Tuesday, September 4

 I woke up around 8:30, pretty easily. 

Drank coffee while reading a page of Newport's "Slow Productivity"; it seems pretty similar to his deep work ideas. Don't try to do too much, focus on one thing. On the train, I read Kotlin in Action; and kept drinking coffee. 

It was not a super productive start of the week: looking over the tasks, thinking of what I didn’t push to finish on Friday. Two app tickets (Sentry integration and Redux refactoring), and the lay-up trains edge case. 

Will posted a few points about Cursor. Trying it. Seems like a lot of hype around it. But works well for what it’s worth. Select code, CMD+K, describe what to do, and it shows the diff to approve. Karpathy says he stopped writing code and writes only English with it.

Lunch with Angela in the park; we both brought lunch. I brought my last night’s cooked moghrabieh. We talked about vacations, beaches, and mountains. Reminded me to check the ski resort passes for the winter. Epic, or no Epic, – that’s the question. $1K for a dozen resorts on the East Coast, and a few in Europe, and in Japan; could go travel somewhere for a week, and have fun weekends. But Angela says skiing on this coast is absolutely sucks: too icy. So, thinking.

Then, unexpectedly productive – finished those two app’s tasks, and fixed the lay-up train case on the backend; I even had some time to think of what’s next.

Back home by 7. The weather was just great; fresh cool air, not cold, not hot; perfect. I was thinking of hanging out in downtown, doing nothing, chilling in the park, but then I thought nope, let’s go for a run. That was a bit hard to push myself to do, but I finished 5K. 

B already ate early dinner by the time I finished running; so I cooked myself some pasta, and we watched an episode of “Watership Down”. Hazel almost died. “There's no more to fear in death than in the changing of the seasons”. Yay.

Wednesday, September 4

Woke up at 7:30 – easily, then I snoozed the alarm for 10 minutes, then for another 10, and it was 8:20 already. I brewed some coffee, picked up a cookie, then headed to the train. As it turned out there were delays on the subway; the wait for 8 minutes, then getting on the crowded train. The train was crowded, but some seats are still empty, with inconsiderate people taking more space. I kept standing for another couple minutes, then squeezed in on a seat between a relaxed dude and a lady in a dress without sleeves; backpack put on my knees, finally, trying to to bump people with my elbows, I pulled my iPad from the backpack. I continued reading Kotlin in Action; not much new in the book, but refreshing Kotlin idioms, and somewhat enjoying the structure of the book; it’s a good book.

By 9:25 I realized I’m not making it to the standup at 9:30. So I got off Christopher St, exited the subway and ended up on a bench at Stonewall park. I called to the meeting. Everyone was working from home, it seemed from the videos. I promised to get started on reading the bus GPS feed. The temperature was about 65ºF, nice and sunny, I didn’t wanna leave the bench, dreaming of how cool it’d be to live in downtown. I went back to the train.

In the office I started reading the code related to buses; a few data feeds, a few components parsing and merging it. What were I gonna do there I still didn’t know. 

At 11, I got invited to a meeting about project transfer to our team; the beacons train tracking on the B division. That went pretty interesting. The train on Flushing and Canarsie lines are tracked with inches precision (great), but the servers that push the data to us are old and do it only every 30 seconds. They were telling us we have to wait till those servers upgrade next year.

We went for lunch with Kenny. Talked about projects, bus tracking – he works on the buses tab on the client, gossiped a bit about Sunny. Sunny is a character; the way he speaks can feel at times offensive. But knowing him – it’s just Sunny, – that’s how he speaks; that is nothing personal. 

Then I read some of the bus existing code, gathering questions for Sunny. Sunny was interviewing someone. I couldn’t tell if it was going very good or very bad. Turned out it went very well. 

Then I talked to Sunny about my bus tracking project. Take the GPS coordinates from the queue, updated every 30 seconds, and merge with the slower feeds, so we get more fresh locations on the client. The plan is for the buses to send us pings every 5 seconds, but the team that is working on it says it’ll run only next year. How does it work now? Now, it turns out, it’s the same 30 seconds + refresh within 20 seconds, depending on how lucky it gets. So I’ll get read of those random up to 20 seconds delay for now, and later the queue will be more frequently updated. Okay, seems fair; that is not as much work as tracking the trains underground. 

Then worked on the parsing part. Cursor didn’t work with Kotlin that well, so I switched back to Intellij; CoPilot was too dumb compared to Cursor, so I ended up just coding myself. I went home by 6. Kenny was still in the office; it was unusual. I forgot to ask him how 1:1 with Will went.

At home, we warmed up our moghrabieh, and ate it with salad, drinking tomato juice. B had some good news about their film script with Y. Then I read something light (wars, word affairs, Indian trading sanctioned tech to Russia [another day YouTube was recommending me something from WION, Indian television – the picture they paint there is only comparable to Russian propagandal showing bravado about big bombs, etc]).