Features of this week include me curled up in my bathroom vomiting, the proper launch of Limejump’s tech discussions, and movie of the week Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Work

This week at work has mostly been invisible progress due to the large amount of task switching and stop-starting on different projects. The other full stack developer in our team has been ‘temporarily’ reassigned and so I halted my work on our GraphQL API and switched to the tasks he was working on, building a system for pre-fetching and caching downstream data. The back-and-forth, plus me spending a day vomiting my guts out on Thursday, has made it difficult to gain any tangible ground. Despite that, there’s been plenty of good stuff that’s happened at Limejump.

I’ve been asked to take on some extra responsibility in the interview process, namely doing the second step - the technical call. I took my first call on Thursday and I really enjoyed it! I’m looking forward to doing more of those ¹.

Friday was the first real launch of the ‘tech discussion’ platform at Limejump, a chance for developers to share the cool stuff they’ve been working on and discuss solutions to wider platform issues. It seemed successful, a lot of people came by to listen to one of our devops engineers talk about our platform wide logging. Not really the most interesting of subjects but I have a couple more topics I’ve lined up for future weeks and if all goes well it should help disseminate the vast amounts of tribal knowledge we have.

This is a bit of a meta comment but it definitely hit me hard this week. I’m finding myself sick of Slack. It constantly demands my attention. The red and blue icons are starting to feel like the Eye of Sauron - always searching, never resting. The people in Slack are great but the platform itself is inherently attention seeking, and frustratingly impossible to detach from. Trys’ thoughts on this subject sum up mine perfectly.

Projects

Hearthstone added a feature last year to add share decks via a ‘deck code’. I’ve always been a little bit curious how these work so this week I spun up a new Rust project to figure them out. This was my first exposure to variable length integer encoding and after playing around with it I can easily see the dangers of writing parsers! I’d forgotten much of the joy of writing Rust and I’m looking forward to using this to experiment with web assembly as well. On the topic of Rust, I signed up to go to a Rust meetup at the end of this month. It’ll be the first meetup I ever go to so I’m excited but a little nervous to go - I’ve convinced Joel to join me though!

After being unhappy with the format of last week’s emails, I reverted last week’s change to my RSS feed - now it only shows summaries again. This isn’t by any means optimal but it means that my week email update doesn’t feel like an essay and it also hides the potentially broken images that might otherwise display.

This week was also demo week for my hush hush startup project which was met with a lot of encouragement. The next step is to push forward and complete phase one of the project by integrating with Stripe to have a sensible payment flow! Joel and Catherine have put a lot of solid work in on this so far and project managing it all has been challenging but I definitely feel like we’re getting there!

Fun and Personal Bits and Pieces

The Hearthstone release fun continues this week! This week’s Tavern Brawl was a standard brawlesium and I got to ten wins with my Rush Bomb Warrior losing only to two more control oriented warrior decks and a disconnect! Overall, I’m optimistic about this expansion - I think it’s going to have a diverse meta and I feel like the Hearthstone team are investing in a better experience all round.

This week Joel and I capped off Firefly by watching the final episode and I was amazed by how much emotion was crammed into what I remembered being a surprisingly mediocre episode. Whilst it doesn’t (and was never meant to) feel like a fitting conclusion to the series, and if viewed through the lens of that expectation will certainly be a disappointment, it is an all around strong episode that highlights the best traits of the Tam siblings and has perhaps the strongest villain of the series! Joel is away for two weeks but I’m looking forward to him coming back so we can watch Serenity together. It’s a flippin’ fantastic movie!

This week I’ve played a fair bit of Smash Bros. and whilst it’s clear I’m improving it’s difficult for me to get a full three stocks of focused play. Joel’s handicap is basically 60-80% above mine for a fair fight, unless I’m Bowser. In terms of character improvement, I’m definitely getting better at playing as Pokemon Trainer, Greninja, and I even branched out into Daisy this week! I also got to play some Rocket League with Dan on Friday night - and frankly it’s a little depressing realising I’m basically only as good at it as I was three years ago.

Film Thoughts: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Last Sunday was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I was unexpectedly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Whilst I was always tempted by the trailer, I wrote it off as a goofy money making spin-off that wasn’t worth my time. In truth, it is a goofy money making spin off - but a well executed one that combines the finer refined aesthetic of Pride and Prejudice with the urgency and more primal theme of a zombie apocalypse. Whilst I have no real experience of Pride and Prejudice, I’m led to believe it’s faithful enough to its source material to be unoffensive for that alone it should receive some praise! As a uninitiated viewer I enjoyed dipping into the dual worlds of the surrealistic landscape of an occupied Britain and the intrigue and social layers of Victorian culture and I was taken aback at how well the movie danced between both without lingering in either so much as to dominate.

Of course, it was never going to be a movie to blow me away or fall in love with but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was more enjoyable to watch than I expected - and I think that’s enough for me. 👍