March 2023

March has been really fun. Spring has arrived in Edinburgh, sunny days and blue skies. The crocuses have come out in the Meadows.

The highlight of this month was a trip to Center Parcs with Harriet’s friends from University. I had never been to Center Parcs before. I have a memory from school age of understanding that it was a large tropical dome in the countryside, but I had no other information on what was there. Turns out this is mostly accurate. It’s a big swimming pool in a glass house with chalets in a forest. We went to Whinfell Forest Center Parcs, near Penrith. I sneaked in a morning run every day, and we took Jack for his first swim. Although not my usual choice for holiday destination, it was really good for a family holiday. The other kids we were with had a great time too.

This month has been very busy with work, trying to wrap up before our holiday. I spent most of the month refactoring a large React, web app, and a little more of the month updating some PHP code I wrote several years ago.

We held another EdinburghJS event, with talks on text and machine learning, and WebGL. It was well attended and very interesting. I’m pleased that we are still growing the event.

I did make it back to EH3 Milers running club, which I’m hoping to keep up with this summer.

I read three books this month:

• Red Plenty, Francis Spufford. Fiction based on the economic incentives of the Soviet Union.
• Red Crosses, Sasha Filipenko. Fiction set in the Soviet Union.
• Red Notice, Bill Browder. An account of Bill Browder investing in Russia, exposing corruption and the killing of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky,

I’m off to Australia and New Zealand for a couple of months. I’ll be posting on instagram if you want to follow along there.