#117

Dec 13, 2020

Work

This week I mostly carried on with the cross-domain analytics stuff I was thinking about last week.

It took a bit longer than hoped, as I’d not really worked with GOV.UK’s javascript stuff before, so I had to get to grips with the module system and how to write tests (and then had to figure out why my tests were flaky, whether it was a bug in the code or the tests, and fix it). And then I had to re-do a bunch of the backend work because it turns out that sticking extra params in the OAuth redirect URI is not cool:

Often times a developer will think that they need to be able to use a different redirect URL on each authorization request, and will try to change the query string parameters per request. This is not the intended use of the redirect URL, and should not be allowed by the authorization server. The server should reject any authorization requests with redirect URLs that are not an exact match of a registered URL.

If a client wishes to include request-specific data in the redirect URL, it can instead use the “state” parameter to store data that will be included after the user is redirected. It can either encode the data in the state parameter itself, or use the state parameter as a session ID to store the state on the server.

But I got there in the end.

We’ve got another frontend developer joining the team next week, which will be very handy as we’ve had a lot of frontend work in recent weeks.

Books

This week I read:

Time Tracking

I’ve decided to give tracking my time a go, by starting a timedot file which I’m manually recording my activities in. Here’s today’s so far (as of about 21:00):

2020-12-13
leisure:anime       ........
sleep               8.25h
leisure:tech        .
leisure:systems     ...
leisure:reading     .. ... ...
leisure:social      .......
leisure:ttrpg:play  4h

I’ve divided all human activity1 under the four headings of chores, leisure, sleep, and work. Each one of those is further divided into high-level categories which I think will let me answer interesting questions. For example,

I’m trying to keep it fairly easy to use, so I’m not trying to track every minute of the day. I’m tracking things in 15-minute intervals. I will round up if I spend ~10 minutes on something, but if I don’t, it won’t get tracked. I’m also keeping the scope of my tracking somewhat limited; I’m not tracking things like having a shower, brushing my teeth, or mindlessly browsing the internet: all those sorts of activities are just lumped together into untracked time.

I’ve now been doing this for a few days, so I have a little data built up:

“Leisure Breakdown” graph from my “Quantified Self” dashboard.

In the graph, “systems” refers to my personal finance system, self organisation system, and now my time tracking system. So as a leisure activity, “systems” is tinkering with those for fun. I’ve been doing a lot of that this week. There is also an associated chore, which is the time spent doing necessary data entry and maintenance (if I spend more than a couple of minutes on them, that is).

And if you’re thinking “surely it didn’t take 10 hours to read 3 volumes of manga!” you would be right: in my weeknotes I only list the books I’ve finished that week. Malazan continues.

It’s been an interesting experience so far. I’ve found myself becoming a bit more mindful of how I spend my time. I’ve also found myself going to enter some data in the timedot file and frequently trying to remember what time I started a task, so as a result I’ve got quite a bit of unaccounted time, particularly during work hours2. That should improve with practice.

  1. Well, all my activity at least.↩︎

  2. On Friday, for example, I kept working until 6pm because I wanted to finish some stuff off, but I somehow only have 7 hours of work (including the lunch break) tracked for that day…↩︎