August 2025: Free time and fresh starts
Hello friends! August is over and autumn is fast approaching, which is easily my favourite season. Cosy vibes, warm jumpers, and golden leaves on the trees. Bliss.
I spent the first three weeks of August resting between jobs. I had a lot of nice day trips visiting friends and family, getting away from my desk and allowing myself to relax – and ticking off a few new railway stations! This weekend alone, I was in London with friends to celebrate the 1000th performance of Operation Mincemeat in the West End, then in Oxford the next day for the wedding of a dear friend.
Some other highlights of my time off:
- A trip to Greenwich Park, where I met an incredibly cute and friendly family of baby goslings, and I got to travel to the delightfully-named station “Maze Hill”.
- I took London’s river boat all the way from Battersea to Putney, where I met a friend for dinner. If you’ve never seen London by boat, it’s a great way to see the city.
- My partner and I went to Ware, where I get my pictures framed. After ordering my next set of frames, we walked along a a canal that runs through Ware and the nearby villages. On the way back, we took a train from St Margarets.
I had a lovely rest, and I’m so glad I was able to do this. It’s the first time I’ve taken a break between jobs since I started working, and in hindsight I was foolish not to do it before – but now I know, and I’ll do it again someday.
I started my new job about a fortnight ago. I’m a software developer on the control plane team at Tailscale – Tailscale is a VPN that can connect computers, even if they’re not physically near each other. I worked in networking before I worked in cultural heritage, so this feels like a bit of a return.
The first few weeks of any job are always tiring as you’re overwhelmed by all the new stuff to learn, but I’m enjoying it so far and I like the people I’m working with. The tiredness is also offset by the fact that I’m now working from home, so I’m not worn out from commuting each day.
The beginning of August was all play, no work, and now the pendulum has swung in the other direction. I’m hoping that as I settle into my new job more, I can find a better balance.
What have I been writing?
I didn’t write much in August, because I took a rest from writing as much as anything else. Part of me was tempted to use my time off as an opportunity to do some bigger projects, but I’m glad I didn’t – the point of pausing work is to not work, not to fill the time with replacement work!
This means I only wrote two articles, putting a capstone on some Python projects. Tailscale almost exclusively writes in Go, so I’ll be writing less Python for a while. The first article is Create space-saving clones on macOS, and the second is Using vcrpy to test HTTP interactions.
I also posted nine “today I learned” posts, and you can already see me starting to use Go:
- Looking up posts in the Bluesky API
- Get the avatar URL for a Bluesky user
- My preferred options for SmartyPants in Python
- How to list the tests that will be run by a “go test” command
- Repeatedly run flaky Go tests with “stress”
- How to play with SQLite functions without real data
- The @ symbol was added to Morse code in 2004
- Discard a variable in a JavaScript object spread by assigning it to “_”
- The person who runs the Cambridge NTP servers has an excellent email address
Despite the slowdown in August, I’ve already published 10% more this year than I did in all of 2024, which was my previous high watermark. The articles/TIL split is really working wonders.
What’s making me smile?
🤴🏿 The King is Dead, by Benjamin Dean is a YA thriller set in the Royal household. I’m not usually interested in the inner workings of monarchy, but a story that follows the first Black and queer heir to the throne caught my interest. It’s a fun and intriguing mystery and I want to read more books by this author.
🏰 The seventh season of Game Changer really stuck the landing. The tenth episode was a presidential-style debate with five improv comedians, then the surprise finale was a switcharoo where Sam Reich, the host, found himself trapped in an escape room based on the show’s history. It was a love letter to the show’s fun and creativity, and I have no idea how they’ll top it for season eight.
🍰 Love & Other Disasters, by Anita Kelly is a queer romance set against the backdrop of a cooking TV show. It’s a prequel to How You Get the Girl, which I read for book club in June. I enjoyed it, especially because it’s the first romance I’ve read in a while that features a non-binary main character, a particular resonance for me.
🚀 The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail is my favourite episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds over the three seasons we’ve had so far. The TOS bridge crew is starting to form, there’s some fun action, and we get a thoughtful reflection on how people respond under pressure.
🌈 The Iconfactory just released Tot 2.0, which is a cute and colourful note-taking app. I use it on all my devices to take short notes during the day. It’s not a full-fledged notes app like Obsidian or OneNote, but it’s great for quick capture.
I hope you all stay warm and cosy as autumn arrives, and I’ll email you again at the end of the month.
Best,
~ Alex