Weeknotes #5

April 28, 2019 5 min read

Weeknotes Series

  1. Weeknotes #1
  2. Weeknotes #2
  3. Weeknotes #3
  4. Weeknotes #4
  5. Weeknotes #5

Trys wrote in his weeknotes this week that he uses JournalBook to write his weeknotes up. I haven’t cracked the discipline side of that yet - and only have two entries for the past seven days - but thankfully those entries reminded me of a few things worth writing about, otherwise this would’ve been a weeknote-less week.

#Bank Holiday Weekend

The bank holiday weekend was full of fun bits and pieces. I got to play board games with friends from church, including a game of King of Tokyo - in which I got knocked out in the first round, and a torturous game of The Resistance with each turn lasting 15+ minutes. I forgot how much joy playing board games brought me and it’s reinvigorated my plans to host a Battlestar Galactica board game evening!

On the Sunday evening I took part in the usual film night and after making some small tweaks to the voting application we use, my nomination Cabin in the Woods was tragically beaten out by Crazy Rich Asians. Crazy Rich Asians is probably the worst movie we’ve watched in a long time, in fact it was so bad that most of us left the room the movie was in and went and played some more Super Smash Bros.! For a romcom, there wasn’t a lot of rom or com - in fact a better description would’ve been ‘infomercial for Singapore’. Definitely not a highlight of the week.

On the Monday I finally got my Wii Uset-up, a gift from Blake, and I managed to grab a couple of hours to play Skyward Sword. It’s been years since I’ve played a Zelda1 game properly and I was completely absorbed by it. The game has a fantastic aesthetic and an authentic charm that had me giggling throughout. I made it up to the first temple and I’m eager to find some time this week to play a little more.

#Clothes

As I mentioned last week, I introduced my friends, the Rottler family, to Queer Eye and after watching a few of the early episodes with them I was inspired to “elevate” my look. My wardrobe is pretty old and has been pretty well worn with all but a couple of pieces of clothing having been bought before I started university. It was definitely time for a refresh!

The decision to update my wardrobe has been complicated, and consequently delayed a number of times by two factors. When Catherine came back from Bangladesh we made the decision to live as ethically as possible - and that means avoiding (where possible) purchasing fast fashion clothes. Places like H&M and Uniqlo which were staples previously are no goes because of the way they treat their workers. I’m also not an easy to buy for in the first place - I’m 5”7 and ~120lbs so I’m naturally a lot smaller than most small sizes. When you put the restriction on places to shop together with my size it’s difficult to find clothes!

In the end I found a few pieces of clothing that were suitable. Black Lane Horse Ateliers is a London company that makes jeans, their workers are all London based - heck you can even go visit their factory, and they go down to my waist size and allow you to hem your jeans at any length. I nabbed a pair of jeans from them. I also found another British company, North Sea Clothing, that does items in my size. They had a jumper, the “Cadet jumper”, which they advertise as being made with Scottish wool in a Scottish factory and since it was on sale I grabbed one.

Obviously I don't quite look like the model in this photo
Obviously I don't quite look like the model in this photo

My favourite purchase so far is my Buzz Rickson BR65622 Sweatshirt. Japan makes fantastic sweatshirts (among other pieces of clothing) and their clothing has the advantage of being made to my proportions and sizing! Whilst not quite a Loopwheeler, which I may see if I can track down whilst I’m in Japan, the Buzz Rickson is an incredibly soft and well made sweatshirt. Finally I found an ethical clothing company that does t-shirts that fit me! Rapanui do a three pack of organic t-shirts that are super soft and fit perfectly. All in all - not a bad haul for a week’s work!

#Endgame

The other big event of this week was watching Avengers: Endgame at midnight on Wednesday. Whilst the movie wasn’t necessarily what I expected it was not a disappointment and was totally worth my sleep deprived state the next day. Whilst it won’t eclipse Infinity War, it hit all the right notes and will stand as a satisfying end to this chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

#Other Bits and Pieces

#Work

Work was fairly unremarkable this week. It’s all Kubernetes and microservices as normal. At work our API gateway is a little old and frankly pretty terrible so I’ve been dreaming over a new thinner API gateway that’s configured entirely using YAML - and of course written in Rust.

I also spent a lot of my time designing a mechanism for performing A/B testing with our new customer portal. The architecture uses Istio and a Reverse-Proxy to attach a header depending on whether the authenticated user is part of a set of users early preview users. Unfortunately both projects are on ice and may have been conceived ahead of their time.

#Friends

My friend Andy was down from Scotland for a week, Joel returned from home this week, and I ran into Dan one lunchtime whilst I was working from home! Hanging out with them, and all the other opportunities to spend time with friends over the past week has made me really thankful for the fact I have such a good set of friends. Spending time with them is definitely the best part of my life.

#Next Week

Next week is going to be a week of firsts. I’ve got my Rust meetup to look forward to, my first pair programming interview, and my book group meeting. I can’t wait!


  1. Or should that be a Link game? ↩︎

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Last Updated: 2022-08-22 19:24