Weeknotes 4.

• Moving - Me and Pauline are very close to buying a house in Letchworth and could be moving in early December 🎉 🤞. If you haven’t been to Letchworth, it’s known for being the first Garden City as well as having the first roundabout in the UK and being the filming location for a lot of The World’s End.
• Working hours - I’ve agreed a contract change at work that means I’ll start working 9 days out of every 10 in the new year for a prorated salary. I had this pattern of working at FutureLearn after hearing from Chris Lowis and Mal Pinder who had both arranged something similar. I found the extra day helps me work on side projects and life admin keeping me more focused at work and able to have a computer-free weekend. I’m grateful for Farewill for being open to trying it.
• Ticketing - Since moving out of London a few years ago, travel has become even more of an expense. A question that’s been on my mind recently is could I spend less? A yearly travel card costs less than 12 monthlies, but both of these options cover 365 days of travel. If you add in weekends, holidays, bank holidays and work from home days, I only need to travel around 170-200 days. Tweaking when I take holiday could mean I could spend less on tickets over a year. I think this is an interesting optimization problem that a computer program could give me a definitive answer to. For step one I’ve built a React component that displays all the days in a year and lets you mark them if you need to commute or not. I’m not sure what step two is yet.
• Data Warehousing - At work, our team has spent the last week investigating data warehousing tools such as Segment, Fivetran and Stitch. We’re considering using these as a more reliable and easier to manage alternatives to our current custom ETL pipeline. It can take time to understand these services. They all promise to connect to lots of data sources, but only by spending time trying to connect them ourselves did the way records are updated and deleted become clear.