Symbolic Forest

It’s almost the end of August, already.

If you ever scan your eyes down the list of links to the various archive pages on this blog—somewhere over on the right on desktop, right down the bottom on mobile, at least with the current design—you’ll see there were only five posts published here this month. Over the last three months in fact, there has been a bit of a drop-off in posting, compared to the other months since the blog was relaunched.

There are reasons for that, which I’m not going to go into here but which mostly involve having other outlets for my writing. Some of it might be published one day, and some won’t be, but that isn’t really the point of this post. The thing I wanted to talk about today is: does it really matter?

This initially popped into my mind at work a few months back, when I was preparing to interview a potential job candidate. Naturally beforehand I did all the usual background research on the candidate in question, looking at what social media profiles they had listed on their CV, hunting down some of the ones they hadn’t listed, and reading all the other links they’d put on their CV. The person in question included a link to a blog. When I followed it up, I found I really enjoyed the articles I found there (all of them tech-related in some way), but there were only a handful. This candidate had started a blog up in lockdown, had updated it a couple of times, and then nothing more. It was still sitting there on their CV, even thought it seemed to be getting a little bit cobwebby.

But does that matter? Well, frankly, it shouldn’t. If you’re interviewing a candidate for a job, you’re interviewing them, not their sticking power at a spare-time project. This blog, on the other hand, is never getting near anyone who might want to employ me, so it doesn’t matter at all if I go a little quiet for a few months, a few years, or even forever. It’s sad, a little, to see someone has started a project only to see it sputter out barely before it has started, but I should try to avoid letting it colour my opinion of them, particularly my opinion of them in a different context.

This site has been a little quiet, but it’s not as if I ever posted in any way consistently to begin with. It comes and goes according to my whims and inspiration, and whether or not I remember to write my ideas down. As I write it largely (but not entirely) for my own amusement, it shouldn’t really matter too much. I do gather information on how many people read this stuff, but I rarely actually look at that information. If I write anything for you specifically to read, I’ll tell you, but otherwise these words are just being thrown out into the electronic void. Some day, there might be an echo back, but I don’t really expect one.

Keyword noise: blogging.

We’re getting to the time of year now when it’s properly dark before a reasonable bedtime; as opposed to a couple of months ago, when it is still twilight in the deepest part of the night, which around here happens at about quarter past one in summer. August, by comparison, is the time of year when I can go outside at 10pm and see if the sky is clear enough to do a small bit of stargazing before bed. It’s too late to wake up The Child Who Likes Space, who nominally owns the telescope, but nevertheless, I rationalise, I can always tell him about it in the morning.

A while ago, I noticed that according to timeanddate.com’s planet apparent size calculator, Jupiter would have a relatively large disc right now. Right now, in fact, it’s receding from us, but it’s still a relatively chunky 49 arcseconds wide. Still a dot to the naked eye—the Moon is about 36 times bigger in apparent diameter if my rough mental calculations are correct—but big for a sky object, and with the best chance we would have of seeing features on it. Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed that Jupiter and Saturn together, although relatively low in the sky, are very definitely the brightest things in the south-eastern sky when I go to bed. So last night, as the sky was almost clear, I decided to get the telescope out.

Last spring I found it rather hard to get the telescope set up in the new garden, due to the street light that shines directly into it over the garden wall. Back then, though, the garden was a rocky, rubble-strewn wasteland, which didn’t help. Now it’s grassed, and at the moment I can tuck the camping table and the telescope into a relatively shady distant corner; from which both planets were shining bright in the sky. It was as easy as any astronomy I could think of: set up the telescope, point the finder on Jupiter, and as soon as I had focused, I had the planet and the four Galilean moons right in the centre of the eyepiece. All four of the moons were on the same side of the planet last night, Io just visible almost touching the planetary disc, the other three clear and sharp and separate spread out to the east of the planet. Jupiter itself was a fairly uniform cream colour, with a thin, darker, more reddish band visible near its equator. It seemed so sharp and clear, much more clear and bright than a photograph.

