Brighton Ruby was really good. I particularly enjoyed Elena , Craig and Tekin ’s talks. But the whole programme was great and I had to chance to catch up with old friends too. I even managed to get there and back more-or-less on time despite the heat. My air-conditioned room at Drakes Hotel was very welcome. I got up early on the morning of the conference for a swim at Sea Lanes . A slow and…
I enjoyed a day out in Cambridge with my Go Free Range colleagues on Wednesday. We had a coffee at Bould Brothers , a ploughmans at The Free Press and then a walk along the river to The Plough where we watched some of the May Bumps . I was struck by Orchard Street as we walked past and took a quick photo. I made a sketch from the photo the next day. I’ve been following the drawabox drawing lessons…
I went to Piehouse in Deptford on Thursday for an event about music co-operatives organised by academics from Goldsmith, Leeds and Huddersfield Universities. I was representing jam.coop , the online record store we’ve been building as a side project. I also met some lovely creative folks including (those that I have URLs for) Roberta and LLK from Mirlo , Ella from PVA , Finn from grassroots events…
A busy few weeks We had a good, relaxing holiday over half-term. The grandparents looked after the boys while A- and I had a short break at Nirvana Spa . It’s the best spa I’ve been to - lots of hot water, strong jets and a good sauna. We then travelled to the Welsh border to meet friends for a few nights. We stayed in the same place we did last year - it has plenty of space for the kids to play…
On Saturday at the last minute I decided to go to The Sheephaven Bay in Camden to watch the Rochdale vs York title decider. I remembered that York City South meet there for televised games and was amazed to see around 200-300 York fans packed in for the game. York needed a draw or better to secure promotion back to the Football League. Rochdale needed to win. After 90 tense minutes the game ended…
We took N- and F- down to Great Ormond Street Hopsital for their regular but infrequent (once every couple of years) screening for the genetic heart condition they may have inherited from me. Everything went very smoothly and there were no concerns. The boys were brave as they were (gently) poked and prodded. While some friends took N- to Go Ape at Alexandra Palace for a birthday party I got some…
We had a good long-weekend in Hastings over Easter. The Battle of Hastings English Heritage site was a lot of fun and captivated the kids’ imaginations. They particularly enjoyed the kid-friendly audio guide, picking up armour and weapons in the visitor centre and charging up the hill of the battlefield wielding wooden swords. We also visited St Leonards-on-Sea and ate excellent bagels at Sleeper…
I missed a couple of these so here’s some edited (by my poor memory) highlights of the last few weeks. I had a great trip up to York for the weekend. My brother and a group of friends have turned it into an annual ritual now - the focus being a York City home game. This year we saw City beat Brackley Town 4-0 in what is turning out to be a real battle for automatic promotion . While in York I…
I’ve been waiting for the plum tree in our garden to bloom since we moved in last year. This week it did. I went to see York City play away at Boreham Wood on Tuesday evening. As is customary when I attend a game, we lost. In this case also ending a 24-game unbeaten streak. On the plus side I got to spend some quality time with my oldest friend. I spent most of the day at Royal Brompton on…
I spent Thursday lunchtime doing some phone banking to help get the (Green) vote out in the Gorton and Denton by-election . It was inspiring to see so many people involved and fantastic to wake up on Friday to news of a successful result. While F- was at music centre on Saturday I went along to the start of the Green Party “day of action” - a campaigning event across Islington for the upcoming…
Sprinkles of good news (the arrest of “Prince” Andrew, the sort-of-overturning of the palestine action proscription) this week to compliment the improving weather and early signs of spring. I went to my first Green Party meeting on Wednesday night after joing up last year. It was a more serious debate than I’d expected (and apparently this is somewhat unusual) but the high spirits and diversity of…
For the first time in ages I went for lunch and came out feeling well-fed and not ripped off. So many places seem to be cutting quality and putting prices up. Kami in Kentish Town served up a big bowl of rice, lots of crispy tempura, a tasty sesame salad and miso soup for an entirely-reasonable-for-2026 £15. We then took the kids to the Tate Modern and spent a good couple of hours in the Uniqlo…
