May, 2023
2023-05-01
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-02
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-03
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-04
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-05
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-06
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-07
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-08
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-09
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-10
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-11
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-12
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-13
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-14
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-15
I wrote something today!
It sure has been a while... There were many days there where I wanted to write something, but I would allow either this or that prevent me from putting fingers to keyboard. As the days drifted on, the issue got bigger, the bigger the issue, the more immense the pressure, the more immense the pressure the easier it was to procrastinate, but not today.
I wrote something today.
And that's what it's about, just writing something. I forgot that it doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be entertaining. I forgot that I was writing this for an audience of one; Me. And if other people actually wanted to read it, well that's great as well.
I'm not going to fill in almost a half a year in today's blog post, I just need to let the past be the past and concentrate on what happened today.
Today was Monday, so that means casenotes. The process has improved dramatically since it was conceived, but I will be a happy man when I'm not longer required on a Sunday night and Monday morning. Now that I have a team member with me that is super smart and willing to learn about systems design and development, we may be able to offload some of this repetitive burden and automate the shit out of it, wahoo!
My wife made me lunch this morning, it made me feel very loved. Thankyou sweetheart, I love you.
In the office today was a careful balancing act between helping people copy and paste links into emails and developing a new system in Power Automate. Oh how I'm quite smitten with Power Automate now. I've come to learn all it's quirks and strangeness that a decently useful flow can be created in less than an hour. Our processes for provisioning hardware has improved and sheer quanity of our infrastructure is ludacrously immense compared to how simple the systems are that monitor and maintain them. There's always room for improvement but I'm in a happy place with it right now.
Oh, I wrote something today. And oh how it feels good to write!
My weight loss journey last year, which fell apart due to a foot injury, then COVID, then blatant laziness, has been put on the happy path once again. Ironically this started because my throat was so sore that eating lost all pleasure. Part of me wishes I could turn off that pleasure centre at will. It would make it far, far easier. C'mon scientists and engineers, surely there's an app for that.
This afternoon we visited a prospective site for our new office as we have overwhelmingly outgrown our current place. Here's a photo of me in the building next door, wondering what the fuck we would ever do if we got to the size of a company that necessitated such a room.
I drew a small fret this evening and updated the code on the Frets article so I don't need to manually add each new image the image array. The javascript code is an ungodly mess of copy and paste but it seems to work so... shrug.
We have started a new thing with our eldest where we ask them to go through their day just before bed and it's my favourite part of the day. We have been doing this for about a week and have noticed a change in their personality since it started. Getting to hear things from their perspective is very rewarding and I encourage all parts of toddlers to start doing this with their kids.
Good night kids, I love you with all my heart.
Here's to writing something tomorrow!
2023-05-16
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-17
I awoke today and jumped on my work computer (not a healthy habit). I jumped on because today was the day of our first staff induction using the fancy new system that I designed and rolled out. To say it ran smoothly is a huge lie. Well, I imagine for the applicants and other people conducting induction it went smoothly, but for me it was a different story.
The setup is using Power Automate and Microsoft Teams Adaptive Cards. The flows to start and re-plan inductions were not thoroughly tested and there was a lot of manual intervention and data wrangling involved. Luckily we got it out the door and a sheet full of bug fixes and process changes.
The induction itself went fantastic. The new staff were well-prepared and the automated emails sent to various staff involved with induction meant there wasn't a mess of communication between people and everyone had better focus on their role. I was quite proud of how well it went all things considering.
I've currently got a blocked left-ear after dealing with a strange head-flu a couple of weeks ago. My doctor prescribed an aggressive regiment of over the counter decongestants and it sounds like my hearing is improving. I'm hoping that it clears in the next few days otherwise we will have to go with an alternate but less ideal treatment.
Worked a bit on the internals of the website tonight. The main problem I'm encountering is the effort to generate a new build of the site and then upload is just tiring. I want to be able to open a markdown file, write some silly words then press a single button and it all magically work. The first step to doing this was to create a mechanism that keeps track of all the content files, the updated dates, etc and build only newly created or modified files.
2023-05-18
While it's technically 12:11 am on the 19th, I'm still going to count this as written on the 18th. I'm up late tonight because inspiration struck for a refactor of the code that generates this site. The original code was hacked together to just work, and now I'm designing it to just work easily. The end result should be a smaller code footprint with more features. Notably: The ability to build only files that have updated since the past production build, the ability to upload the files automatically and the ability to ignore files or directories based on regex patterns (certain file extensions, or folders that start with an underscore).
Currently it's not even interpreting markdown yet (just doing simple copies), but the foundation is there for more work over the coming days.
The day went really well today, my wife and I had a really good conversation after the kids went to bed and it made me feel good. I didn't spend as much time with my children as I should so will be taking the morning off to fully engage with them.
Oh yeah, and I'm wearing an Oodie. These things are so fucking comfy.
Oh yeah, I just noticed I originally wrote todays entry inside the build directory, then did a final build before bed, leading to the entry to be overwritten. Luckily VSCodium has powerful Ctrl+Z features. phew.
2023-05-19
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-20
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-21
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-22
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-23
It's incredible how quick a week goes by. I've been thinking about this a bit since having kids. I think the fact that a lot of life is in a routine means the days blend into each other quicker, giving a warped perspective of time.
We didn't go swimming this morning as the kids weren't feeling the best. I worked later last night so took the morning to spend time with them. We played with blocks and cars, it was fun to see them playing together without yelling a fighting. A rare sight at the moment with their ages.
A bit of a security scare at work today, we will be implementing some more stringent security measures in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, people are the weakest part of any information system. And it's my job to make sure they have the training and tools to help them better assess risk.
I've been binging an incredible show called Mr Inbetween for the past week. It's not often that a show pulls me in, but this one pulled me in so hard and fast that I'm feeling profound loss that there are not more than 3 seasons.
Slowly chipping away at the refactor of this static site generator.
2023-05-24
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-25
I'm not going to write much today, not really feeling it.
I've hit feature parity with the refactor of this site's code. The next step will be building the code for automatic uploads and then I will be able to start adding content more easily.
2023-05-26
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-27
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-28
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-29
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-30
I didn't write anything today.
2023-05-31
I didn't write anything today.