After Jupiter, I trained the spotter on Saturn, much smaller in the sky. At first it just seemed to be an oval blob, but I’d knocked the focus off slightly. Tweaking it showed the planet, orange in colour, and its rings. We don’t have anywhere near enough magnification to show the ring divisions, and the rings and the planet seemed to have a fully uniform colour. It’s strange to think that when Stegosaurs were alive and tramping the planet, Saturn probably didn’t have any rings at all. I couldn’t make out any of the planet’s moons, but I know they are much fainter than those of Jupiter, my eyes probably hadn’t had time to fully adapt to the dark, and I didn’t know where to be looking in any case. I wonder how different the history of science would have been, if Jupiter didn’t have four clear bright moons for Galileo to spot easily with his early telescopes.

Incidentally, due to geometry, it’s impossible for the planets orbiting outside Earth to have phases like the Moon does: their discs will always appear from our standpoint to be fully illuminated. This coming winter Venus will be the largest planet in the sky—it peaks at just under 63 arcseconds on January 8^th—and it will be interesting to see if around then more than a thin crescent is visible. Assuming the skies are clear, of course.

Keyword noise: astronomy, planets, Jupiter, Saturn, moons, Galilean Moons, Io, Venus.

This blog is now a whole sixteen years old. At least, it’s now sixteen years from the date of the first official post. Looking at the calendar for that year, the site was put live on a Saturday, the day after someone had driven into the side of my car. Well, at least I had some content to post about. Since then there’s been over a thousand posts in total, I think, if you include all of the complete-nonsense ones that have been edited out in the interim.

Of course, there have been a few hiatuses over the course of the last sixteen years, some of which were longer than others. The site only really came back from its longest hiatus as a lockdown project, last summer, but it’s provided something of an outlet for me ever since. Whether it will still be going in another sixteen years’ time is, of course, a complete unknown, but we can only move in that direction and find out, can’t we.

Keyword noise: anniversaries.

Back in May, the latest post in the Books I Haven’t Read series was about *The Hills Of Wales* by Jim Perrin, a book which I felt had a somewhat exclusive and elitist approach to said hills. At the time I read it, or at least part of it, I was staying in a cottage under Moel y Gest, within sight of the Moelwynion, so the hills of Wales were very real and very much on the doorstep. For that matter, the hills of Wales are on the doorstep of my home, too, and the issue of why hills such as Yr Wyddfa, the Moelwynion and all the others of the Eryri massif are seen as valid and special in a way that the worn-out, lived-on hills of the south such as Mynydd Machen, Twmbarlwm and the Blorenge are not, is a whole ‘nother topic in itself. The hills of the North, after all, are almost as industrialised as the hills of the South, particularly in the case of places like Parys Mountain or Penmaenmawr which have been industrial sites for thousands of years. Putting that aside, my plan was always to come home and write about my own responses to the hills of North Wales and what they mean to me; but since May it has stayed on the to-do pile.

Last week, however, I was away again, this time to the area around Aberteifi/Cardigan in West Wales. Driving along the main road north from Aberteifi towards Aberaeron and Aberystwyth, I glanced to my left and saw the sparkling, shining seas of Cardigan Bay. The air was so clear I could see the mountains on the far side of the bay in the distance. I could only glance briefly—I was driving, after all—but there unmistakably in the distance was the lonely outline of Moel y Gest, and alongside it the double-peaked ridge of the Moelwynion. It filled me with a sudden thrill, spotting a skyline I recognised from the far side of the bay. As soon as I got out of the car, I was messaging one of the regular correspondants to tell them about it, to their undoubted bemusement. Later, when I was back home and back at a proper computer, I checked the distance: about sixty miles, pretty good seeing really. Even the sparkling sea was deceptive: although it looked close enough to touch, the shore must have been some five or six miles away. I was over 200 metres above it, not far off the altitude of Moel y Gest itself.

Why does spotting the Moelwynion give me a thrill like that? I don’t know, other than that I have been going back to that corner of the country on and off since I was a teenager. But spotting them like that did remind me to write this post, and it took me back to a day back in May when I was driving around almost in their shadow, hunting down some bottles of limited-edition beer (it’s a long story). The drive took me across the Traeth Mawr, then over the hill road from Garreg to Maentwrog, but it is the first part, from Prenteg to Garreg, that sticks in my mind. I really don’t expect you to know where these places are, by the way, but please do stop to look them up on a map. The Traeth Mawr is an ancient drowned valley, once a broad sandy silvery estuary, for the past two hundred years usually farmland.

