I left this weekly note until Monday morning. Sunday was a hangover day after my brother and sister’s 40th on Saturday night. The last thing I wanted to do was reach for a keyboard.
The week has been exhausting, the usual routine punctuated with a brief trip to Edinburgh. I picked the worst day to fly with the UK being battered by a storm it took multiple attempts to land. The flight may have only be an hour but it ranks with one of my worst ever for travel sickness. By the time we eventually touched down the last thing in the world I wanted to do was spend an evening cooped up in a hotel.
In an effort to get out of the hotel and airport dining options, I discovered Tipo, a pasta restaurant run by Stuart Ralston. Turning up early, I had the place to myself and enjoyed an incredible meal at the bar. I don’t ask work to cover a nicer meal like this, but it is worth taking advantage of the fact that I’m in a new city to try different restaurants. It is all to easy to fall into the habit of booking the same flight, staying at the same hotel, and ordering off the same room service menu each trip. Variety is needed.
Continuous remediation (aka patching and upgrades) has been the theme at work. I took the team through a demo I’ve been working on; Continuous Remediation with OpenRewrite and Spring Application Advisor. I wanted people to consider the use of OpenRewrite recipes as a component of machine readable release notes. In making release notes machine readable, we allow people using our software to run automated upgrades for all their consumers. And no, I’m not talking about having a large language model digest your release notes and try to upgrade software. I’m looking for something a lot more deterministic.
In the evenings I’ve been exploring some AI fundamentals. Rather than just submitting prompts to the latest frontier models, I’ve been exploring the behaviour of smaller open weight models. I’ve been looking at how various prompting approaches dramatically alter the responses, looking at the impact of tweaking model temperature, and thinking about how to balance where tasks are completed; in code, or in the model. A hybrid combination of traditional code coupled with a smaller model is an interesting combination.
Homework time The calm before the storm. At breakfast I get to look out at the air traffic control tower for Edinburgh Airport. Oscar has started Zoom calls once a week with friends from his Chinese class. Line of sight to home. A small detour on foot. Ethan is really into making coffee at the moment. It is mildly terrifying letting him pour the boiling water into the filter paper. Oscar has been introduced to the pedals on the piano this week. I’ve been learning a few chords.
