Mark Carroll's Journal

I survived my first week at work. I went on-site in Edinburgh for the first three days, initially picking up my shiny new MacBook M4 Pro running Sequoia. The office turns out to be a pleasant dog-friendly space with the amenities one might hope for. Being a hybrid worker, I book desk space when I need it from the hot-desking pool. The desks are motorized adjustable desks that can become standing desks. There are very many onboarding things to do over the coming weeks, a lot to do and learn, and plenty of friendly, helpful people to meet. Despite the open-plan layout, it's not too hard to focus, not very distracting.

As usual, there's some wrestling with the Mac but, in all fairness, plenty of things did just work quite well. The most obvious wrestling was the usual: Mac users love to see things in blurry-text. Okay, all the problems I ran into this week arise because I have the temerity to plug the Mac into non-Apple hardware. For instance, the external monitors on the desks have low pixel density and recent versions of the OS have removed useful options for fixing that. I was able to solve the blur by installing iTerm2 and unchecking Anti-Aliased. Other pending issues include it applying the wrong keymap for my external keyboard and imposing some godawful acceleration on my scroll-wheel but they're in progress, I want to get some actual work done too.

Nice though the office environment is, being in transit for at least three hours per day makes me appreciate fully remote work: Wednesday felt as if it should already be Friday. I am currently taking the more expensive option: subway over to Queen Street, and the frequent faster trains aren't as crowded as I'd heard, quite tolerable. (Work has provided my laptop a privacy screen to limit viewing angle.) My current route to the office includes climbing the 124 News Steps which means I get the hardest part of my workday out of the way at the start. The bus would be cheapest except I'd probably want extra bus to and from the stations: at each end, the bus station is further than the railway. A compromise might be the limited rail ticket: I'd end up working long days but could probably just walk at both ends around the intercity portion. Belatedly, I also wonder if I should be masking for the railway journey: perhaps it's outstandingly the riskiest among my habits.

Having been made redundant from my fully remote job, I am starting a new job that has me on-site in Edinburgh twice per week. In looking into how to make this a cost-effective habit, first I thought of railcards but there don't seem to be any that apply. Fortunately, there are flexi ticket bundles that are useful for people taking a few trips within a longer period, which seem to be the best option.

Among the flexible tickets, the two obvious kinds appear to be from ScotRail which would cost me around £22 per day and allow me to travel on all the relevant trains, and from CrossCountry which for around £15 per day allow me to travel on only their trains which are the minority, only a couple of plausible ones each day either way. We need to save money where we can but the latter option has me arriving back into Glasgow at 21.22 at the earliest.

I didn't discover the cheaper option until after I had bought the other, at least for the initial period. After I learn more about the peak-time trains and the culture in the office, I can look into limiting which trains I may take. Perhaps a couple of longer workdays each week will make sense.

Having transcribed the timetable into LibreOffice Calc and tried some sorts, it seems to me that Central Station has those couple of useful CrossCountry trains which take at least an hour, plus some ScotRail services that take rather longer still. Queen Street station is further from me on foot, easy by subway though, and offers only ScotRail services that run frequently and take less than an hour but are anecdotally rather busy.

Filing taxes is on paper for me this year. After Mint Mobile ended their previous international roaming, I allowed my US cellphone plan to lapse. Although the IRS typically expects expats to file taxes, its services also generally require them to have a US telephone number. When they can make it easier for expats to actually deal with them then they won't have to process my paper mail any more. As it is, it helps to be able to attach a separate page anyway because Form 1116 Part II doesn't have enough space for reporting monthly salary deposits. If I end up working as a contractor later this year then I may also have to start attaching a form from the UK's Home Office showing that I am not liable for Self Employment tax.

At work, I had to learn about a particular distributed cryptocurrency exchange. Liquidity is provided by set of reserves that each contain coins of two different kinds, an equal value of each.

For pricing an exchange "from" the coin we hold "to" the coin we want, using one of these reserves of two different kinds of coin, we have:

r_f

how much of the "from" coin is in the reserve

r_t

how much of the "to" coin is in the reserve

a_f

how much of the "from" coin we want to exchange

a_t

how much of the "to" coin we are to receive

c_n

a constant determining the transaction cost

c_d

another constant determining the transaction cost, a little larger than c_n

It turns out that we decide how much currency users receive by,


I found this quite interesting. In my ignorance, I don't know if it's a standard approach for such currency exchanges. The formula seems to have some reasonable properties, in terms of things like how the price increases as one's swapping to a currency that there is now less of (or would be less of after the swap).

(Dreamwidth doesn't appear to allow <math> markup so I did what I could.)

I am a Professional Member of the British Computer Society (BCS) who handle accreditation for my Chartered IT Professional (CITP) status. At the moment, I do not much use my membership except for being able to list it on my resumé. The royal charter granted by the Privy Council to the BCS allows them to award such status so, under the established British conventions, I can reasonably use MBCS, CITP post-nominally after my MA (Cantab).

