My second week off work is coming to an end. I’m not sad; actually yesterday I started missing work. Thanks to my business partner manning the fort, I got to really switch off and recharge my batteries. Last week, my family and I spent a few days at a Slieve Aughty, an eco-friendly equestrian and activity leisure centre near Galway. Mere minutes before leaving, my daughter broke her arm; not by falling off a horse but by jumping off a swing. She wears her cast like a badge of honour, so it’s all good.

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Discord has become a popular community platform far beyond gamers. Recently, the number of Discord servers I’ve joined has grown quite a bit. I have whole folders full of Discord servers grouped by Live Coders, Mechanical Keyboards, World of Warcraft, and application software support.

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For about a year, we’ve been cleaning up the Chef Infra code for freistilbox to make updating dependencies, Chef versions and even operating systems easier. It’s a lot of work because our early code is functional but not pretty. There have been many instances of “we didn’t know better”, and that’s what refactoring is for. But I also came to realise that we were missing a critical fact: Common software engineering principles and practices apply to infrastructure code like they do to any other type of code.

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I do my work using keyboards and I make music using keyboards. This clever web application brings it all together.

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For decades, I’ve lived a sheltered life as a person whom MLK describes as

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Pick any guide on remote work (oh, there are so many…) and it’ll tell you that communication is essential when you work in a distributed team. The problem is that it’s not obvious where exactly the centre of balance is between sharing too little and sharing too much. That’s why I’ve created a framework that uses a simple acronym to remind you of good opportunities to keep your distributed team in the loop.

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Back in Azeroth I will certainly not remember the current World of Warcraft expansion “Battle for Azeroth” as my favourite one. After months of frustration with its storytelling, I stopped playing in February. I didn’t expect my exodus to last only three months, but I also didn’t anticipate that I’d be stuck at home for an eternity. So this week, I converted some of my in-game gold into play time and took my Tauren druid out of cold storage. With lowered expectations.

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GMK Night Runner, one of a few keycap sets I ordered last year, finally arrived, completing my cyberpunk-themed keyboard. The case is a Keyboardbelle Nouvelle limited edition. I used tactile T1 switches with 67g springs, lubed with Tribosys 3204. They’re mounted in a carbon-fibre plate over a hot-swap HS60 PCB.

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“Scheduling is an invaluable tool for habit formation: it helps to eliminate decision making; it helps us make the most of our limited self-command; it helps us fight procrastination. Most important, perhaps, the Strategy of Scheduling helps us make time for the things that are most important to us. How we schedule our days is how we spend our lives.” (Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before)

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So we whittle the group of candidates down aggressively first. This means judging their cover letter and, to a far lesser extent, their resume.

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