead of time. I’m not an expert but, as an experiment, can we try just having one kind of thing (call it a job or a build or whatever you like) which means “run this”, and make all of the other features available as runtime primitives instead?

After many years of inconvenience, my life has accidentally reached a tipping point where USB-C is actually quite helpful. I have one power cable snaking round the side of the sofa, and whenever my PS5 controller, headphones, Switch, laptop or iPad run out of juice I can plug them into that cable for a bit and they charge back up. I didn’t think this would ever happen but it’s surprisingly good.

To liven up lockdown, my neighbour has got a new dog which barks all the time. Bark. Bark bark bark. Bark bark. Good dog.

I had the window open on Saturday.