My latest annual renewal fee was £216 and, right now, money is tight. I went ahead and paid it but I wonder how much employers actually notice and care. I used my membership a little more during the COVID-19 pandemic when more talks were broadcast online but, between work and family, I have little time at the moment for interacting with fellow professionals, etc. and even less for travelling to do so. I suppose that I shall see how things stand when renewal next comes around.

My programming at work recently has mostly followed a familiar sequence. For each component,

1. figure out how to make it work


2. for a missing piece, write its code, rinse and repeat


3. test and debug it.

Having finished that third step on Wednesday for a new page in a webapp, I am now in the midst of the second step for a related backend service.

The second step is hardest on my sleep when I think about detail of what to do next and just want to get up and do it. It is also the most interesting with its rinse and repeat in that, even if I do not start with a complete picture, if I keep filling in the next piece that I see that I need then eventually I end up having done them all. Sometimes, I find myself building a scaffold of increasing abstraction, such that I build pieces that enable other pieces to be built more easily: earlier pieces make the shape of other pieces clearer and simpler. Fortunately, it always seems that if any pieces remain to be done then at least one of them has a clear path forward, so they all get done in the end.

It made sense to complete my work on the webapp component first because the product and user experience people can test and improve it while I work on the less visible and interactive facets of the project. Further, the component I am working on now isn't strictly required for launch as long as it follows soon afterward. I expect to be able to finish it this coming week.

( I was busy with a family visit. )

( The rented Volvo was a little annoying. )

I have also been involved with a major product launch at work and have been somewhat covering as colleagues have also been taking some days off. At least work stuff has gone fairly smoothly and I have enjoyed getting back to writing some code. My work-life balance is back under control, at least to a first approximation.

Given the above activity, last weekend was my first reasonably free one for quite some time. I spent the Saturday with family visiting from Dundee. Now we are to ready the flat for relisting for sale through a different agent. Among all that, we will try to find another weekend for camping, not that the current weather is encouraging.

( Our dog's a good weight, I am finally dieting to improve mine. )

( Money's tight at the moment. )

I have not posted any entries here for well over a month. It's because I find myself short of time for doing personal things on the computer. I have not even addressed the various minor computer issues that I mentioned previously.

One reason for my being short of time is that I have been putting plenty of hours in with my day job. As well as learning my way around, I am now leading the delivery of an overdue project, mixing both people and project management with coding. This suits me well, it's what I am good at and what is needed, and I am paid decently for my efforts and experience, but it leaves me with little spare time on weekdays.

Another reason is that we now have a puppy, mostly a brindle Shih Tzu but clearly a bit of something else too, his snout is a little longer which may help his respiration. He is very much R.'s but we all help out and I love to be with R. so I will tend to come along on walks and suchlike when I can. He gets on reasonably with our two kittens, now they are used to each other. I was interested to find that, even on his short legs, he can outrun me. For running, rather than alternating paws for his steps, he switches to bounding with bilateral symmetry in how he moves. This weekend, he's learned to enjoy snow.

These changes raise some questions. With working, happily being with R., helping with pressing chores, winding down at the end of the evenings, I don't have much time left for lower-priority pursuits like personal computing, social media, playing music, etc. I should figure out what is important enough and how to fit it in, and deal with that the list cannot be as long as I might like.

My new job has plenty of nice people but keeps me doubly busy at this point because I want to already be somewhat productive but I have plenty to learn, in this case including React, TypeScript, and Solidity. It's one of these things where I keep rereading things and being confused, and I know it just takes enough effort, I'll look back on this next year with a reasonable grasp of what I am stumbling my way through now. I know some stuff well but, of course, the most glaring for me is the stuff I don't. In particular, I really need to get a better grip of the cryptocurrency software ecosystem and the abstractions it assumes.

Also keeping me busy is the ongoing administrivia that is the fallout from my previous employer's liquidation, with my wanting to ensure that I do all that is necessary to assert my claim as a creditor. Fortunately, I am not alone in this.

Last weekend was not much of an opportunity to catch up in that it started with water leaking into our flat. We are not alone in this either: it affected a few flats on that side, and the factor is getting a property services company out to take a look. The consensus suspicion that that more work is needed on the roof. In our case, no terrible damage was done, and we do have buildings insurance, but we had to move furniture around, rush out to buy a powerful dehumidifier, etc.

Another impediment is various minor computer issues. For instance, since I reinstalled Linux, my personal computer doesn't seem to be able to unmute the microphone, or switch from X to a virtual console then back, and I still have to wrangle wee-slack. In the meantime, my old work laptop can't hold a steady wifi connection, an issue I worked around before a video conference today by means of my very long ethernet cable.

Yesterday, I headed into our Edinburgh office for the first time since moving to Glasgow. Technically I am wholly remote but I like to show my face occasionally if possible, there are empty desks for visitors. There are many trains between the two cities, and the express trains take less than an hour, it turned out to be a pleasant, easy journey. I walked through Princes Street Gardens on the way to the office, and I stayed after work to socialize before heading back home. It is most welcome to see colleagues now and again and it was noted that I have been employed with them for a year. Luck held well enough for me to avoid heavy rain. The day may have tired me out: I slept late this morning and felt lethargic afterward.