I was completely wiped out on Tuesday and Wednesday, having contracted whatever lurgy F- had had the previous Friday. Oddly, on Thursday I felt better than I have for a long time, leaping out of bed full of energy. I spent some time at the weekend making an Old West-style building out of bits of cardboard. I’m not really sure why, but I found it very relaxing and it took me to a similar place as…
A- arrived home safely. We were all very happy to see her and decided to travel to Heathrow to meet her in arrivals. Although the giant orange nonce’s attentions seem to have drifted from South America for a little while, having her home and safe reduced my 😬 a fair amount. Harry Hill’s new /podscarf/ with Stewart Lee was an unexpected joy. I particularly appreciated the 15 minute serious…
A- was away all week, so there’s been even more routine (getting kids to school, home, doing chores) than usual. We’ve got a leaky gutter that’s causing water to seep through the brickwork. As we live in a fairly high building we first need scaffolders to construct safe platforms for the roofers to do their work. I spent a couple of days letting them in and out and upping my swearing game to fit…
A- left for Colombia on Wednesday evening. I’m gritting my teeth because of that-part-of-the-world events but I’m really happy she’ll be able to spend time with her parents for their golden wedding anniversary. Not unrelated to this change in routine, I managed to lock myself out. Fortunately our kind downstairs neighbours kept the kids warm and entertained while 1st Metro Locksmiths performed…
Moving Moving house took up a good chunk of the first half of 2025. We’d decided to keep our kids at the same primary school - they’re happy there, it’s great - and look for a new place within a sensible journey. We found a larger, older place in Archway. It’s a short overground train ride away from the school. We completed at the end of March. We came to a great arrangement with the person who…
Dear David, Ruby has brought me immense joy during my life and I’ve made many close friends thanks to a shared love of the language. Rails, thanks to the contributions of you and hundreds of others, has allowed me to experience that joy at work too. However, I can’t describe how disappointed I was to read your recent blog post “ As I remember London ”. I remember when you visited the London Ruby…
A bunch of single-page Web Audio examples A collection of single-page web audio examples of drum synthesis, sampling, buffer manipulation, envelopes, audio worklets and more. Author: Felix Roos
No Exceptions Excellent advice to keep on top of exceptions in production: I have absolutely no tolerance for exceptions in production. Your error monitoring system should hit Inbox Zero every day. No exceptions. Like flossing my teeth, it’s advice that I know is right but find it really hard to do every day. There’s the exceptions raised by code I’ve written for a client, the exceptions raised by…
Quoting Jason Gorman Most managers see teams as vehicles for delivering software. This misses the bigger picture. The value of any iteration of the software is ephemeral, and the code itself is a liability: it has negative value. What has far more value over the lifetime of a software product or system is the capability of the dev team to keep hitting a moving target - to rapidly, reliably and…
The composer still making music four years after his death Under a magnifying lens sit two white blobs, like a tiny pair of jellyfish. Together, they form the lab-grown “mini-brain” of the late US musician Alvin Lucier – composing a posthumous score in real time. Artists grow stem cells taken from Alvin Lucier and incorporate it into an artwork. There’s always a lot of “AI will destroy us all”…
Photographs of Old Japan These pictures, the work of several different photographers,1 were assembled by a pair of collectors named Henry and Nancy Rosin. They were originally shot in black and white, then hand-coloured by artists — a technique common at the time. All were taken between the years 1860-1900, meaning the earliest of them just predates the Meiji Restoration, when the last shōgun…
Emacs Lisp Elements The fun part is how you go about writing the code. There are no duties you have to conform with. None! You program for the sake of programming. It is a recreational activity that expands your horizons.
