script flip

 i got up early later, made myself a coffee and walked it to the bus stop. shortly into the ride a man came in and sat down across from me with a smell that made it hard to breathe. he got off one stop before me.

i walked in, picked up my repaired computer (i haven't tested it yet), walked out, and caught the bus home. an easier ride.

i got home just in time to leave for work. i arrived at work just before bigtalk, and didn't have time to worry about talking to my boss before he made me feel like he'd been working hard all weekend, and he explained what had happened on thursday, and i no longer felt like that was the problem.

what followed, though, was a day that felt very long, a lot of it me trying to align him with the task requirements. it was the middle of the afternoon by the time i felt he'd understood the requirements, and by the end of the day he was pretty much done, albeit with an insane bug that i feel pretty confident his reliance on AI support was preventing him from resolving 🤦

someone else said it yesterday: AI makes you feel like you're getting things done faster, but you're actually not. my experience is that i feel like it's slowing me down on anything more interesting than a trivial solution.

aside from that, i babysat an external contractor's efforts to migrate his cloudformation to pulumi - it wasn't easy, but i am pretty confident that pulumi is the right choice after all.

as usual, at around 5.30/6pm urgent things began to fall apart. some of my coworkers have been complaining about ridiculous build times, and suddenly i started experiencing them too. instead of the usual minute or two, my build took 35 minutes, and its subsequent deploy broke on contact.

frustrated, as much by the build time as by not being able to have dinner with my family, i went to our warehouse to be on the same physical network as the machine i was deploying to, only to discover that one of my coworkers who has a tendency to skip important steps [skippity] moved the server from our installation desks that i set up last week to a power point connected to the lights, and the cleaning lady had finished up and turned off the lights just before my deployment started 🤦

you can't make this up.

i was furious.

while waiting for him to join me, i tried re-logging in to werf on a whim, and suddenly the build times dropped back to normal. it turns out that instead of throwing an error like it used to, it simply runs retry behavior repeatedly and then fails silently. so even when we thought it was eventually working, it wasn't 🤦

omfg.

after moving the installation back to a safe power point, i learned that skippity hadn't configured the router correctly and nothing would have worked anyway 🤦

finally, after a further half hour spent trying and failing to connect the machine through the router, i plugged in "directly" and began the deployment. that was when he stood up and announced that he had to go because his family would be upset with him... like mine wouldn't?

jesus, fuck.

anyway, i finally got the deployment done and went to pick up my bag. two of my bosses (founder and direct report) were still in, and i let them know what i'd just been through. i ended up having an open discussion with my direct report about bigtalk, we shared different concerns and i walked out feeling much better having said what needed to be said.

i came home, my mom prepared me an emergency gin and tonic and i at least got to say goodnight to mr smear.

...

it's demo day (no. 1), i've slept alright and i'm on my way to postpone gd's nerve block again and try and make an appointment for a surgeon for my ingrown toenail.