Week Notes 26#33

• The main thing this week has been GopherCon UK - an expensive week, and unfortunately not as good as previous years - but you can see my writeup for more info
  • On Tuesday night when I got in, I went over to Monohon Ramen which was nice
  • Met some nice folks and had some good chats
  • Went up to Smithfields Market to get a view of the eclipse, but as we didn't have glasses, didn't try and actually see it, but had the market obscuring it. Pretty cool experience, but better for folks who could see it safely!
  • Had at least one person who almost asked me verbatim about what my proposed talk would've been, if it was accepted 😅
  • A bit of delays on the way home didn't help after a busy few days 🥱
  • Recorded a Fallthrough episode with Kris and Matt when I got back on Friday, but feel that I shouldn't have tried to get it in after being at the conference - I was pretty exhausted and feel I was a significantly sub-par guest host, and lower energy than usual - but hopefully it sounds like a better episode than I felt it did during record 😅
  • After an extra early bed time on Friday night, I woke up very rested and back to normal 🥱
• Ate a lot of the samosas we brought back from Shayona 😋 They're so very hard to stop eating!
• Was a bit cheeky this week seeing that Dependabot still doesn't have support enabled for the GitHub Actions Lockfiles, so decided to ship it in a day 🚀
• My new Pixel Watch 4 came, and it's very nice!
  • I'm liking how colourful it is in comparison - as well as with my watch face being a lot cooler
  • Yes, I could've waited a few days and got it cheaper and/or got the new one, but 🤷🏼
  • The great battery life has also meant I've found that I've been able to take more advantage of the sleep tracking functionality - it's been really interesting finding that some of the days I've felt I didn't sleep so well, the data's telling me I did!
• It's been a good week for personal software:
  • I have a number of personal projects that I want done, but don't necessarily have the time to sit down and do them, which is a shame. Instead of letting them weigh on me significantly, I've decided to put my Claude for Open Source (Claude Max) subscription to use, and try and smash them out while I have incredibly subsidised access
  • It meant that I spent some time at the conference with Claude ticking away in the background on:
    • Improvements to my site's analytics monitoring, so I now get push notifications when certain traffic increases appear
    • A rewrite of my Micropub server, going into Go (and tackling some future enhancements that again, I'd love to do, but never have/prioritise the time on top of all the other things I have to do!)
    • I've finally cleaned up my editor and:
      • Migrated from an old Architect Framework deployment to a Go+HTMX backend
      • Made it public (as I've been meaning to for several years)
      • Tidied up the colour scheme, made it a little bit more readable, and a sticky "Post it" button
      • Added a few useful features I've wanted for a while
    • Adding a frontend with search to books-mf2
    • Getting renovate-graph updated to the latest major version of Renovate, and in a better place to get weekly updates - looking forward to confirming it works right tomorrow
  • I also enjoyed having "remote control" access, so while I was at breakfast I could help answer/approve things that Claude on my laptop was continuing to investigate
• Almost finished my Canada writeup - thanks to a productive train journey down to London - but it's not quite there
• I've got my thoughts right in my head for a blog post I'm going to try and get out tomorrow about why I still focus a lot of my time on hand-writing my commit messages
• While cooking a roast chicken last night, it turns out it's been so long since I've cooked (about a week) that I forgot which oven was turned on, and wasted an hour with the chicken not being cooked 😅
• Had a nice walk at Gravelly Hollow with Carol and Alan
• With Rakki Rakkas having a holiday for a couple of weeks, we got an extra takeaway to tide us over - which was 😋
• The fires around the UK are absolutely awful, and there were some incredibly terrifying videos of folks in the West Midlands fleeing the flames that have made it pretty unsettling

Played:

• Kingshot (as usual)
  • Another good KvK (16th in Prep, 110th in Battle), and lots of upgrades
• Apex Legends

Reading:

• Leviathan Falls

Watched:

• Veep (Season 6)
• Saturday Night Live
• The Expanse (Season 5)
• Unacceptable (Season 1)
• Enola Holmes (2020)
• Enola Holmes 2 (2022)
• Enola Holmes 3 (2026)
• Maduk @ Liquicity Festival 2026
• Koven @ Liquicity Festival 2026