This week at work has been a slog. I’ve been chasing a bug around and around, and finally found where it originated. I need to fix it in a way that’s fundamentally different to the way the code is currently implemented, and that in itself makes me wonder whether what I really need to do is patch the underlying library.

In the business, we call this yak shaving: fixing one thing means fixing a different thing, and fixing that thing requires fixing something else, and before long you’ve raised an army and invaded Switzerland because you couldn’t find the bottle opener. It’s the same spirit as the poem ‘for want of a nail‘.

I’m building something at the moment that has a known edge case at around 4,000 transactions per second. It’s something we deal with often enough that we need to be prepared for it, and something the owners of the library that we’re using did not design for at all. Fixing it for our specific case means digging into a lot of their assumptions and finding they don’t work for our edge case. Instead, I think I’m doing to need to design something almost completely new that looks duplicative on the surface. It feels messy, but I’m not sure it’s my fault that it’s messy, and I probably need to get over that frustration and just build on the mess.

The MSc rumbles on. This module is much, much more interesting than the last. It’s cybercrime, which is simultaneously a subset of existing crime and a whole new beast. It can be tempting to get stuck in semantic rabbit holes – is ransomware cyber enabled (the crime of ransom/blackmail enabled by computers) or is it computer dependent (impossible without an information technology system)?

I don’t think the answer’s actually too important. I think what most fascinating at the moment is the way the market is criminal services is evolving. We’re seeing specialisation within markets, and the commensurate struggles in law enforcement to attribute things. Criminal organisations are subcontracting, and that makes it impossible to say who’s behind a crime. You can work out who did it, which hackers-for-hire have left their fingerprints on it, but that’s useless when you realise the data’s going to be passed to a broker (who doesn’t know where it came from) who’ll wash it with other data and sell a transformed product to someone else in turn.

You might as well try to figure out the name of a cow from the milk in your tea.

I had a very cultured weekend. On Saturday we saw Cruise, which was absolutely remarkable. We saw the penultimate show, and Jack is somehow still electric. Wherever it pops up next, do go and see it. It’s a one-man show, about 1hr 40, and if you see the matinee you can get out into the cool air and take a few breaths. Deep breaths, because you’ve been breathing shallow all the way through. And then get some cake. Definitely get some cake.

I also had a lovely session with the writing group. I’ve gotten into the habit of writing to the prompt, which has produced a couple of short pieces that I’m really pleased with. I’ll drop the most recent one here, about a kiss from a little while ago. The prompt was spotted/lightness, and I got an A* from the workshop leader, which is a totally natural and normal thing to want from your peers.

I spotted her across the concourse. She was smaller than she'd sounded on the phone, where her voice had filled all of the available space. I spotted her before she spotted me, and I was able to get close to her before she saw me.

There aren't words. The space between us is so dense with tension that light bends weirdly through it, fracturing into colours. A man engrossed in his phone walks through it by accident and is turned into a jelly marble that makes a dent in the floor when it falls.

I curl a finger under her chin and raise it up, slowly. My heart is so loud that it sets the rhythm for people walking; makes the great clock overhead tick staccato time. She looks at me with challenge and desire and caution. She reaches her hand up to my face and for the first time I know what it is to be touched by her. My hair grows out just so that it can stand on end, so electric is her touch.

She starts to stand on her tiptoes and immediately obviates the need as I melt at least two inches. The tips of our noses touch and our breath intermingles as we gasp. Her nose is cold and her heart is warm and her lips -

At last, I touch my lips to hers; or she touches hers to mine. Two pairs of lips, having crossed thousands of miles, touch.

And the roof is torn away and the stars come rushing in and every living soul on the concourse of London Euston station is vaporised. Since every person there had either arrived from Manchester to the worst city in England, or was leaving from London to go to the worst city in England, it was frankly something of a relief to instead be reduced to your component atoms.

All of them except Dr Mary Marsh, who'd just bought an extremely expensive sandwich on her company credit card and had been really looking forward to it.

We opened our eyes. Our lips parted, barely.

Everything around us was as it was before, except the look of delight on the face of one Dr Mary Marsh, who would never know how close she'd come to not enjoying that sandwich.

Nothing within us would ever be as it was before.

Hello friends.

I’m writing just off the back of an exam that took about 6 hours of work. I have a new appreciation for the benefit I get from my employer giving me paid time off to do the thing: another member of my cohort is sweating over the paper from a field somewhere.

I’m writing just off the back of an exhibit at a local museum and gallery that asks whether there are better way to run the economy.

I’m writing off the back of realising that I have a whole week stretching ahead of me: a week of learning about a new city and making notes and putting the things I like into a story.

I am wrung out, in the best possible way.

FYI: this is a slightly creepy weeknotes. I want you to imagine it being given by a guy standing on a TED-style stage.

These last couple of weeks I’ve snuck in an hour of just creating things with some friends. It’s been a real pleasure. I did some fiction writing and some coding that’s just for practice. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it. Making things is good.

I was looking at my stats the other day, and I saw someone had stumbled into some of my old weeknotes. Back at the beginning of season 8, actually. I went back and read them. They’re really good. They’re really good. They’re so much more bold than the insipid, high-level nonsense I’ve been pushing out for the past quarter.

I think I’ve been scared, because I got a couple of knocks to my confidence, of putting my entire intense self out here. I also hit 25 whole subscribers, and I don’t know – I’m suddenly more aware that people read these things I write. But they signed up for a reason and this aint it.

So. Back to basics. Back to proper work.

Onwards.

I’ve done a lot more AWS this week, but it’s all flowed fairly nicely. So you’ll be glad/disappointed to hear that this week it’s back to the every day.

This week I learned a lot about AWS, and I need to write it down before I forget it again. If you came here for high drama, I apologise; if you came here for information on the AWS Python CDK, you’re in luck (and a tragic minority)