tretton37 weekend conference, day two. This morning’s activity was a co-op puzzle game/challenge. We got large floor puzzles to assemble, and the finished picture contained clues for the next step. I joined in the puzzle assembly but my head was too tired today for any kind of intellectual challenge.

The final result was a code to a website, and our prize was the revelation that we will have a global conference in May. The global Knowabunga is an annual tradition but we’ve skipped the last two because of covid. Now there is hope that we won’t skip a third one.

Knowabunga conference weekend with tretton37, and in 10 minutes I’m about to hold a talk (about getting started with containers in Azure).

I enjoy this, but I’m not exactly sure why and how. The preparation part is a bit of a slog. Right before the talk I’m always nervous, in particular about taking too little time, or too much. I enjoy it while I’m up there, though. And I also really enjoy people coming up to me afterwards and telling me I did a good job.

Python code beaten into submission, another pair of socks finished. A good day at work.

90% of the code we have at Urb-it is .NET. Whenever I have to work with any of the remaining 10%, it takes hours to even get started. It took me three hours on my own, and then another two hours together with two more developers, to get the python project to build and run on my computer. Even though I’ve done it before on that same computer. Some damn package gets updated somewhere and boom, there goes my afternoon. But that was yesterday, so today was pure productivity.

Adrian is practising multiplication. Not just simple times tables anymore – now one of the terms is a double-digit number, so it’s two for one and some addition and memory training as well.

I make up the problems for him by randomly sprinkling numbers on the page. I usually skip one (too easy) and start at two. Work my way from two to nine and put each number on a random line in the first position, and repeat that until there’s a number on each line. Three cycles gives me 24 lines which is roughly what I can fit on a normal page of squared paper. Then put a multiplication sign on each line. Then do three cycles from two to nine again for the first digit of the second term, and then the same again for the second digit. Voila – random maths problems on demand.

I keep forgetting my lactose intolerance. I do remember it when I’m doing my grocery shopping. But for some things there are no lactose-free alternatives, and then I just buy the normal stuff and plan to take a lactase tablet when I eat it. Yogurts, for example. There are very few lactose-free alternatives and none of them taste well. Or anything with ricotta cheese.

The problem is that when I get to actually eating these things I forget about the tablets. I’ve been eating normal yogurt for decades so I just do it on autopilot. And a few hours later my stomach feels like a balloon and my clothes literally don’t fit me any more.

Knowing that my waist circumference at this point is 4 cm larger than normal, I wonder if could you calculate the volume of intestinal gas from that, and then the amount of lactose that was digested by bacteria instead of myself.

Today’s lunchtime talk went well, with the live coding and everything. We had some last minute technical problems which we solved with literally a couple of minutes to spare. Firefox refused to share camera and desktop at the same time, and Chrome refused to share the desktop at all, so I ended up joining the session twice – once from Firefox for the camera feed and once more from Chrome to share my desktop. And those two took so much CPU that the performance of all other applications really suffered. Builds were much slower than normal and I kept having to wait, and asking the audience to wait, before I could show the results.

It all worked out in the end. Even my time estimates did! I got done when I had hoped to be done, and had time for a few questions in the end.

If you want to hear the talk, you can find it here.

The presentation I promised to do is happening on Wednesday. I did start preparing in good time and actually have most of it figured out. As I was working on it, I came to realize that for this topic it would make most sense to just skip all the usual Powerpoint slides and just write code, live, on screen, during the session. Which I have never done before, so I can’t just wing it the way I normally tend to do with presentations. I can’t even really estimate how much coding I can fit into one hour. So here I am, spending my Sunday afternoon talking to myself while writing the same code for the third time now.

If you want to see me do this live on Wednesday, here’s the link: Massaging MongoDB data.

Knitting is all about maths.

Sock yarn comes in hanks of 100 grams. One pair of standard socks for myself or Adrian weighs 51 grams. (His are 1.5 cm shorter in the foot than mine but higher in the calf.) So one hank is just barely not enough for two pairs of socks, which is a bit unfortunate, since both Adrian and I loved this yarn. But I can make us a pair each if I use a different yarn for the sock heel for one of the pairs, which would actually be pretty practical anyway, because it will help us tell our socks apart.

This is like an arithmetics problem for elementary school.

Mum has 100 grams of colourful yarn. She knits one pair of socks using 51 grams of the yarn. After knitting a third sock, using plain brown yarn for the heel, she has 27 grams of the colourful yarn left. How much brown yarn did she use for the sock heel? After finishing the second pair of socks, how much colourful yarn will she have left over for darning?

It’s seven o’clock in the evening and I’m sitting in front of my work computer and wracking my brains. I was asked a few weeks ago if I could hold another talk for tretton37 and, eager to please people, I said yes. Now the bill is coming due. I need to actually come up with a topic, so that the talk can be scheduled and marketed and whatnot.

The talking is never the hard part. The hard part is finding something to talk about. I’m not working on anything new or exciting. It feels like everything I can think of has already been talked about. I keep second-guessing myself.

For International Women’s Day, tretton37 interviewed me and some of my women colleagues about being a developer. Here’s a video of me talking about why I love my job.