Wednesday, September 4

[soid]

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]).