CSS Naked Day The idea behind CSS Naked Day is to promote web standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of HTML, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good old play on words. In the words of 2006, it’s time to show off your <body> for what it really is. On or around April 9th a little bit of code disables CSS on our co-op’s website . The web, and the world, has…
Comradery - co-op run Patreon alternative Comradery is a digital platform where creators can receive monthly payments from supporters, and optionally give those supporters exclusive access to posts and media. What makes Comradery different is we are a worker cooperative democratically owned and controlled equally by all the creators in our organization (that means you!). Interesting Patreon-like…
Against the Cozy Web The latter annoys me: the assumption that the internet is a terrible place, a dark forest where all the good people and spirits have left the public sphere and are now hiding in private, cozy spaces. This is the first time I’ve heard the phrase “the cozy web” but Kristoffer Tjalve (of the excellent Naive Weekly blog/newsletter) hits a nerve. I’m a long-time believer in the…
DIY Synths Database Curated collection of 75 DIY-friendly hardware synthesizers and related standalone musical equipment. All open source. Mike Sannikov has put together this directory / gallery of DIY synth projects. Projects must be open source, have schematics and a video demonstration. This means the directory looks great and rewards exploring. I really like these curated collections - see…
Automated Visual Regression Testing With Playwright Now that we have a better idea of the requirements, it’s time for internal CSS refactoring … However … I needed something to guard against visual regressions while refactoring. I’ve been considering a similar strategy on my current project. I don’t feel that my implementation of designs is good enough that there’s a “right” answer that I can rely…
For Christmas 2023 I bought A- some more rollerskating lessons. On the first lesson back in 2024 she fell and broke her leg in two places. This had a pretty big impact on the first half of 2024! The surgery went well and she was able to make it home to us after a week in hospital. As soon as her Mum heard she flew over to us and stayed for several weeks. We were extremely grateful for this as…
Dealing with my heart condition (obstructive hypotrophic cardiomyopathy) has been a big part of my year. I was invited to take part in a randomised controlled trial of a new medicine. This has involved frequent trips to Royal Brompton hospital in Chelsea where I’ve been looked after by a wonderful and talented team of nurses, doctors and researchers. The trial itself was double blinded so we’ll…
We had a good Easter weekend visiting my parents. Is it possible to eat too much chocolate? The answer is yes. Easter Monday was my birthday but as that largely involved driving back to London, A- and I took the day off on Tuesday and went for a mooch around Soho. Shopping, and eating tasty snacks at The Colombian Coffee Company . Normal service resumed on Wednesday with James, Chris and I…
I spent most of the day on Monday at Royal Brompton hospital receiving my first dose of a new medicine/placebo. I’m taking part in a stage three clinical trial of a new drug for treating obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It was an uneventful and slightly drawn out day that culminated in me taking 4 tiny white pills that may, or may not, be the drug. I spent most of the rest of the week…
I started a new work project properly this week. We’re back at the Government Digital Service working on the publishing platform. It’s been really fun meeting the current developers and doing a little bit of pairing. Their docker based development environment made getting everything running locally fairly painless. I’m also enjoying having 2-factor authentication via a Yubikey hardware key. When I…
A fairly quiet week at work as we wait for a large, new project to start. I’m still providing some support/mentoring/coaching to data people with sports governing bodies so spent some time preparing to talk to England Netball about sample sizes and survey data. N-‘s school was closed for two days due to NEU strike action (✊), and A- agreed to look after him this time, so I took F- on his usual…
We needed a “quick” prototype to test with some research participants this week. I wasn’t sure what technology to use - I’ve been favouring static stites with a bit of JavaScript lately, but after staring at the wireframes for a bit and asking #roos for some reckons I decided I’d be better off building some of the trickier parts (persistance, authentication) rather than trying to fake them out. I…
I travelled to Glasgow this week for a gathering of the Co-operative Technologists network. It was a restorative and fun couple of days. As well as hanging out with some old and new friends I also spent some time writing a couple of how to guides to get some things out of our collective brains and onto paper. I worked with some colleagues to form a proposal to trial hiring a coordinator for the…
This week’s Song Exploder podcast about Different Trains by Steve Reich was wonderful. Hrishikesh Hirway interviews Reich about the 1st movement “America, before the war”. I enjoyed the fun technical details (early use of samplers and “more overdubs than The Beatles”) of course, but Reich’s recollections of his childhood travels between the East and West coast, his descriptions of the melodic…
The war in Ukraine continues to depress and morbidly grip me in equal measure. I feel as though everything else is pointless while at the same time I want to grab hold of any joy in daily normality and not let go. F-‘s nursery was closed on Thursday so I took him to the zoo. We laughed, made animal noises and chased each other around.
