This week the theme has been to figure out the first most important thing. I am not sure I’ve got it right, and I won’t get another chance. But that’s true also of the next thing I do, and the next. Life is just one long series figuring out the next most important thing and mostly getting it wrong. Read on. That’s the current next most important thing.

The current MSc module is software and application security, with a focus on malware. I thought I was going to breeze this module and baby: I was wrong. We have spent a week on decompiling and disassembling binary code. Just getting my brain around this is such a struggle. However, one or two classmates really seem to be enjoying it, and their energy is helping to drag me through it. I don’t think I’ll end up doing this low-level, granular analysis long-term, but it’s good to at least know the basics and how this stuff works. Even getting to grips with the process of turning high-level code into assembly code into binary code is fascinating. Computers! They use 1s and 0s to do things that are categorically magic.

In the world of work, I’m still fighting the intractable problem – but I’m an inch closer to solving it. I’m at the point where I’m chasing down error messages, and the messages give me a really clear insight into what I need to do next. For example, the error message will say “Resource A can’t access Resource B. Set permission X on Resource B so that Resource A can access Resource B.” And then I go and do that. And then I repeat it a couple more times until it works, and then I refactor it so that it keeps working but is written in a way that makes sense for the next guy. My commit messages are currently very long, but I know I’ll appreciate it in the future.

(My current working hypothesis is that you can tell a developer’s seniority by the length of, and care put into, their commit messages)

My next role is still taking shape, and is basically agreed. 80% there is only 20% finished, of course: because the last 20% of a project will take 80% of the resources. But I think we’ll be done in the next few weeks, and then I shall have a new thing to talk about in vagaries. I know that’s what y’all come here for. Vague things about technical skills you’ll never learn but are glad someone’s taking care of.

This has been a good week for small joys, too. A friend shared a video of a brain-training…thing? Technology? Toy? (These things overlap) for their cat, and we’ve immediately bought it. Though now I think about it perhaps teaching Salem how to use levers and drawers will come back and bite me…

Another friend shared their (light, comical) anguish at having bough a shelf to go under their sink. They had measured the space perfectly. They had not considered the pipe. We have all been there. We have all carefully measured a space, come home with something that fits the space, and realised – against all evidence – that our minds had entirely glossed over the fact that there is something already in the space. Somehow our brain has seen it so often that it has just completely elided it from the beautiful mental image we have of the thing sliding perfectly into its new home.

These things that anchor us to each other are such perfect things. The small gifts – not things, but time, thought, love. Though things are important too. And since I’ve just been told there’s a gift waiting for me in my postbox, I’ll wrap up here. A good week. A very good week!