Man, it's amazing how little idea I have of the week when it comes to summarise it.
Work
Last week was kind of intense; resourcing issues meant we had a bit of a crunch at the end of the week to get this horrendous jquery-driven form updated in line with new legislation. The BE engineer and I chastised each other for working out of hours, but the work got done.
Obviously that wasn't the end of it: requirements kept changing and bugs were found, but they were reasonably straightforward to deal with. So I had a relatively chilled couple of days at the start of the week before the next sprint's ceremonies began.
- Started using Volta to manage node versions
- ...and started a Confluence page to document such tooling decisions.
- Did a bit of a spike on the org site ahead of the upcoming branding alignment.
- Wrote up a bunch of ideas that aren't quite blog posts yet, but will be.
- Got my FED colleague caught up on what's been happening while he was on paternity leave.
- Organised some stuff with my QA colleague who's leaving at the end of the month.
I also started prepping for the upcoming sprint, which was hard because we're going into it with very little structure. The idea is that we have a outcome-driven objective that we can measure with user-testing, and the team's got carte blanche to come up with solutions.
It's cool and for-real-agile in that way that feels slightly uncomfortable. There's literally zero development work in the sprint, so apart from contributions to the design process D and I will be free to pull stuff from the top of the backlog, or shape up work that's in the pipeline or whatever. I'm really keen to make this a success, so I'll be actively prioriting things next week.
Food
I never thought it would happen, but I started getting sick of poke bowls and began to crave things like greasy fish suppers, bread and meat. This co-incides with the change in the seasons towards Autumn I suppose. I did well, I think, by maing potato rostis with fried eggs and making sweetcorn fritters for the first time in a long time.
Sushi rice was still on the agenda in the form of chicken katsu curry. I followed this recipe and it was... fine? I didn't get stressed out making it like I used to because I knew exactly what I was doing with the rice, and using chicken breasts instead of thighs is much less hassle because their big single pieces like schnitzels. It was just that the sauce didn't quite hit the spot, and I'm not sure why. It didn't lack heat, but some kind of intensity of flavour? I dunno. It'll do as by baseline recipe, but I'll search around for ways to refine it. Maybe even sticking a cube or two of a pre-made curry sauce would be enough to punch it up a bit.
Sweetcorn fritters and dal are back on the menu after a rest due to overexposure. Both kids are now fans, it seems, of the fritters at least, and they hotly deny ever having turned their noses up at it. I even got a "Yum" from R when I told her what we were having after school.
Activities
- Mist painted the small bedroom ahead of it being decorated
- Nancy visiting this weekend
- We went to rollerstop on Friday night - first time since I fell on my knee a fortnight back
- Lots of RG35XX tinkering - I got refunded for it and didn't have to return it so I'm desperately trying to find some firmware that doesn't randomly crash.
- Sprung for Protonmail and a custom email domain. Trying to shift into a non-google model if possible.
- Balmaha with the Owens Grace family.
These notes are really unfocused and took too long to write.
END