Weeknotes 10.

• Magic paste - I’m continuing with an endless stream of house chores. This week I added a towel rail and hooks to the bathroom. Next on my todo list is filling some old drill holes in the bathroom with some magic paste and researching how on earth to fit curtain rails/poles to our bay window.
• SSL Certs - I spent some time managing my Dokku-powered web server. I got an email from Let’s Encrypt telling me that the ACME API that my older version of Dokku was using would stop working in June. For self-hosted sites, the pain of managing SSL certificates has been replaced with the meta-problem of managing software that manages SSL certificates. Still, I’m appreciative of the Let’s Encrypt project and it’s nice that I got the warning email.
• Collecting succulents - I got a pretty String of Pearls plant at our nearby garden centre. I’m still looking for a Chinese money plant and something bigger to live on the floor (suggestions welcome).
• Progression - I spent some of my time at work this week looking at publicly available progression frameworks as it’s something we want to introduce to help us now the engineering team has grown (there’s 10 of us now!). My favourite is Songkick’s Growth framework since it has lots of great examples that aren’t too Songkick specific.
• Chromecast is awful - Our meeting rooms at work all use Chromecast as a way to share your laptop screen with the TV. I find it so difficult to use. If you want to share your screen rather than the current Chrome tab, you have to stop casting and start again. When you want to stop casting it’s way too easy to stop someone else’s cast in another meeting room. And then there’s all the cutting out and glitching to put up with. Jack of all trades and master of none, Google Chrome has become the iTunes of today.
• The roundest animal - Our copy of Wavelength came, me and Pauline tried the 2-player variant. You play by drawing a card which shows two extremes (such as hot & cold). One player has to secretly spin the wheel so it points to somewhere between the two extremes and has to think of a word or phrase that will help others guess where the wheel is pointing too. One of the cards was ‘Roundest animal’ to ‘pointiest animal’ which was fun to debate.