Week Notes 20#15

Another week of lockdown, ending in Easter:

• From Wednesday was the start of the Project Iteration (PI) planning at work, so Monday/Tuesday was trying to close everything off, which didn't quite happen - code review + dependencies on other teams for the shared library
  • Planning was alright, although I spent most of Wednesday/Thursday speaking, which I wasn't expecting - there were only 2-3 of us in the team actually driving any of the conversations, despite being ~11 people on the team. Not ideal, and a reminder that although we've been making good strides to getting agency better within the team, it still doesn't help when the whole team is in a meeting together, especially when folks can much more easily get distracted, because they're on their laptops (myself included). That being said, we're in the middle of unprecedented times, and it's really unlikely that everyone is in their best mental state, so we'll chalk it down to that!
  • Given planning doesn't always require me to be able to see what's on the screen, I took the chance to walk around while in meetings, which helped
  • Mostly happy with planning on the whole, as we got through a fair bit
• Motivation returned - after a few weeks of not really being engaged in side projects, I've got a bit more motivation back and I've had things to dive into. For instance, I spent a fair bit of the weekend working on my Micropub edit functionality:
  • While working on it, I've noticed/fixed separate pieces of work in separate Merge Requests, such as restricting scopes a little better, and providing Micropub-specific exceptions
  • While working on Micropub exceptions, I spent Sunday morning trying to work around Micropub expecting a non-OAuth2 HTTP status code for insufficient_scope, before Aaron Parecki mentioned we could just amend the spec
  • Hoping to have it all ready for release before the Easter weekend is done!
• Wrote a few blog posts this week, which felt good - it was nice to have things I felt motivated to write about - not that my content backlog isn't small
• My hayfever has decided to flare up this week - which doesn't usually get me very bad - so there's been a bit more snuffles/sneezing than I'd have preferred
• Did my first release of Granary as an official Open Source maintainer!
• One day we went out for a walk and Morph walked out the front door with us, and proceeded to follow us down the road, hiding under cars as he went - was pretty cute
• Anna bought Animal Crossing, which arrived yesterday, and she's been enjoying since
• Bought an M.2 Bluetooth/WiFi card, and when trying to install it realised I'm a bit of an idiot - although my motherboard supports M.2, it's only specific (SSD) configurations - TIL that there are different versions! But now I think I need to find a way to return it amidst the pandemic
• Observed that this week, despite joining our team coffee socials, I've not really been participating, but instead just having folks on in the background while doing other work
• Shared with the team what I'd been working on the previous week production-facing, and hoping to share with some other folks soon
• During the weeks we've not been using eyemasks to sleep, instead allowing the natural light / Hue wake up lights to wake us up. I noticed when I get to use my eyemask I'm excited because it means it's a lie in day!
• Watched Man on a Ledge
• Participated in The Big Quiz for Cancer Research UK - Live! which was alright - although network issues didn't help, and as a family we managed to get 38.5/52
• Had a reasonable first fully-remote PHPMiNDS, in which we had a lot of non-Nottingham folks attend
• Bought a UltraSharp 27 4K USB-C Monitor: U2720Q to replace my second monitor, which is a QNIX QX2710 which I've been using with my work laptop given my primary monitor doesn't seem to work. As this new one is USB-C, it'll work really easily with the work Mac, as it's USB-C. Also, as I'm spending a lot of time at home, it makes sense to have a good setup!
• Mum received her NHS letter about staying safe for the next 12 weeks - it's for the best, and although a bit disheartening, they've got a lovely house, a great garden, and are a lot better off than others are, so it's going to not be as bad as we think
• Started to get involved with Tech Nottingham's Folding@Home team, but have had issues with it rebooting my desktop so haven't had it running on there much, but I do have it on the NAS