Recent changes
2023-12-04 11:36:05 +0100 +0100
I sprained my wrist on Thursday night, probably worse than I ever have before, while goalkeeping in a football match with friends. Somehow I am typing this today. It is probably thanks to (aside from copious amounts of ibuprofen and ice!) my newly arrived Keyboardio Atreus. The keyboard is tiny and thus doesn't require much movement from my fingers. I have a feeling it won't replace the Model 100 as my daily driver, but it is likely to travel with me as the Model 100 is too big to lug around, and I can no longer type on a "normal" keyboard having been spoiled by the split keyboard paradigm.
Music
I'm still in Hisar makam land, like last week. This week working on another song, Dili pür ızdırabım (listen). Since I have sprained my wrist, though, I can't really play. So I am mostly listening and singing.
Reading
I picked up and finished Cal Newport's Deep Work. I wish I had read that one a while ago. I like his idea about time-blocking–I am already most of the way there in how I schedule work for the day as part of my morning planning, but I think formalizing it a bit more and making sure I have the space for concentration on tasks will be quite useful.
I finished Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. One depressing realization, in the author's description of indiscriminate shelling of Beirut suburbs in 1982, is how little has changed in forty years. It's tempting to think that "if only people knew" that the world would be a better place. But while access to knowledge is a precondition to justice, it's not going to change anything on its own.
Work
At work we are discussing strategy for my team's work. I've been thinking about the 4DX framework (which I learned about from reading Deep Work) and how we might apply that. I recorded a lightning talk about technical challenges in the trust and safety space at Wikimedia, which probably deserves its own blog post.
I've also been thinking about and discussing local, test and staging environments. One thing I've had in mind is that, like a TODO tracker or note taking system, every implementation is both imperfect and also secondary to the goal of producing an output–for the TODO system, to get things done; for notes, to assist in writing; for the local/test/staging environment, to assist in shipping to production without incident. I know I have gotten caught up in the past about trying to get environments to match exactly the production environment, when I think what matters here is the outcome and not the means.
I've also been contributing some small patches to improve the new developer experience when getting started with MediaWiki, in response to this newly published guide Local development quickstart - MediaWiki.