Some time off, some progress on things, and a bug. A big, annoying, Bug.

MiSc

I have paid the good people at Obsidian some money and my notes for the MSc can now be read online. At some point I’ll figure out how to have them at msc.caffeinatedpunctuation.co.uk, but right now they’re not. They’re over there.

I put the link in the Slack instance my classmates and I have been provided, and three of my classmates very kindly sent me a little coffee donation. It is unreasonably kind of them, and also makes me wonder whether I should review the previous content and maybe add in a bit more. There were a few weeks in the first term where I completely zoned out…

More people have been joining and I was misidentified as an admin. This is not the first time folks have joined a new space and said “Ah, that bossy White man, he must be in charge”. I wish it were not the case, but I have noticed this about myself. Sometimes it is a good trait – to take charge of a group of people who want to achieve something, give them a boost, and then let them get on with it. Other times I need to be a whole lot quieter and let people struggle and figure things out for themselves.

My discomfort at other people’s struggle is not an invitation to cast myself as their saviour.

Work

I have been tied up for the last four days with a bug whose origin I think I finally hunted down on Thursday. It’s been a really good opportunity for me to deep dive into the code and understand the process and data flows that happen under the hood.

I have zero idea how to fix it, yet, but knowing is half the battle.

The easy half, yes.

On the Fast Stream algorithm, we’re doing an internal-open show and tell in a couple of weeks. I’m actually quite nervous about this. This is the first time that a process that’s been happening in people’s heads has been written down, and it’s written down in public. I think there’ll be good, hard questions to ask about how we decided things, and what routes there are to change or challenge the policy. My hope is that this is the first step in co-designing this service: we expose what we’re doing at the moment, we make it transparent, and then we engage with everyone using the service to try to ensure it meets those needs.

On this, I had a good discussion with a friend about whether I (specifically me) should be doing user research and if so, with whom? Are Fast Streamers users of a service where they’re also fundamentally the product? The immediate users of my script are the people running the service, and this script exists only to automate a section of the service. They’re my users, and I’m just encoding policy into beautiful, idiomatic Python. If the policy were to change, the code would change. But does the existence of the code make me responsible for user research?

I don’t think it does. I just write the code. If I had a strong moral disagreement with what I was encoding, what I was automating, I wouldn’t write the code. But I don’t.

And yet there is something there, something that says: we are making this real. We are writing down what we think and in doing so we have opened a window for someone to tell us we are wrong. And with my background and my experience, do I have a duty to push that window open and encourage that feedback?

I don’t know. I want to tie this up, but I don’t know. Maybe you do.