Bee happy 🐝

Inspired by my friend Carol and her lifenotes :)

✨ Highlights

• Started my new job at 🐝 Bumble! The people there are lovely, my new line manager is incredibly supportive, the codebase (and engineering team, and user base, and just… everything) is massive, but there’s lots of documentation and the pressure to get to grips with things and learn it all is purely from my own head and they’ve been great in onboarding me 💛
• Bramley started going to daycare - it’s been a bit of a struggle lately, I spend so much of my time with him and my wife saw how I could use a break. So twice a week he’s in daycare and he comes home muddy, worn out, and from what we’ve seen he’s been so very happy there making friends and playing with other dogs 🐶
• Got new computer monitors and adjusted my desk setup 🖥️
• Hung out with Anthony, he came over and we drunk tea, had lunch, put the world to rights, went for a walk and just caught up. He’s a wonderful person and even back when we worked together he was a close and dear friend and I’m glad I got to spend a few hours with him 💖
• Started a rework of RequestBox, it’s a little side project I built in a weekend that I’ve expanded with a few features here and there. I wanted to try some things out and ended up reworking the back-end and redesigning the UI, so far I’m quite happy with it 🟪
• Made plans for trips and some weekends away with my beloved wife 💖

🎮 Played

• Dorfromantik. I’m really enjoying playing this on the Steam Deck while sat with my wife on the sofa. It’s a really chilled game
• Sonic the Hedgehog (yes, the first one!) on Steam Deck
• Playing through Mario Kart 8 Deluxe again
• Plus the usual Overwatch 2 and Apex Legends
• Cyberpunk 2077. I’ve been playing this in my office with Hue Sync app on the PC and the immersion has been really cool!

👀 Read/Watched

• The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross - from The Laundry Files. I’ve read a number of these before but this year I want to read through all of the books that are in the series so I started reading this again
• Understanding Privacy, Heather Burns - I’ve seen Heather talk at a number of conferences before and the level of knowledge, insight, and passion she has is just incredible. The book only arrived on the 30th January so I’ve only just started but even in the ~50 or so pages I’ve read so far it’s a fantastic read
• “Extremely Hardcore”, The Verge - an article about El Musko’s takeover of Twitter and subsequent failings to do anything good there
• Glass Onion - technically it was in December, but I wanted to include it because it was just so good
• The Last of Us - wow. Just wow. If you liked the games, you’ll love this
• Fringe - I’d heard of it before but hadn’t watched it, a friend mentioned it so I thought I’d check it out, really enjoying it so far!
• The Legend of Vox Machina - season 2 started this year! I love CR and while I don’t watch the latest campaign (finding the time to watch it is tough!) the first campaign holds a dear place in my heart and seeing the stories told through these cartoons is amazing

📷 Pics