Earlier this year, I was invited to join the wonderful Fallthrough podcast to talk about APIs, which would be my first appearance on Fallthrough.

As noted in I'm on Fallthrough: Patching Problems with Persnickety Proxies Purveyed by Paternalistic Princes, the episode on APIs was planned to come out around now, but my second appearance came out first due to the time sensitivity.

This was a fun episode, and we touched on a number of topics around APIs, how to build them, versioning and OpenAPI, and more.

The episode, An Exploration of APIs, Versioning, & HTTP is out now, and I'm looking forward to re-listening to it.

I'm also excited to say that we've got a follow-up episode planned, which will dig into things in a lot more detail, so stay tuned 👀

• Definitely felt a notable improvement in mood given the nicer weather
  • And I feel like my Dad, quite liking having the windows open for fresh air 🫣
• Apex Legends' new Relic Weapons LTM has been a lot of fun, and moreso than last season's takeover
  • (thankfully moved over to an LTM, because the community have been very whiny)
• One day, playing Apex Legends before work, then rebooting after, I got another dreaded "CPU overheating" which worried me, but it seemed to be OK after cooling a little
• Today, been back to trying to debug an issue I've been seeing with running renovate / renovate-graph locally against GitLab, hitting a segfault in git
  • But still no dice, just know that it's due to my local machine setup, as running an archlinux / alpine container doesn't see the same issue
• Set up Tailscale on my desktop, ahead of tomorrow's Batch Bunch, so I can access my Ollama setup
• Done some fixing up of my self-hosted Renovate setup, but still hitting memory limits, so may move that over to Hetzner with a bit of a better memory footprint (for the same cost)
• Seen some traffic to my site from softeng281.digitaledu.ac.nz
• There's been someone who's either been crawling my website or been very much enjoying reading my content
• Cookie tried to bring a stick in from the garden earlier, and it was so big it got stuck in the conservatory door (and stayed stuck)
• Had a nice walk with Cookie at Gravelly Hollow
• Had a nice Sunday lunch seeing Carol and Juno at Blend 😋
• Finalised the details for next week's OpenUK Digital Meetup
• Looking forward to going to Developers Developers Developers in April (as an evening trip) and meeting some folks in the DevTools space
• With some mental energy back, spent some time going through and cleaning up my TODO lists
• Noticed it was Pancake Day on Wednesday 🫣
• Excited for my first (next) Fallthrough episode to come out, and we've organised for a follow-up
• Hands Held High came on shuffle this week, and oof the lyrics hit maybe moreso in today's political climate 😬
• Got a nice massage, and got Subway on the way back 😋
• Had a nice catch-up with Abby
• Found a dying bee outside (😥) but before we could get it to some sugar water to recover, and out of the way of Cookie and Morph, we noticed some parasites on it
• After not sleeping well most of the week, had a very good night's sleep on Thursday which was restorative
• Not enjoying being back to 12 hour on-call shifts, after our follow-the-sun model for on-call has been made a little more onerous, by folks in EngProd in Australia no longer having a job
  • As it runs 0600-1800, it also means that my working hours are 100% filled up with in-hours support too, and given it's a lot of context switching, really takes it out of you
• Took a long time to read, but very much recommend the excellently written The Ideal Candidate Will Be Punched In the Stomach

Watched:

• Reacher
• Rings of Power
• Brooklyn 99
• Yes Man

A bit of a busy week:

• Was nice to chat with Tessa Kriesel on Monday, about one of her current clients, but also some more general chat
• Had a nice catch up with the Capital One folks on Wednesday
• My post Some useful SQL(ite) tips I've learned appeared on /r/SQLite and Hacker News this week, unexpectedly, but seems to have been interesting to folks, and appeared in the Hacker Newsletter too
• The weather being nicer towards the end of the week has been nice, and we've had windows open a bit more
  • Morph and Cookie have been enjoying being in the conservatory when it's warm and sunny which is cute
• Had a Saturday trip to Asda, but they only had "deep dish" pizza base which was OK, but prefer our "thin and crispy"
  • Tried the Reece's ice cream, which is alright? Not that amazing, but I'll eat it
• A very exciting Sunday morning for Cookie and Morph, with a dead pigeon in the garden (luckily neither of them tried to get it)
• A number of obligations this week have been taking a lot of mental energy away and being a bit of a drag
• Played a lot of Apex Legends this week
• GopherCon UK's CFP is open, so I've put in a few proposals for different topics
  • Including a little help from Ollama (although mostly ignored)
• Dug into Custom Datasources for Renovate, and how to test them
• I've been taking more advantage of my Ollama setup this last week
  • Got a helpful answer for my JSONata queries at work with Renovate custom datasources
  • Got some good ideas for a Tailwind-powered dashboard structure, while fleshing out what Deps.FYI could look like
  • Gave it a bit of a go for rating my Call for Papers submissions, although I didn't really listen to it much
  • It's been a bit annoying that to do bits of coding - between games of Apex Legends I'm not able to use the GPU (as it's busy gaming) so I miss out on the chance to play with it more
  • I'm fortunate to be able to use qwen2.5-coder:32b on my new GPU which has been fairly good, although if you ask it about someone, it seems very biased towards them being in the Kubernetes community 🫣
  • Also trying to work out if I can use it - with Open WebUI to take in knowledge / interact with DMD's SQLite database locally
• AMD released the 9700 XT, which is poor timing given my new 7900 XTX - although the 9700 XT isn't comparable
• Had a good chat with Adrian
• Back to listening to some tech podcasts, but still mostly listening to The Delta Flyers (and very much enjoying it)

In dependency-management-data:

• After looking into the painful process of updating the vendored code in renovate-graph, discovered a post talking about pnpm patch and so migrated over to pnpm and then set up the patching to much more easily modify the underlying dependency on renovate which so far hasn't caused any issues!

Watched:

• Life in Pieces
  • Sad to have finished it
• Reacher
• Rings of Power
  • Restarting our rewatch from season 1 (so we can watch season 2)
• Brooklyn 99
  • As our light watching programme