January 2025

I didn’t feel like I had a full go at a week in January: it was a balancing act between unexpected family obligations, new work and trying to implement some new year resolutions. After a lovely Christmas and New Year break I was keen to get stuck into work with a new client: working on some security and infrastructure migrations, then full-stack JavaScript feature development. Jack had other plans! His nursery closed for a day on the second day back due to flooding, then a week later he developed Chicken Pox. We’d had him vaccinated, so it was a mild case, but he still needed to be at home for a week. Then it was Hazza’s week of night shifts, just to round off the month. Still, we managed some nice family time together, visiting Portobello for lunch and a wander.

We got cracking again with the JavaScript meetups. We had Daniel Roe at GlasgowJS speaking about font optimisation. Daniel is a great speaker, and we’re lucky to have him here in Scotland. Exposure to all the different facets and types of JavaScript development is one reason why I run the meetups, and why I think it’s worth attending even if the topic isn’t in your usual area of work. The EdinburghJS meetup was without a venue, as FanDuel are unable to host us anymore, so we opted for a social event at JPs. This year I am altering the programme of events to provide a little more socialising time, both at our talks and adding a few more purely social events throughout the year. EdinburghJS will be at the new TravelPerk offices in February.

I have also added a Patreon page for the Scottish Technology Club. I needed to diversity the sources of income for the JavaScript meetups, as I have to personally bridge the gap between sponsorship and what we spend. I’m happy to do so, but more money means a more sustainable future for the community. Thank you to Duncan and Ian for being early supporters!

I managed to hit ~100km of running in January (squeaking the last few km on 1st Feb). I typically run Jack to and from nursery, but I have added some more long runs over Blackford in the morning. It’s nice being up high for a winter sunrise.

Hazza and I had an evening out at the Scottish Ballet’s Nutcracker, with dinner out at Matto Pizza beforehand. We’ll be back at the ballet in April for Swan Lake. I’d neither been to the Festival Theatre or the ballet before, so it was good to try something new in January.

Reading and Watching

I had a good month of reading and watching:

Medieval Horizons, Ian Mortimer is a good tour of how life changed in the Middle Ages, a period in which Mortimer claims our values and priorities were shaped. He attacks the idea of several public intellectuals and writers that a peasant from the ~distant past (1750 BC for Ian Morris, 1000 for Yuval Noah Harari) could be transported to shortly before the Industrial Revolution and find life mostly unchanged. Mortimor says that this is false, and the Middle Ages is where the bulk of the change happened.

Even our most respected public intellectuals believe that society’s development largely depended on technological innovation. My contention is not only that this view is misleading but also that it results in a cultural denigration of the Middle Ages as an unsophisticated ‘dark ages’ in the public imagination. […] What of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance? What of the Italian Renaissance? What of the great cathedrals? If you think ‘medieval’ is synonymous with backwardness, then you are exposing your own ignorance – for this was the age that gave us universities, Parliament and some of the finest architecture to be found in Europe.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, Nate Silver. Gambling, crypto, risk, AI. I feel adjacent to this online space. Interesting to take a tour through it.

I have made a commitment to read more fiction this year. I started with Things Fall Apart, and No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe giving insights into colonialism, development and the loss of society and culture. I followed up with Green Lessons by Han Kang.

I watched Lee (2023). I thought the film needed a better pace, but it still made me pick up and start reading the books that Harriet has on Lee Miller. At some point I want to post book or photo reviews on my /photography page.

I had an afternoon with Sam Enright’s Progress Reading Group discussing The Merchant of Venice and Shakespeare in education with Henry Oliver, author of The Common Reader newsletter and Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. In preparation I watched Abagail Graham’s production available on the Globe Player.

Some articles I highlighted:

• Principles, Nabeel S. Qureshi

  Fun is underrated. The best and most creative work comes from a root of joy and excitement. You can feel this in your body.

  Do things fast. Things don’t actually take much time (as measured by a stopwatch); resistance/procrastination does. “Slow is fake”. If no urgency exists, impose some.

  Figure out what your primary focus is and make progress on that every day, first thing in the morning, no exceptions. Days with 0 output are the killers. (Tyler Cowen)

  There’s a lot of alpha in being willing to do “menial” work (take notes, send out agendas, order pizza, manually inspect raw data, whatever). Beware over-delegation and being too far from the details.

• How to have a career even when OpenAI’s o3 drops, Pradyumna Prasad

  What lessons can one draw from this? I argue that the main lesson is that if your job is legible enough that people can make a dataset clearly pointing out what is right and what is wrong, you are at the highest risk for an AI model being “superhuman” at your job. It is even more risky if it is possible to articulate your thought process in a way that is verifiable.

That’s all for January folks - see you in February! 👋