July 2026: A competition and a canal
Hello! The UK heatwaves are finally starting to let up, and now it’s regularly under 30°C I can think and write properly. Once the summer is properly over and I have more energy, I want to invest serious time in making next summer and more pleasant experience.
The highlight of my July was a birthday trip to the Dutch town of Kerkrade for the World Music Contest, where my sister’s brass band were representing England. The band played twice over two days, and came a very respectable third place in a competition stacked with the best brass bands in the world. I don’t get to see Coco play as often as I’d like, so I was glad to see her on this big stage.
I also got to ride on a bunch of Dutch trains, which is always a fun treat.
Later in the month, my partner took me on one of our “signing adventures” in west London. We’re learning BSL together, and every so often one of us plans a day trip and a series of signs to teach the other along the way. We walked along the canal out of Paddington and into west London, where I learnt words like “sunshine”, “bookshop” and “excited”. We also saw lots of cute baby birds!
Closer to home, I’m still trying to sell my house, but I took a break for a few weeks – I finally ditched my first choice of estate agent, and I’ve just relisted the account with a new agent. Fingers crossed this time I’m more successful! (In fact, I’ll be leaving the house in an hour or two so the estate agent can bring somebody round for a viewing.)
August is a fun month, with lots of picnics and fun nights with friends – and hopefully some cooler weather.
What have I been writing?
I wrote about Describing all my photos, something I’ve started doing in the last year or so to make my photo library more useful.
From my day job, I don't want to repeat repeat myself is a pair of regexes I used to find mistakes in our user-facing copy, and a Git hook to prevent committing directly to main is about having the computer enforce a rule I regularly forget.
From my personal computing, Fixing a bug with byte order marks is about my new code to convert SRT subtitles to WebVTT, and Preventing line breaks in code elements is about an improvement to my blog for writing that post.
And finally, the usual collection of small notes:
What’s making me smile?
🔥 I really enjoyed Marianne Bellotti’s book Kill it With Fire, which is about legacy modernisation projects – lots of practical advice about how to run them, and how to avoid them. This piqued my interest because it’s a mixture of software development and the long-term thinking from the world of digital preservation.
🚀 Star City continued to be excellent to the end, with Anna Maxwell-Martin and Alice Englert as particular highlights. If you enjoy Soviet-era spy thrillers with a splash of space exploration, check it out. I really hope Apple renews it for another season.
🌨️ I resonated with Nat Bennett’s article The Tech Debt Snowball Method, which matches my approach – find the smallest, easiest thing you can work on, and do that first. I’ve been doing this for eleven months in my new job, and I’d like to think I’ve made a dent in the quality of the codebase, beyond my areas of immediate responsibility.
Enjoy the rest of the summer (or the winter, if I have any readers in the Southern Hemisphere), and I’ll write again in a month.
Best,
~ Alex