Oops I did it again - Lee Jarvis

Last week I published my first weeknotes post. Here I am again with week two shenanigans.

My daughter returned to nursery for the first time in almost six weeks and absolutely loved it. Very thankful that she enjoys it so much, and that they send us daily pictures of her activities. She also joined Rugby Tots and enjoyed it equally. We’re hoping to get her in to more hobbies over the next few months.

I finally got my wedding ring back from the jewellers after sending it off for resizing. When it returned the first time, it didn’t look at all like my ring. Turns out they’d removed (or perhaps not re-applied) the matt finish. I’m not sure how that goes unnoticed when they’d taken a very clear photograph of it before sending it off. It’s back now though after many months of not being able to wear it (after losing weight, I think).

I’m writing this post at 30 thousand feet above Greenland. Currently en route to Vancouver for the second time in 4 months. Looking forward to a week with the team. And eating lots and lots of poutine.

My Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones are holding up to the test of a screaming baby and I’m feeling for her and her parents, who are trying their absolute best to calm her down.

A few weeks ago whilst listening to the Cortex Podcast, I learned that Myke or Grey had an additional iPhone home screen for travel purposes and thought that might be a nice idea. Turns out it was! Here’s the Home Screen I created:

The Flighty widget (which I cleared to take the screenshot) contains information about the flight, including boarding times and gate details. Also whilst I generally detest all things Google, it supports offline maps which Apple Maps does not. I activated this screen a few days before travel and will turn it off when I’m back home.

I have — from time to time — an inexplicable desire to write code in low-level languages, and spent some time this week digging back in to Rust. I’ve used it for small things here and there, but I find some of the syntax a little nauseating and never really spent time learning things like Lifetime Annotations and understanding the ownership model. I worked through the Rustlings exercises and then solved a couple of basic Advent of Code challenges. It all went a lot smoother than expected, which is perhaps a sign that my brain is retaining some of this information, even if it feels a little overwhelming at times. I’d like to try and keep on top of it and have a couple of ideas for little side projects.

I re-learned about the Boop Mac App. Re-learned because I found out I already had it installed. One of those apps I need to be reminded to use. Recommended especially if you’re a weirdo like me and have a handful of custom scripts for doing this and that.

I finally found time to integrate a ViewComponent in to the work Rails app. I opened a PR for discussion and so far the responses are positive. I think we’re going to be adopting this and replacing some of our controller tests.

I re-watched this excellent Elixir/Erlang/BEAM video talk from Saša Jurić. It’s one of my favourite video talks and I highly recommend it, even if you don’t know Erlang/Elixir.

Media corner: After our Lord of the Rings trilogy watch last week, I watched the first Hobbit movie. It was good, if not quite as epic as the original movies.

I also watched The French Dispatch (artsy and beautiful, but a bit hollow otherwise) and The Unforgivable (meh).

Started reading Billy Summers by Stephen King. I find Stephen King books really easy to pick up and put down, which is exactly what I’m looking for at the moment. I wonder if there’s a better book website to link against; Goodreads seems a bit gross?