#104

Sep 13, 2020

Work

This week I spent mostly in meetings; I got a small amount of refactoring done but that’s it in terms of dev work.

We had a few story mapping sessions, and now have a good idea of what’s needed for our MVP. Hopefully development on that can start early next week, as we’re still aiming for mid October as a launch date, so time is slipping away…

Finally, Issy Long left GDS this week, after being there for over 6 years. A tribute appeared in gov.uk/humans.txt for Friday.

Books

This week I read:

I decided to buy the remnants of all the book series I’m reading: I got all the remaining volumes of Nana, Malazan, The Culture, The Sprawl, and a few volumes of 20th Century Boys (some of the others might be out of print, so I’ll need to scour the second-hand places). I’ve spent a lot of money on books this year; maybe I can go the rest without buying any more…

Miscellaneous

I did some pruning of my “to-read” bookmarks, I started with over a thousand articles and papers and ended up with around 200. I’d built up those bookmarks over years, so it was like a trip back through time working through them all: lots of programming and tech (including announcements of “new” things from 2015); occasional clusters of self-improvement, organisation, and personal finance; random articles on things I thought were interesting at the time (like obscure mythological creatures); and overall a gradual shift from mostly tech to mostly game mastering.

Carefully considering so many bookmarks would have been infeasible, so I erred on the side of deletion and only looked at each one enough to get a sense of the overall topic. It helped that a lot of the older ones no longer existed (404s, inaccessible servers, or even expired domains). Some things I’d even bookmarked multiple times, one page I had bookmarked 5 times over the years! I also deleted all the papers and books I’d bookmarked during my Ph.D, figuring that if I’d not read them by now I probably wouldn’t be reading them ever.

So now I’ve got a much smaller, though still fairly large, set of browser bookmarks. Hopefully I can keep on top of them all now, and move things over to my bookmarks search engine as I read them.