Week 161: occult

Monday 18 April 2022

• Job interview unsuccessful, but maybe the real success was the things we learned along the way, and bless them for bothering to feed back some helpful feedback. Yes, I shouted some angry words at the email, and had a warlock place a curse on their business, but I didn’t mean it. As well as all sorts of other bad vibes I’m sure, I was too honest about favouring boring technology over this week’s shimmering new JavaScript framework – did I accidentally present an exaggerated version of myself (we all do, but I here I’d exaggerated all the wrong things), or am I really old and past it already?

  Anyway, it’s really not a big deal, but it felt like a negative at a time when I needed at least two positives.

• Some work. There’s been some weird, occult technical shit that has slightly (one could argue) pissed on my theory that bustimes.org is easily stable enough for me to greedily do another full-time job at the same time again. Here’s a graph:

  

  (Normally the “private inbound” line is the highest, but suddenly the two public lines went up and the other two went down. I’m good at understanding logs, but I couldn’t find any clues about what was going on there.)

• A fun fact about computers is that Gunicorn’s timeout setting only really applies for synchronous workers.

  Another: I thought my intuition about how to pronounce Redis was wrong, but I was right all along (“it’s like the word ‘red’ plus the word ‘kiss’ without the ‘k’”, not like “redistribute” without the “tribute”); I was too suggestible when someone else mispronounced it once.

• Happy Oestre. Made some fruity buns, which were a bit bland – needed some spices and orange zest – but a better size than last year’s for fitting, halved, in the toaster.

• Saturday: hopped on the bicycle to pedal across the county for some long weekend family time, at precisely the same time the website went down again. It’s funny because one of the common user-facing error messages states “backend is unhealthy”, but actually I wasn’t on the saddle for that long. Anyway, that was some further hours of downtime I ought to be embarrassed by. I could have effected a fix by the roadside, as this time the cause was less occult (database indexes, eh?), but I didn’t. Ah well, I can feel some work coming that will make everything more reliable again.

• Mowed some lawn. Kept thinking of the plight of “coughing Major” Charles Ingram, the innocent man who lost at least one toe in a lawnmower accident. Pleased to say the only injury I suffered was some blistering to the thumbs.

• Read a little. Then the Kindle app dared to congratulate me for “approaching a record reading streak!” and I felt so patronised I muttered “oh fuck off” at the screen. Which happens quite a lot, actually, and maybe I could keep a log of everything that provokes that response.

• 📺 Severance !!!