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| title | date | description | url | type | mp-syndicate-to | tags | |||||
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| Weeknote 18-24 Sept | 2023-09-24T19:22:17+01:00 | short summary | /2023/9/24/weeknote-18-24-sept | posts |
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Another week has flown by and September is coming to an end. Autumn, incidentally, my favourite season, is here. As ever, September is a monumentally busy month at work as clients and colleagues alike come back from summer holidays. It's also the time of year when I like to kickstart personal projects and chores around the house.
Due to some bad timing with colleague holidays this week, I spent some time doing some front-line data science work and I welcomed the opportunity to get my hands dirty and reflected on how python package management is still nightmarish in 2023. I think my own advice from a couple of years back is still pretty relevant.
As we approach the end of the third quarter, it's also time to review what we did over the summer amidst all the disruption of pretty much doubling the size of our team. The next quarter is going to probably be about building and embedding scalable ways of working into the team so that we can really ramp up the number of clients we can look after. I've been digging around in the platform, attempting to uncover some metrics around processing throughput and hopefully start to drive them up. In order to do this, I've been playing with different types of clustered indices in MySQL which was good fun.
It's been a pretty busy week on the home front with various extraordinary chores going on: dentist visits, trips to the garage with the car and a plumber visiting to do some work on our central heating. The combination of work and home tasks has felt a little overwhelming at times and I've ended up asleep on the sofa by 9pm a couple of nights.
While I wait for an Nvidia Linux driver fix so that I can run Starfield, I've been playing my way through Mass Effect Legendary Edition. I finished the first game last week and I've been putting a few hours into ME2 during evenings this week. I'm also reading Rimworld by Larry Niven which I've noticed has some pretty bad misogynistic stuff in it that's put me off a little bit.
Last week I purchased a new router with the intention of installing and running OpenWRT on it. I managed to flash the device but when I ran a speedtest, I noticed I was only getting 300 MBPs on our 1 GBPS home internet (first world problems I know). After some reading, it turns out that OpenWRT doesn't seem to have hardware support for some of the network kit in the router, so it was CPU throttling the connection. I ended up spending some time reflashing the stock firmware onto the router. The ASUS firmware is reasonably good out of the box anyway. It supports all the standard port forwarding I need for my home server plus DynDNS and a VPN client (so I can force all traffic on my home network to run via a VPN if I want to).
Today we spent some time decluttering my home office. It's needed a good tidy for a few months so it was nice to finally get around to spending some time doing that. I did find a huge number of blank paper journals and notebooks that I've yet to fill. I think I may have a slight addiction...
Next Week
I've got another busy September week coming up with a company retreat, an appearance at our board meeting and a visit to my parents in Shropshire next weekend.
I am aiming to try to keep up more consistent journaling practice this coming week.