Weeknotes 17

My father-in-law was on The One Show discussing why a multi-storey car park in Liverpool burnt down, destroying 1,300 cars.

In an effort to be a better son-in-law, I extracted an animated GIF of his heroic introduction and, thanks to Collin Burger’s “How to make GIFs with FFMPEG”, ended up using this one-liner:

$ ffmpeg -ss 1499.5 -t 2.5 -i oneshow.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v] fps=12,scale=480:-1,split [a][b];[a] palettegen [p];[b][p] paletteuse" hero.gif

Following a recommendation from Leo, I listened to an episode of “On the Metal” interviewing Kenneth Finnegan about starting his own internet exchange. Despite working on the web for 20 years, it quickly became clear I had no idea how the internet really worked.

I enjoyed Nicolas Carlo’s “Avoid rewriting a legacy system from scratch, by strangling it” about the Strangler Fig Application pattern. It reminded me of the time I failed to migrate the main database in a legacy system from MongoDB to PostgreSQL while trying very hard not to rewrite it from scratch.

When we finally cancelled the project, I wrote a long explanation to the whole company (like an Etsy PSA) called “The State of Custard”. Sadly, having left the company, that is now locked inside someone else’s Basecamp account.

As part of my job search, I have spent a lot of time editing my LinkedIn profile. In particular, I have changed my “headline” many times in an attempt to concisely explain what I do. At the time of writing it is “Consultant Technical/Engineering Lead”, shamelessly inspired by Andrew McDonough but I’m sure I will continue to agonise about it.

Having tempted fate by writing that our white noise snafus were over last week, our Bluetooth speaker simply stopped charging. Sadly, no amount of WD40 could fix the problem.