2026 W19

Most countries have the 1st May as a national holiday. For some reason we push the holiday to the first Monday of the month. We kicked off the short week by going to see Oscar perform at the Seeds of Change concert in County Hall in London. It was an absolute delight to watch him perform and we were really lucky to have the extended family join us for the event.

Ethan had his first bike accident this week. It turns out that just because you can look backwards as you continue to cycle doesn’t mean you should. The result, a black eye and a graze to the side of the face. Thankfully he was straight back on his bike the following day.

I’ve been frustrated at work recently and noticed that it’s made me mildly irritable. As the whole AI thing starts to become less of a distant technology and more of a daily talking point, I’ve struggled to find how I can contribute. I’m caught between those who believe I should be talking about AI at every opportunity and those who have made little effort to understand why it’s a talking point at all. I’ve always liked to speak from a position of experience and I’ve been finding experience hard to come by. It’s relatively new after all. I’m finding most of the talking points are either “AI will take over the world, scale, scale, scale” or “AI? Someone else can explain it.” Somewhere in the middles is a balance of curiosity and honest experimentation. That’s the gap I’m looking to fill.

I wrote a Spring Boot version of an application that helps articulate the importance of graceful shutdown and the importance of understanding the liveness and readiness endpoints when monitoring application health. It’s an application I’ve written in Go before, but this was the first time writing it in Spring Boot.

After spending much of Sunday in the garden with Alicia and the boys. I’ve got my first two pacts.