• 🎉 Work Onsite & Social: Our 2-squad team had our quarterly onsite this week. Always nice to have everyone in the same room honing in on what we’re tackling for the rest of the year.
  • Spin the Wheel CLI: Having volunteered to run the ice-breaker I was disappointed by the existing range of “spin-the-wheel” online tools. In particular, their lacking support for longer sentences such as the questions I had in mind for the get-to-know-us round. So I wrote a CLI tool to do the job: https://github.com/samsmi7h/spin-the-wheel-cli. It looks great across multiple TMUX panes.
  • Poetry in motion: I was reading Frank O’Hara, one of my favourite melancholic poetic retreats for challenging times, on the train in to work. I was struck with an idea. What if I opened the day with a poem of my own. I hastily pulled together some interesting tid-bits from the quarter and made them pseudo-rhyme. By the time I’d arrived at the office I had a passable poem that went down pretty well.
  • Forumla One Arcade: F1 has hit the mainstream with the Drive to Survive series, and the London F1 simulator is now the top pick for parties. We were not disappointed. We spent a couple of fairly thrilling hours knocking each other off track. What was great about the arcade is the range of people enjoying it. If Drive to Survive’s influence has been to make the fan-base more diverse, bring on season 5.
• 🏃🏻‍♂️ Running & Royal Parks: Down to base-building business as pre-marathon training begins in earnest. 35 miles this week including a 14 mile long run round East London.
  • The morning after the social, we in the team that could face the early morning light trotted around the Royal Parks for some more team building, at a slightly slower pace than the F1 of the night before.
• 🚨 On-Call: I started on-call on Friday morning. Our rota is usually orderly, but I’m still restricted in how far I can stray from home, so it’ll be sheltered week for me coming up.
• Making mess to make things better: Cracked shells makes omlettes, and the house refactor I’ve begun certainly looked like bombshells had fallen this week. Starting, like most good things, with a trip to Ikea, I’ve entirely revamped the limited storage we have in this small London flat. Messiness makes me claustrophobic, but I can breathe once more.
• New gear but no idea: We were back on the kart circuit this week. Colder September nights made for a low-grip night, and my rib protector did little to keep off the pain of my recovering rib. Combined with some less than sporting behaviour around me, I called it a day slightly early, to mitigate the rib pain. Longer break clearly necessary, but frustration that I couldn’t give my all in an event I had been anticipating all week.
• Peaky f@!cking Blinders: I watched most of this show 5 years ago, but I finally got around to finishing it over the past few days. The brummy accents are mostly shocking, but Cillian Murphy is something special.

Now time for the Japan GP. See you next week.