Inspired by my friend Trys, I’ve decided to join into the weeknote craze and start chronicling what I get up to each week. My rough plan is to include a healthy mixture of the areas of my life: what I’ve been up to at work, developments in my personal life, things I’ve been pondering, projects I’m working on, and more trivial things like the videogames I’ve been playing, books I’ve been reading, and songs I’ve been listening to.

As I write this I’m headed into Vauxhall for my fourth week at Limejump. This time last week I had no interviewing experience at all but since then I’ve quizzed three candidates and spent a lot of time considering what a good interview process looks like and the kinds of questions it’s important to ask. Sitting in the chair of the interviewer as opposed the interviewee has shocked me - I think everything I’ve been taught about interviews is wrong.

I’ve been working on improving the small command line Rust utility I made in January. The tool takes the raw source code for this blog and parses the markdown files to produce a JSON index which is to power the blog’s search feature. Last time I posted about it I’d just finished the initial version. Whilst the first attempt was good enough to replace my previous solution 1, I’ve spent time improving the areas I wasn’t happy with and I’ve learned a lot in the process.

During New Year’s Eve my unofficially-adopted-brother Ethan told me that he was sad because he wasn’t going to have a Pokemon daily calendar in 2019. To me, that sounded like a problem technology could solve. Sure, I couldn’t give him a fancy flip calendar for 2019 but I could send him a text and email every day!

Jon Edmiston, one of my mentors and friends, has a phrase he frequently likes to use: “People overestimate what they can achieve in a day, but underestimate what they can achieve in a year1. Like many of his sayings, it’s one that’s been repeated to me a lot but until recently I hadn’t really reflected on it what it actually means. Whilst the specifics of the phrase itself are immaterial I think it captures the reality that consistency achieves more than pure effort.

Recently I encountered a repeated error trying to globally install command line programs with Yarn. No matter what I did it didn’t seem to matter, the error would return. Today - I finally cracked the puzzle.

A couple of weekends ago I hosted a few friends for a Lord of the Rings marathon and we set off on an epic adventure in Middle Earth together. Here’s my take on what went well, what I’d change, and which movie I never intend to watch the extended edition of again.

A couple of weeks ago I introduced the concept of replacing basic Unix equivalents with modern Rust alternatives with the example of Bat - today I want to introduce Amber, a modern alternative to awk and sed. I recently migrated to Fastmail and switched my email address from arranf@gmail.com to arran@arranfrance.com in an effort to avoid sharing too much information with Google and ensure people can contact me at the domains I own.

The state of images on the web is pretty rough. What should be an easy goal, showing a user a picture, is actually complicated. Good websites deliver the right resolution to the right device, perform lazy loading, support ‘retina’ (or high density pixel) devices, serve new image formats like WebP to the correct clients, and show placeholders whilst images load. It’s messy, hard to get right, and requires a lot more effort than a user might realise behind the scenes.

Joel and I spent the Summer of second year playing The Witcher 1: Enhanced Edition, a game I’ve wanted to play since 2007. This year we’ve decided to pick up The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings, the game famously presented to Obama by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and I intend to blog my thoughts and feelings about each chapter of the game. WARNING: THIS SERIES WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS THROUGHOUT