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As you will know from resubscribing to this fledgling envelope of raw, unfiltered brain matter, I have abandoned Tiny Letter. What I hadn’t realised is that Tiny Letter is now owned by MailChimp and employs the use of tracking pixels in its mailshots. This is probably fine and #notAllTrackingPixels etc., but I don’t really trust MailChimp as they are an American private equity firm. Thus they aren’t really regulated in any meaningful way and I have no idea whatsoever what information they’re pulling out of those emails. Instead. I’ve opted for a self-hosted open source alternative called ListMonk. At least then I know what goes inside the sausage, as I can read the source code. I imagine most of you don’t care, but privacy stuff bothers me. Anyhoo, on with the nonsense…

At the end of this week, Claire, Marlowe, and I will be escaping from our plague prison from whence we shall fly northwards unto the Lake District for a week of no laptops, Slack, emails, Terraform, merge requests, or Surrey drivers. Just fells, lakes, books and relaxing. The weather is most likely going to be abysmal looking at the long range forecast. I don’t even care. We haven’t been away since October, when dad died, and I’ll just be glad to get away to somewhere other than here for a while. The big downside of working from home during the pandemic is that I walk past the office upwards of twenty times a day. There’s a very slight magnetic pull, to ‘just check Slack’, or finish off a task or whatever. Only slight, but it slowly erodes your soul like the incessant drip of water onto limestone. There are more things I could do to keep work and life separate, and I shall probably try and do so as working from home becomes the standard. All in all though, I’ve really enjoyed doing so for the last four months. The commute is fourteen steps from bed, and the people I share an office with are pretty cool as well. We’ve even got an office dog!

One thing that’s been really bothering me as we transition from lockdown into ignoring-there-was-ever-a-virus-and-pushing-people-into-dangerous-situations-in-the-pursuit-of-profit, is the resurgence of the traffic. When we first got banged up, back in March, the air drifting in through the office window was gloriously fresh, blowing across the river and the meadow opposite. Now it’s back to diesel and petrol fumes, with a chaser of rubber particulates as people fly down our road at fifty in a thirty zone. It’s depressing. This weekend in particular has seemed very busy, with the usual tailbacks on the M25, a symptom of the utter lack of driving competence south of Oxford, and the utter lack of concern from the local police forces. I miss the fresh air and the quiet. Maybe the tectonic shift towards remote working will mean we can move somewhere nice, and still get a decent salary instead of having to hang off London ‘because that’s where the jobs are’. The balance of tech jobs in the UK are obscenely skewed towards the south, despite it generally being an industry in which one can literally work from anywhere. I guess we’ll catch up to the pioneers one day.

The upshot of all this is that Claire and I are just bone tired. Utterly exhausted right down to the soul. Where I imagined saving an extra two hours a day by not commuting, I would be able to spend more time relaxing, it just hasn’t worked out that way. We’ve definitely been getting more sleep, but if anything, I’m very guilty of working more. I don’t think we realised how close we are to burn out. I’m thankful that we’re lucky enough to be able to go away. I know a lot of people who aren’t.

Meanwhile, the government continues to play poker poorly with our health and rushes at re-opening everything without caution and against the advice of professionals. Our mop-mantled Prime Moron is now even declaiming “it’ll be over by Christmas”, in another sickening hark back to that wartime spirit that only a few dwindling humans vaguely remember.

I’ve never seen such a useless bunch of over-promoted, self-serving, talent-devoid, lizard people collected together in a single group before in my life, and I worked for fifteen years in retail IT.

God help us all.

Reading⌗

This month I’ve mostly been reading Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet. It’s a management text on basically encouraging your subordinates to be leaders themselves, and make decisions. I like the message, though the presentation – based on his experience as a nuclear submarine commander in the US Navy – is very cheesy, and as expected, very jingoistic at times. It’s one of those books where, for those that are likely to read it, they already know the message, and those that really need to read it, never will.

I also read another technical book, Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters by the folks at Basecamp. Mostly because I continue to despise Scrum and everything it stands for and was looking for an alternative that will stop me from being permanently anxious. I’m adopting some of it with my team. We’ll see how it goes

Definitely going to be spending time with some fiction for a bit now though. I’ll let you know what.

Watching⌗

We’ve either been watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars or football to be honest. Although with the release of Hamilton on Disney, we managed to get a viewing of that in finally. It was just as good I remember the live show being. Get on it!

Andy