In this world of micro-services and Kubernetes, it was nice to be working on a system built as a monolith running in a plain old EC2 instance. But recently, during load testing, the service we’ve been working on as been showing signs of stress — timing out, maxing out the CPU — and it’s become clear that scaling up has taken us only so far. So now might be time to rearchitect this into micro-services and move it into something like Kubernetes. This was probably always going to happen. I’m just glad that it’s happening now, rather than before it was necessary.

I’ve been spending so much time on this tool to generate a report I’ve been asked to produce, and it’s super overdue. The funny thing is, if I delay one more week, the report would be trivial to produce, and the tool will become unnecessary (the tool’s almost finished too).

Okay, so apparently I held out for exactly 1 hour and 15 minutes, as I’ve just opened a Bluesky account¹. The reason is that some old Twitter accounts have moved over there instead of Mastodon. I get a lot of enjoyment from those accounts and it’s good to see them still posting.

I do wonder where they moved their old Twitter archive. A tweet of theirs I linked to as a shortcode broke this blog for a time when they deactivated their Twitter account. I do hope they either POSSE or PESOS with a domain they control so I can fix it (they’re so close: they’re using a domain for their handle, all they need to do is setup a website).

Wondering if I should open a Bluesky account. Do I need another service to look at every day? Am I desparate enough for “moar reederz” to set up another POSSE channel? It’s tempting. Will hold off for now, but who knows how long I’ll be able to maintain my willpower.

Someone at work found this blog. Apparently they found a link to it on LinkedIn. Probably should get that fixed. 😜

(Hi, K.K. 👋)

I was not expecting tense to be a stumbling block with writing design proposals that’ll eventually become documentation. I’ve been catching myself writing in the future tense — “this service will do this” — instead of the present tense — “this service does this.” This is probably a habit I formed while writing design proposals to be reviewed, only to leave them be forgotten once they’re approved.

I’m trying to avoid that here, and although the use of present tense instead of future tense might seem like a small thing, I think it’s a very important one. Once the design is approved and realised, what will be will eventually become what is, and I want to make sure the reader gets that, and keeps it up to that when the design changes. Using the wrong tense here would just signal to the reader that the document is just a proposal and is no longer relevant. And when that happens, it’ll never get looked at again.

🔗 How to deactivate your X account

Finally got around to deleting my Twitter account. I’ve seen others do likewise, yet many say they’re “deleting” their account and the only option in Twitter’s Settings is “deactivate”. So I was unsure if they were one and the same. Looks like they are.

So, walking from the station to the only cafe that’s open to pick up a coffee before my train arrives is about a 5 minute round trip. This assumes the barista is ready and there are no customers in front. So, let’s say it’s safe to go when the earlier train has just left the station.

It’s such a romantic idea to think that they’ll always be a customer or product manager available to me to answer all my business rules questions. Would love that to actually be the case. 😕⁉️

I’ll never understand Go developers who insist on using pointers to represent a lack of something, where a zero value would work just as well. Better even, as you wouldn’t need to dereference things or worry about nil-pointer panics. Remember, don’t fear the zero value.

It only just occurred to me that I can turn off “Use ⌘+Scroll to Zoom Page” in Vivaldi to compensate for the Magic Mouse’s incessant need to scroll while I’m trying to Cmd+Click a link.

I still dislike the mouse, but hopefully with this off, the urge to throw it out the window will be diminished.

Love this post by Mike Grindle, especially this line:

To me, it shows what happens when you regularly write, publish, share and hyperlink into the void that is the web: the void speaks back.

Similar things happen to me from time to time, and when I find it, it’s always a bit of a thrill. I don’t expect the ripples that are the posts on this site to reflect back, but it’s wonderful when they do.

A recurring element of my dreams is an unmaintained railway line. The infrastructure is falling apart, yet it’s still an important connection and trains occasionally do use it. I usually approach it at level crossings and in past dreams I’ve not once saw a train. Last night, I almost got hit by one.