Weekly notes 17/2023

What’s been happening #

It’s been another busy week!

• It’s oncall week. At the Trade Desk, at the moment SRE’s role in oncall is primarily on a escalation basis, so I don’t have to be the first person to response to any alerts. Plus it’s only for work hours - but includes weekends as well. As such, I decided to not take the long weekend and work on Tuesday as well. I’ll take another day off in lieu of this.
• I had changed my blog theme few weeks ago. I mostly like the theme, but was annoyed that it didn’t add the paginator for old posts on the home page. I finally got to fix this, thanks to this tip.
• After a month-long break, F1 is back this weekend. Writing this as I watch the “Sprint Shootout” - a tweak to the Sprint format. Previously, the qualifying would set the starting position for a short sprint race and the sprint race would set the position for the race start, which was a bit weird. With the new format, the qualifying sets the race starting grid, and a separate sprint shootout starts the sprint race starting grid. I think this makes more sense as compared to the previous format.
• It looks like I’ll have to apply for a New South Wales driving license soon, due to the rules changes coming in effect from July 1. Till now, I’ve been drive here with my Indian license, but that’s set to change. Ironically I’ve had more shit from Aussie drivers (including dingbats showing me the finger all the way across a traffic signal) than anyone else, but such is life.
• Another social network gets popular. I’m seeing a lot of chatter and talk around Bluesky Social. Bluesky Social is a distributed social network, similar vein as Mastodon but different - it uses the AT Protocol. I fundamentally understand how ActivityPub works, but I’m yet to grok the At protocol. Maybe once I’ve used and read a bit more I can understand it better. For now, I wrote a small CLI tool that can login and post to BlueSky Web App. It’ll be interesting to see how the growth of AT Protocol and BlueSky will be compared to Mastodon. With major FOMO due to the invite system, I’ve already seen lot of people announce that AT Protocol and BlueSky is where they will be, not Mastodon, and I can’t understand why. Maybe because there’s only one instance that looks similar to twitter of yore and without being policed about what should or should not be done in a specific instance is making people accept BlueSky more. We’ll have to wait and watch.
• Just as I was about to wrap up this edition, I saw this post on Indian Gaming subreddit about a solo developer building a Stardew Valley inspired life sim set in South India with a special focus on Toddy. Certainly looks very interesting, will have to see if the charm of the small teaser video carries throughout the game, much like it does for Stardew. There’s no dates yet, so maybe will be a while before it gets here.

Link of the week #

There’s a thread on Hacker News about “Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?” that has some amazing things people have built. It’s bit of a long read, so go ahead, save/bookmark that thread and read it at your own pace.

Like & Subscribe! #

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