blog: add Vibe Check #14

src/content/blog/2023-07-01-hours-of-tinkering-has-saved-me-seconds-of-toil-and-i-am-very-happy.md

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+---
+title: Hours of tinkering has saved me seconds of toil (and I am very happy)
+date: 2023-07-01T14:16:21.605Z
+slug: 2023-07-01-hours-of-tinkering-has-saved-me-seconds-of-toil-and-i-am-very-happy
+author: Thomas Wilson
+
+---
+In January, [I wrote about](/blog/2023-01-12-2023-01-12-little-project-oddbox-scraper) a tiny bot that I built in a week which goes to the "Upcoming Deliveries" page on ODDBOX (a fruit & veg delivery company in the UK), does some simple HTML scraping to find what fresh food I can expect to have delivered, and then format that in an email to me.  Once a week I get an email telling me to expect beetroot or whatever.
+
+I had to build this because despite receiving a weekly email from ODDBOX themselves, those emails would always redirect me to some marketing landing page, and I'd have to click around from there to find what I wanted.  I'd have to do the same dance every week, where I would have to look at two unordered date ranges in my head and think about "wait, is this this week or next week?  What date will next Monday be".  It was 10 seconds once a week and it was maddening.
+
+I suppose there's a KPI somewhere for website engagement or conversion to other e-commerce services.  Having someone land on your website means you can probably upsell them a little better.
+
+But I have a KPI in my life for "amount of time spent doing toil" and I want that to be basically zero.  I wish to decide how to waist my own time.
+
+The great time wheel turned over within ODDBOX and they shipped a redesign on their marketing site.  It looks okay, as these things go.  But it broke my fragile path selectors.  Won't some poor software engineering team member think of my fragile path selectors.  
+
+I _guarantee_ you that the time I spent debugging and fixing this far exceeds any time this bot has saved, but it didn't feel like toil.  It felt like fun tinkering.
+
+Another thumbs-up for terraform here, too.  I checked my README for the deploy commands, ran them, and they worked.  IaC is cool.  Anyway, I'm going to go resume waisting my time.

src/content/blog/2023-07-19-vibe-check-14.md

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+---
+title: 'Vibe Check #14'
+date: 2023-07-19T18:33:50.024Z
+slug: 2023-07-19-vibe-check-14
+author: Thomas Wilson
+
+---
+June 2023 was a pretty busy month.  The company I work for went through a second round of redundancies and the software team (the team I lead) ended up being quite badly affected, and many of my colleagues were made redundant.  I ended up doing a lot of mental and emotional labour going through that process with, and for, the people affected.  
+
+It feels (and felt) indecent to turn any of that into public content.  To make a "five steps for helping your newly redundant colleagues" article.  Or to post cryptic "things are hard".  Or to post "things aren't hard".  Because things have been difficult for me and for people around me.  The toll has been apparent and invisible, and the priority has been my wellbeing and the wellbeing  of the people around me (inconsistently ordered).
+
+That feeling stands above everything else from June 2023.  That's not to say, there weren't some good things:
+
+- Taking a wonderful sun-doused cycle ride with a close friend through the Oxfordshire countryside 
+- Taking many (online) French lessons to prepare for a holiday in July.  I enjoy learning languages (really I think I just enjoy talking)
+- Leaning on my mentorship network to talk through the human and  logistical moving parts, and feeling very supported 
+- Having friends (bridal party members) over for a lunch and board game afternoon
+- Teaching another friend how to sew, from cutting to finishing (it's hard, we still haven't finished that tunic)
+
+**Books I Read** 
+
+- Atalanta, Jennifer Saint.  My love for the "feminists writing women from mythology as though they were characters" genre continues.  Saint wrote *Ariadne*, which is in my top-three of these kinds of books (strong recommend for *Ariadne*).  In comparison, *Atalanta* feels equally technically strong, turning her attention to the titular Atalanta, a mortal chosen to be a champion of Artemis, by the goddess of the hunt herself.  Atalanta finds herself the only female member of the argonauts.  Something in the narrative didn't quite hit me like *Ariadne*, but I suspect that's the effect of expectations.
+- A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik.  When I was nineteen I read all three Hunger Games novels in a very short time period (for me at least) - and I wanted a book which scratched that same itch.  A story about magical students at a magical school but where the school is lousy with enchanted creatures that want to crush kids' bodies and suck out all the magical nutrition within them?  And there are no adult teachers, and also the school itself is an indifferent steampunk contraption?  Fuck yeah, dude.  This is exactly what I needed to get me through "life is hard" times.