Weeknotes 11

Working from an office again was weird. I spent a day in an office that wasn’t in my house this week. With other people. I found it to be a mixed experience. It was nice to get out of the house (I’ve found getting out of the house once a week is a good idea for my sanity) and when the commute isn’t every day it’s a nice way to unwind. Seeing my colleagues face-to-face was also nice.

However, I can say without a doubt that it was my most unproductive day in a long time. I’m sure COVID has reduced my already low tolerance for noise and general disruption. Concentrating felt impossible, even with headphones and music. Luckily I didn’t have too much hardcore concentrating to do due to the work I had lined up.

The lesson I learn over and over is to test your own assumptions. This happened again this week when debugging a test failure. It was failing due to a DNS change (long story), which was something I didn’t consider whilst investigating. A fresh set of eyes from another solved the problem, but it was a good reminder.

I’m gradually using really quite old Ruby features. This week it was the ... operator used for forwarding arguments on. Usually I would collect the arguments using *args and then destructure them again also using *args, but I always forget which syntax. Having ... for a single purpose is pretty nice. Contrary to a lot of the new syntax added to Ruby, I think this is worth it.