Monthly Archives: June 2019

Week 3046

Pals, Week.In.Review, , , , ,

Grunting and Sweating

Amazing Trainer Christina, Deepa from work and I went to Obstacle Athletics on Saturday and had a lot of fun in their grown up playground. I got to do a lot of wall vaults and monkey bar work, ran up some wavy walls, balanced on beams and traversed long wall climbs. All were pretty cool. I also finally got to a place with a high rope so I could practice rope climbs!

Also finally got back to biking in! It’s beeyoootiful out.

Got to go to Georgia’s birthday party afterward and had a really swell time with my peeps there.

Politics

I’d vote for Biden over Trump – but I really think Biden will lose. He’s not even as exciting as Hillary was. There’s no reason to vote for him, just reasons to vote against Trump. Makes me wish again for Ranked Choice Voting. I’d love to see someone who has some enthusiasm get the nomination.

Skimmed the debates and it seems like Warren did great in her night as a real standout, committing to Medicare for all. On the second night, I didn’t check out as much but it looks like Biden’s skeletons are starting to become more known in the mainstream.

Family

Last week of school for Max Lazer! He’s coming out of kindergarten. I got to read a bunch of material that had never made it home before from him!

A book from my dad and a book from my son

Max also has been back at his circuits and seems to have figured parallel and series circuits.

Max Lazer Rainbow Shield

Zeezus on the other hand may have to go to a reform school.

Week 3045

Week.In.Review,

Family

We did the IEP review for Maxwell and the school has agreed to defer to the CBST.

This means the Department of Education will take a shot at finding an appropriate school for him. If they can’t provide one, we will find one. The hope is we can get something within the school system, but if not, we’ll do what we need to.

Zelda is getting very verbal and very sweet. Last night she cuddled max and lay her head on his chest, and said she wanted to watch “my Mackie sleep”

Reading

The Fifth Risk was very good. Lost Gods lost me very early on.

The Fifth Risk

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Well, that’s terrifying. This is almost like Lovecraft in that the unknown unknowns are huge lurking civilization ending monsters. Oy vey.

I started reading Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi and it’s very powerful and sad. A lot of it reminds me of Maxie’s struggles. The surges and changes he experiences and the way neither he nor we are prepared or have tools to help him but we muddle through as best we can – they match this poor girl’s struggles. Sometimes I want to abandon a book because it makes me feel too much and doesn’t feel like an adventure, and I’ve felt that with this book.

Grunting and Sweating

I’m going with trainer Christina and my work partner Deepa to an Obstacle Gym on Long Island this Saturday before coming back for birthday parties in the park. I’m psyched to try some crazy monkey bars and experiment with new moves and obstacles. They have one of those American Ninja warrior pull up bar ladders!

Week 3044

Week.In.Review, , , , , , ,

Books

Just finished up Tigerman by Nick Harkaway and it was a delight. A lovely struggle of a man who wants to be a father and ends up being a mysterious crime fighter, set against a post colonial outpost island sentenced to die and rotting as a Black Fleet uses the death of a nation to set up a zone without law. Really good fast-moving stuff of heroes and villains. Randomly checked out Lost Gods by Brom from the NYPL ebooks and it is holding up so far, though I feel irrationally suspicious that it will disappoint.

Also started The Fifth Risk after being reminded of Michael Lewis by the excellent Against the Rules podcast. I’m a bit full up on the mind bending horror of this age, though. My heart is really struggling for more meaningful ways to contribute within the time I’ve got.

Code

Got an hour or so over the weekend to make a wee bit more movement on the Trello release notes.

Researched X-API-Warn, X-API-DeprecationDate, DeprecationWarning (Python), Obsolete (C#), and @Deprecated(Java).

Work

I learned that you typically have 2 months of leaving notice in India and I can’t quite wrap my mind around it and all the implications of staffing and pacing of projects.

Also started working on an internal document around API deprecation policy. We do a pretty decent job of communication etc, but I want to make it a clear guide so that we can get better at it. Standards and checklists are good for things that we intend to do often.

Some good reading around this:

Family

Maxwell is sleeping on the couch nightly. He goes from the bed to the couch in the middle of the night, some sort of bi-phasic sleep thing I imagine. Zelda sleeps through the night for the most part!

Week 3043

Week.In.Review

Family

Finally got a date for Maxwell’s IEP review, so we can work with the school system to get him more appropriate education.

Max scrawls out "NO GRLS ULAWD!" for his door.
Max is, however working on his writing since has found a use for it.

Code

Spent a bunch more time exploring pytest to get through some testing. Discovered magic to skip tests, filter warning messages out, run only failing tests, and adding py.test flags to tox.ini – which is nice – I don’t like to have lots of different places for all the configuration to run.

Also started puttering around at night on yet another little project, based off of this fun idea from Alice Goldfuss. It’s just a cookiecutter project right now, but that makes it so much easier to get started with making something shareable. Cookiecutter is really good community scaffolding for python projects and I’ve been evangelizing it at work.

Work

Been doing a lot of organizing and going through our backlog to remove old projects or identify what we don’t care about any more. I want to also start tracking urgency for projects which is a function of size of request, time since request – with a wave function. A request that is 2 weeks of work but has been waiting a little while is more urgent – because you are losing the window where we can actually help the customer well. A small project that waits for 6 months is probably not urgent at all – by this point everyone probably has a workaround and it should probably be removed from the queue in that case. A large project that waits a little is usually ok unless there is a firm deadline.

This was all in service of better tracking our work and being able to present more intelligently about what we are doing. The presentation went well, so it paid off at least once

I also had a really good conversation about what is in the espresso pods at work and how does decaffeination work – love getting obsessed and delving into things with people. Of course I made a wiki page – people need to know how to choose their coffee!

Finally wrapping up the last items for our first wave of the Py2-Py3 conversion work. I’ve been a bottle neck on some of it, but it’s really important to lay good foundations for future work.

Buds

More axe throwing with The Lawyers. Then drinking. Then Korean food. Then Karaoke. I was best at the eating and drinking where I have a phenomenal amount of practice and natural talent.

I will spare you video of the karaoke.