Things have been broadly uneventful for a bit, and to be honest, it can continue for a while. After living with the constant threat of a school closing, a kid getting COVID, us getting COVID or some plans being cancelled because of COVID, it’s been nice to have a bit of time where everything has settled into a bit of routine. We haven’t had much work on in the last week so I’ve been busy trying to…
A fairly quiet week work-wise, which was helpful given that N-‘s after-school club is still closed. We thought we had arranged work for the next 3 months, but unfortunately it’s been scaled back to 2 weeks. Still, it’ll be good to get stuck into something. I enjoyed revisiting old projects and writing supporting evidence for our R&D tax credits claim, it felt good to reflect on what we’d achieved…
It’s fair to say that adjusting back to life in London this week has been pretty hard. N-‘s after school club closed on his first day back for two weeks (due to too many cases of Covid in his year), so we’ve had to adjust our working arrangements already. F- made it through his first week back at nursery, but became ill on Friday afternoon. A LFT says its not Covid, so hopefully just teething or…
We arrived home. The trip to Barranquilla was relaxing, we had an impromptu extra night in the city itself because we missed our flight back to Bogotá (3am != 3pm, for reference). The last few days in Bogotá were fun, N- had a “sleep over” at his cousin’s house, and we caught up with the extended family a bit. We’d arranged an evening out with one of A-‘s school friends but unfortunately they’d…
We’ve travelled to Barranquilla for a few days by the sea. It’s around an hour flight from Bogotá and F- fell asleep before we took off and woke up after we’d landed. We’re staying in a small resort that seems to specialise in watersports. I’ll know more when I’ve had chance to explore tomorrow. We saw New Year in at my brother and sister in-laws house, a few extended family joined us too. It was…
We spent Christmas week in Villa de Leyva a beautiful old town about 3 hours drive from Bogotá. We rented a house on the edge of the town, and the boys loved playing on the provided trampoline with anyone who would join them. The Parque Gondava dinosaur park was a hit with the kids. Lots of life-size model dinosaurs spread around a lake. Including an animatronic T-rex and a Brachiosaurus you could…
Altitude sickness hit me harder than it has done in the past this week. I started to feel more normal today, a week after we arrived in Bogotá (2,640m). The kids took a few days to adjust to the time zone change too, meaning some broken nights sleep and early starts. But some bright, sunny weather helped a lot with the jetlag. My brother-in-law’s family have a new dog. A beautiful Australian…
We arrived in Colombia for a family visit. It took around 24 hours door-to-door yesterday (with a 4am start). To be honest, I’ve been dreading the journey, particularly because F- is at the age where being stuck anywhere for too long drives him a bit mad. I’m not going to say it was an easy journey, but the two boys were great . The only time F- cried was when he couldn’t get his big plastic…
We went on a suprisingly smooth Sunday train ride to Chertsey today to meet some friends for a “mini Christmas” before we (hopefully) travel to Colombia for Christmas next weekend. The pub we chose met the criteria of being roughly equidistant from the three families, having more than one choice of veggie/vegan food and having a garden for the kids to play in. The log fire and Christmas tree was a…
N- finished his second full week at his new school. It’s been a really big change for him and us, but he’s settling in well and (as far as I can tell from his minimal dispatches) enjoying it. We’re still not into a routine because the drop off and pick up times are very different to before. Also F- returned to nursery, got ill and, yada-yada-yada (cf. every previous f–king weeknote). I took…
I’ve been on holiday for the last two weeks. First a week in Norfolk and then a week with my parents in Berkshire. We arrived in Norwich too early to check in to our accomodation. Fortunately everyone’s favourite plaster cast dinosaur Dippy was visiting Norwich cathedral so we paid it a visit. Dippy’s visit meant that the city also had a Meet the T-rex trail, and N- loved walking around the city…