Monday, April 29

 Woke up around 8ish, even though the alarm went off at 7:15am. Congested nose. Allergies? Am I sick? Yogurt, coffee. I checked if I had a fever – nope; probably the allergy. So I went to the office.

The train was pretty full, but so far I’ve never failed to find a seat. Many Spanish tourists got on the train around Times Square. Last week the train was all Frenchies going to see the Statue of Liberty at South Ferry. This week it is Spaniards. They look the same as the French tourists last week though: middle-class grey-bearded dads and meticulously-hiding-wrinkles-under-the-makeup moms, and their having good life teenage kids. They all have way too much energy for 9 in the morning on Monday. But they’re on vacation!

I was late for the standup, in by about 9:37. The team talked about the arrows on the stations that show the train direction. Pointing to the direction of the last stop, as laid out on the map, does not always make sense. Then, turned out, Will and Sunny also worked during the weekend: on the fun parts, kind of. Will is making a barometer-based locator on the station: since the GPS is unavailable underground, and various subway lines are at different depths, then the barometer helps detect what exactly line/platform the user is on without the GPS. Cool, is it not? Next, Apple recently started requiring Health data access for reading the barometer. So, users will start complaining about why the subway app requires health data access. That’s not cool. Life is never easy.

Then, I finished the code for my first task for the arriving trains display API. Turned out, there was not much to do there: all data was already available. Just find it, filter, sort, and return. So, it’s a toy task for me to play with the project a little. I’m still not happy with the code yet though: I need to learn more about Kotlin idioms. Then, I wanted to write a test for it, and I went somewhere deep into the Spring, something-service mock and autowire-auto-configure schmuck, and that still didn’t work, and it all gave me a headache, or, perhaps, I had already had a headache since my nose was dead stuffed from the allergy, and so I called it a day by 6.

At home, I took a nap. That helped. Life is not fun with a stuffed nose. I wish I could just sleep till I felt better, but instead, I read a paper inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's analysis. Bourdieu’s thought is deep; I like him; but his writing is dull. Requires clear mind. It is as dull as raw unfiltered life: it is truly true, but it is not fun anymore.

I put the paper aside and wrote this journal entry instead.