2026 Week 23

We started this week with Alicia in Amsterdam, Ethan in particular was not too pleased. We haven’t quite decided what to do over the summer, but I suspect he’s gonna face at least a week without Alicia at home. I’m going to have to up my game if I’m going to inherit favourite parent status before then.

Oscar’s school art project gave us an opportunity to practice some more cyanotype. The theme was My Happy Place. His first attempt to draw a piano ended up in tears, and so he settled on drawing his bicycle. After tracing an image of his bike, we scanned it and he used the iPad to go over the lines in thicker black pen before printing on transparency. The weather has been terrible so we ended up printing images under an artificial UV lamp.

I really enjoyed a conversation with a colleague about proposals for upcoming social media bans that are being considered around the world. I’d never been put on the spot and asked what my opinion was, and it forced me to think about how I feel about the idea of a ban. My initial response was that I don’t believe a ban will fix the underlying problem. I also believe that targeting only the younger generation misses the fact that there are obvious harms on all generations. In talking to my colleague, one of the arguments put forward was that a ban would do something as opposed to doing nothing. And that if we agreed that we had to do something, searching for a perfect solution was going to prevent any progress at all. The conversation opened up more questions than it gave me answers, like what qualifies as social media? At what age do we consider the harms acceptable? Do we agree on what the harms are? How would a ban be enforced? What are the consequences for breaching the ban?

Probably the most exciting thing I did at work involved exploring the use of open telemetry by an application team at one of my clients. With many observability questions, I found that the default answer has been to gather metrics, traces, and logs from everywhere. If things can generate a metric, then they should be generated, if things can ship metrics, they should be shipped. The only problem is, no one ever stops to think about what questions you might like to ask of this data. In this particular case, an application team drowning in a fire hose of metrics, traces, and logs was unable to answer the question; How many people used my application today? One of the things that is often overlooked is the idea of proactive or conscious metric generation. All too often we rely on the ability to observe underlying systems, frameworks, or platforms and use these metrics as a proxy for what we want to observe. One of the nice things about the ability to generate metrics, open telemetry or otherwise, is the ability to be proactive in choosing the signals we surface about how an application is performing in a business context.

I’ve been having great fun with the [[Pocket Operator]] KO this week. I wouldn’t say I was particularly creative in my ability to generate rhythm or melody, but pulling together and layering sounds that I’ve made with my own voice or actions has been incredibly fun.

The week ended with a surprise letter from HMRC. At some point in the past I have miss-categorised or failed to declare some unknown source of foreign income on a self assessment tax return. What annoys me most about this letter is that, if HMRC have the information that I received foreign income, why was that not used to pre-populate and help me submit the tax returns correctly? If they know I have foreign income, publish it on the tax return and ask me to explain it. Keeping it from me surely just increases the chance of me making a mistake when trying to understand foreign tax. Either way, the letter prompted a weekend of research, accounting, and investigation. Every time I took a break, a new thought would occur to me. I would think of something that perhaps I might have missed or misrepresented, and so I’d sit down to investigate and each time I ruled it out. I think I’m making progress, but until I get to the bottom of it and cover any gaps I’m going to remain vague about where the challenges are. One thing would have really helped though; well filed financial records. Relying on financial institutions (or 3rd party) services to keep historical records turns out to have been a mistake.

Plus Minus Next

• ➕ Loved getting back into cyanotype and being creative
• ➕ Had great fun making noise with the Pocket Operator KO
• ➖ I’ve messed up a tax return at some point and have to find where
• ➖ I’ve not been sleeping well, run of poor sleep
• → Embrace the Johnny Decimal filing system that I started but never concluded

Week in Pictures