#068

Jan 5, 2020

Work

I spent most of the week (I was off on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday) continuing to work on getting our learning-to-rank training and deployment pipeline set up in Concourse and Amazon SageMaker, finally getting to the point where I have something which we can deploy and test. There’s been a lot to learn, and it doesn’t help that none of the AWS APIs document the permissions you need, so there has been a lot of guesswork.

I implemented a small UI change to disable the “most viewed” option when someone enters a search query. Yes, it’s not all machine learning and faffing around with clouds, there’s a never-ending list of small improvements we can make.

Finally, I opened an RFC about putting attachment data into content items, to enable more neat programmatic use of our content, both internally and externally.

Miscellaneous

I went to see the new Star Wars film, which was honestly a bit disappointing. It was entertaining enough, but there was a lot which wasn’t explained. The first sentence of the opening text was something like “Palpatine is back.” Did we learn how he came back? No, he’s just back. But at least we saw the Knights of Ren, who we’d not seen before despite Kylo Ren being introduced to us in The Force Awakens as “commander of the Knights of Ren”.

I got a couple of new games in the recent Steam sale:

I read a bunch of books this week, including finishing off the Wheel of Time series. I read:

I’ve started on The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I don’t think I’ll get through quite as quickly as I did the fiction.