If there is one thing that I can say about this week for sure: my sleep pattern is messed up big time. I don’t think there was a single day this week when I didn’t fall asleep way later than I wanted with the absolutely unexpected side effect of me being very tired all day long. Fantastic.
It also didn’t help that I was too tired after work to do my stupid walk for the stupid mental health and somehow still didn’t go to sleep earlier.
Weeks like this are the reason why I usually stop writing these notes after a while – sometimes it just feels like nothing happened all week, everything was a bit of a blur and trying to put that nothingness into words for ✨ public consumption ✨ is a deeply unpleasant experience.

Sigh. Anyway.

Websites

I did manage to put my Twitter archive online. It’s not linked anywhere, yet, except here and I’m not sure if I will. I might just go through the database of my blog here and change all links to my now private tweets to this page.

Things I learned

I managed to get Rector working for me, which was a nice surprise. In previous attempts I had weird results and/or error messages and had more or less given up on it. It’s pretty good now and I guess the trick might just be to not feed it an old code base of 400+ php files at once and instead do things in chunks.

Music

It’s not the most groundbreaking discovery – in fact it’s one I make every couple of months – but just having electronic music running in the background really helps with my ✨ productivity. ✨
(Even though together with a massive sleep deficit it might have added to the floaty feeling all week, who knows.)
Sometimes I just play some semi-random Spotify playlist, this week it was DJ sets on YouTube. The algorithm told me to have the sets of Miss Monique, Nora En Pure and Giolì & Assia running, so that’s what I did.

Well, now let’s see if I can get myself to bed faster today. I did sleep a lot yesterday and today, but we all know it’s not really possible to catch up on sleep just with a weekend, but people would probably complain if I stayed in bed until noon during the week.

Every week when I open Byword to write these things, I start to type “Hello internet friends” which is how I used to start my newsletter back in the day. I guess I miss writing it, after all – I just don’t see myself writing two longer posts per week and somehow it doesn’t feel right to send the weeknotes to the newsletter subscribers. Oh well.

This week felt really long – not in a bad way, though. I got to taste Teymur’s falafels (just look at them over on his blog, they’re very tasty indeed) and overall ate way too much.
I played some poker (you get some bonus points if you find me on one of the photos) and given that this was probably the third time I ever played, I was out of the event very quickly.

Some observations:
Usually I sleep very well in hotel beds. This time? Not so much. The worst night was probably the one when the hotel TV turned itself on and rebooted in the middle of the night.
Once again I really enjoyed being on the road on my way back, even though it was pretty demanding. I was pretty sleepy anyway (see above) and add to that rush hour traffic, trucks, rain and twilight and the six hours wore me out for good. Even though it was still early in the evening, I went directly to bed once I reached home.

Don’t call them resolutions

Don’t mention them, please.
It was okay when the commute between the hotel and the office was enough to close the rings, but the weekend was a bust.

Websites

Yesterday I mostly patched all my little websites and webtools after a small security advisory was issued for Symfony and Laravel projects.

App of the Week

StreetPass is a fun Browser extension that gives you a constantly updating list of Mastodon accounts of the websites you’re visiting.

On we go, the fourth week of the year behind us, having braved most of January and staring into the darkness that February provides. It’s Sunday afternoon, I just arrived in Cologne and I noticed something new-ish when leaving the highway and driving into town: a profound disappointment at having reached my destination already. That’s not a slight against my destination, I think at this moment I’d have the same feeling anywhere – it was rather the realization that being on the move is something that I miss in my normal everyday life. I started to think back at the last few times I was in transit and which ones I liked and which ones I didn’t. I’m also still not done wondering about the reasons behind my decision to take the train or not.
I’ll have a bit of a meditation on that topic and might or might not subject you to the results of that.

Don’t call them resolutions

Ooooh, this was a bad week for them. Let’s just forget about it, look forward and try to do better next week.

Websites

I haven’t done all that much – I tinkered a bit more with the link blog and started to work on a PESOS style import of Github activities. Not sure what will come of this, but we’ll see.
I think the next website I want to give a bit of a refresh is this blog. There’s a whole bunch of things that have been annoying me for ages and maybe I can fix a bunch of those. We’ll see – it will be a busy week and I might not find the time at all.

So here we are again, on a gray and cold Sunday afternoon.
I have seen some people online whose resolution was to write a medium-length blog post every day for the month of January and oh wow, that would be too much for me. But good for them, I guess.

After I had some tech disappointment on Tuesday the day turned around in the evening – did some (virtual) socializing with a few colleagues and big surprise: it’s actually nice to spend some time with people on your wave length. Who knew.

Don’t call them resolutions

Not much to say here – I managed to fill the rings on each day of the week, except for today, but that’s just a formality, I was out and about this morning so it’s just the standing hours now.

My Websites

I relaunched my website in a very work-in-progress state. I was wondering for a quick moment if I should have added one of those little construction worker gifs from back in the days. But at least it is deployed now and I have something to work with. I guess the main part for now will be the link blog.

Things I learned

If you need to get rid of the old MySQL column comments you need to alter the column and add an empty comment. For example:

ALTER TABLE `table` MODIFY `columnname` JSON DEFAULT NULL COMMENT '';

App of the Week

It is very much not something new – in fact I actually had it installed before – but after Dominik mentioned the note taking app Obsidian this week, I gave it another try. It works pretty well for me so far and I do like the fact that it is all just a bunch of markdown and json files in a folder somewhere.

Gong xi fa cai, little bunnies 🐰