Weeknotes 14
- Another quiet week. I’m busy with work at FutureLearn, it feels good
to be writing and mostly shipping useful code. I’m really enjoying
having a couple of days a week pairing with
Chris and it’s also been great to work with
Simon again.
- I found out this week that large parts of the BBC
/music
site have been taken offline. Things have moved on, and BBC
Sounds seems to be focus today. I
moved to London to join the BBC in
2009 to work on
/music. One
of the wonderful things about /music was its commitment to have a
page for every
artist
which collected all of their BBC connections (songs played on the
radio, interviews, album reviews etc.) in one place. Rather than
build a CMS to edit the artist biographies, we instead pulled
changes from Wikipedia and Musicbrainz. This meant our editorial
colleagues (we sat right next to them, which was another great thing
about the team) were editing Wikipedia in order to edit /music,
improving both at the same
time. Patrick and others had written
some scripts that used a Wikipedia IRC channel to get a stream of
change events, filtered them for pages we cared about and then
updated the artist biographies. It was elegant and janky and
brilliant and I loved it. I mostly worked on /introducing, the
BBC’s service for unsigned artists. We looked after a Rails app
called Peel, and one of its jobs was to create a new page on
/music when one of the introducing artists had been played on the
radio for the first time. It was a small thing, but we got such
great feedback from artists for that. Anyway, nostalgia isn’t what
it used to be and URLs aren’t cool
anymore. But I’m glad
for the memories and the friendships I still have from that time.
- We went shopping for a Christmas tree and decorated it today. N- is
now at an age where this is very exciting for him, and given the
year we’ve all had, I’m going to get stuck in. The
Low
Christmas
Album
made its first (of many) appearances.
- I’ve given up on doom
emacs. There were too many
things that were slightly different to how I was used to them
working, and I didn’t have enough time to learn them (or even to
learn how to disable them). The final straw was when I had issues
with some trailing whitespace not deleting reliably, and couldn’t
work out how to fix it. It’s not been a lost cause though, I’ve
found a few new packages that are great (
vterm in particular) and
know enough about doom to crib things from its code into my own
config. I’ve started a new
config from scratch and am
pulling things from my old config, or from doom, as and when I need
them. So far, so homely.
Listening