Notes for week 47 of 2021

I spent most of this week in work meetings. I also went to the office quite a bit and since the commute is not exactly short, there was little time for anything else. I tried to use evenings to wind down properly and to adjust for jetlag¹. The weapon of choice were board games, most often the Lost Ruins of Arnak accompanies by Through the Ages and Machi Koro.

I managed to only offend a few people and discovered two major architectural projects that “someone” should do. How much people appreciate me poking holes remains to be seen; I am starting a clock.

As my home country continues to manage pandemic as an unimportant side project, I am converting to be a remote employee again. I’ve enjoyed seeing people face to face, but a waning dose, the overwhelmed hospitals and the rise of Omicron² tells me to wait it out.

Random

• Receipt of the week is not really a receipt, but rather a technique. Velveting makes a difference! I am generally trying to cut down on frying, but when I do, this simple step elevates the effect of a quick meal by a lot, and it doesn’t add much time (although it requires planning)
• My random buy of Soleirolia soleirolii is turning into another graveyard project. Let’s see whether dying plants are salvagable after reading more into the care taking interwebz
• I experience a weird bug in which Google authentication inside an app refuses to redirect for Okta SSO. This means I can’t get my work calendar into my phone, causing various annoyances. I suspect it’s some security setting I enabled somewhere and now I can’t figure out how to get it back
• Quite a few of my colleagues use clockwise; I am not sure if it doesn’t point to a cultural meeting problem, but it is a good hack
• How GitHub advices people to combine GQL and REST API
• I also went to do few oneliner fixes on Graveyard and of course letting a project alone for a few weeks means that CI is failing for no good reason
• Through playing with Dogsheep (a less impressive version of wolf-ram, hehe), I discovered iNaturalist. I have a feeling you’ll find me there
• I’ve walked 4 km. I’ve been active for 0.8 hours during 1 activities as I am still waiting for my toe to recover. Meh

Kotlin & JVM

• You know you work around Java when your ORM is paid. Irony aside, other open source communities battle with sustainability of its development for years where this looks like a working and sustainable effort, except for the bus factor
• After setting up an easy project with a few JVM version conflict, I will never make this joke again
• I remember why I disliked Java ecosystem so much (back in the days of version 1.5): more than elsewhere, the error is accompanied by a long stack trace that ends with “GenericSomethingAbstractFactoryError: Some XML somewhere else configured dependency injection badly, check logs”. The ecosystem improved somewhat, but there is still a way to go

Recommended Readings From This Week

• Stripe’s payments APIs: the first ten years: Excellent case study of a domain and contract evolution
• What comes after smartphones?: “There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.”
• Secrets Of The Great Families: OK, this connects a dot or two and explains a thing or two about an investor into our ex-startup. And I think there is quite a bit to the hero license. Less people try than you think
• Individuals matter: Dan Luu on abstracted and quantifiable decision making
• NFT games are fun. Filing taxes afterward is a nightmare.: When in-game events have tax implications, isn’t it a metaverse already?
• The Secret of Simple Code: The correct abstractions
• New mRNA anti-tick vaccine may protect from more than just Lyme disease: As a Lyme survivor, I say YESSSS

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1. 8 am meetings may not cause you to travel time zones, but they do that to me ↩︎

2. I, for one, am disappointed by WHO’s choice to skip the Greek ν (“nu”) in naming the variants. We already nicknamed it “ňuňu” in Czech and it’s a shame for such a nick to go in vain ↩︎