It's been a good week.
My new weeknotes system (see below) seems to militate against observing connections between my various interests, but weirdly I think I'd have missed these correspondences otherwise.
Oligarchy (private boarding school eating disorders), Rich Girl, keto dieting and fasting… clear thematic links there!
Agile terminology
Despite being a short week (Monday to Thursday) it was kind of weird.
We had a retro in which I said my piece about avoiding using agile terminology if we're not going to adhere to the practices in the appropriate ways and was basically pooh-poohed. It seems that nobody but me thinks it matters if we name things in literally wrong and misleading ways. They don't care what things are called… and yet they're not pepared to adjust them slightly on my account. I got vexed and published an internal blog post venting my frustration.
I had back-to-back meetings, work in between and I was doing a good job of managing it all, but was feeling pissed off. So when the "Fun Session" rolled around I sacked it off, saying "Sorry, not for me" and leaving the Teams channel.
I wasn't sure how that would be received, but I subsequently presented a showcase on some of recent dev work and I smashed it, so that earned me back some credit I reckon.
Reading: Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas
'Oligarchy' by Scarlett Thomas is the first book for quite a while that I've finished without a struggle. Maybe finished at all?!
I've always enjoyed her prose and themes and I'm enjoying catching up with her books after a couple of decades. I re-read 'Our Tragic Universe' and 'The End of Mr Y' last year and realised they'd been more impactful on me than I'd given them credit for at the time.
I'm not here to do a full book review, but I liked 'Oligarchy' a lot. It has a very distinct atmosphere that borders on the Ballardian.
Earworm: Rich Girl by Hall & Oates
This song has been in my head constantly since I heard Katie Tupper singing it in this youtube short.
That led me to a video of the original which is awesome and, inevitably, to more than one guitar tutorial.
Apparently this is a really famous song that everyone knows, but I honestly don't think I've ever heard it before this week!
Lifestyle: Opposite extremes
I've been meaning to sort out my diet and whatnot for a long time now. Other than a few half-hearted attempts, I don't think I've demonstrated any real self-control since before Christmas.
The Gigha camping trip, with its snacks and booze and indigestion, was the debauch I needed to get the pendulum swinging the other way, and boy has it swung.
Since I got back I've been off alcohol, obviously, but somehow I've also ended up starting a ketogenic diet with intermittent fasting, drinking lemon water with apple cider vinegar.
For some reason this seems a lot easier to me than restricting calories. The fasting, especially, feels very natural, like the way I used to eat when I was younger (though I never thought of it as "fasting"!).
I've also been for two runs.
So, we'll see how it goes.
Dev: Taggregation
I'm pretty pleased with myself right now. I suddenly had the idea to write separate posts on whatever subjects … diet, work, books, music … and then compile them together to form my weeknotes.
I tend to compartmentalise into sections like this anyway, so the outcome should be similar, but this system will also allow themes to be browsed in isolation, without being cross-contaminated with other topics.
It was easy enough to implement in 11ty:
- Add a tag (
taggregate) to the category posts. - Add year and week frontmatter properties to the weeknote post and category posts.
- Make a new template extending the
bloglayout. It contains a block that iterated overcollections.taggregateand, if the year and date match the current post's frontmatter, the content is rendered.
One issue I'm already aware of is that this limits my ability to use hierarchical headings within sections: I can't know if the starting point is an h1 in a single post, or an h2 in a weeknotes post. There are various ways around this, but I'm only going to think about those if they really become necessary. For now I'll just follow the content-wise restriction of having short posts with a flat structure.