The Romantics, Shelley in particular, thought it one of the finest sights in the world before it was reclaimed. Nowadays you can hike, drive, or catch the train across it. And even though the sea is no longer there to reflect them, the surrounding mountains are a mighty encounter. Driving across the Traeth in search of beer, I felt safe, warm and secure, cupped in a bowl, the grand bones of Eryri wrapping themselves around me and protecting me with their power. If you were to reach for your copy of the Mabinogion you might realise that Pryderi was buried just over the other side of the mountain ridge, with Lleu Llaw Gyffes living with his wife made of flowers just a short walk away too.

That, maybe, gives you some sense of the reaction that I have to the hills of Wales, or at least a small fraction of them. There are many more, of course, and I have much more to say. I have had half a post drafted about Mynydd Machen for a while, although I might need to go up there again in a better mood. I have complex feelings about the Rhinogydd even though I’ve never explored their dark, quiet and lurking shapes. I’ve promised to take one regular correspondant to Bryn Cader Faner to see its curious crown of thorns, and I will always remember a teenage walk up to Llandecwyn chapel at dusk, looking down on Harlech Bay as if it was in the palm of my hand. No doubt I will write more about Welsh hills over the coming months and years. The important thing, the thing to always remember, is that they belong to everyone. The people who live on them, the people who live around them, the people who walk up them and the people who work on them. They are too old and too powerful to ever be the property of just one.

Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, mountains, mynyddoedd, outdoors.

You might remember, if you’ve read back as far as last March or April, that I’d been trying some astrophotography but hadn’t got very far. I still haven’t got very far, largely because it’s summer, and we are only just out of the part of the year where it never gets properly dark at all here.

The other day, though, regular reader MdeC was grumbling on their social media that their attempt to take a gorgeous photo of the Milky Way—far better than anything I’ve produced—had been ruined by a meteor. And it reminded me: we’re just coming into one of the key meteor-spotting seasons of the year. August is the month of the Perseid meteor shower, one of the busiest and brightest showers in the calendar. The fact there are lots of meteors in the sky in August has been known since ancient times; in the 19th century the astronomer Schiaparelli calculated they were created by the trail of dust left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle in its orbit. Their peak will be next week, on Thursday night and Friday morning, but they are spread quite broadly, and any clear night over the next couple of weeks gives you a good chance of seeing some.

So, if there’s a clear night, I’ll be taking a deckchair outside, lying back and looking up at the sky. There’s no point really setting up the telescope or getting binoculars out: they move too fast and can be anywhere in the sky. Just relax, find a dark place if you can, let your eyes adapt, and watch them flash across the sky.

Keyword noise: astronomy, meteors, meteor shower, Perseids.

It’s nearly a month now since I started the new job. It’s not been plain sailing all the way, of course, but it feels like it’s going reasonably well.

One aspect of coming in and taking over a team is that naturally I want to put my own flavour on things. I’m not saying I automatically think my ideas are always better than what the team already does, of course, but I do think firstly that new ideas can often trigger new thinking and give new energy to a team, and secondly, that some of the things are familiar to me are inevitably going to be new to my new colleagues, and things they might not have considered before. So, if I can bring in processes and practices that have worked well for me before, they may well work well in the new job too. If anything, as long as I can get the team behind them, they might be worth a try.

“As long as I can get the team behind them” is the key point there, of course; and it’s important to make sure we all feel we are a team and that we can all contribute to making change happen. I started writing down some Basic Good Principles along those lines. “We know we’re not perfect but we’re always improving,” for example. “We all review each other’s code, because everyone gets it wrong sometimes.” — I’m always surprised how many people don’t quite follow that one. “This document is not set in stone and is always changing, just as our processes are always changing and improving.” is another one, because when a particular practice or process turns into dogma is when it starts to impede you rather than work for you.

After a while brainstorming this stuff, writing down these sort of things, though, I started to get a bit of self-doubt. Is writing down these sort of principles really helpful, or were my notes just turning into meaningless platitudes in themselves? Was I at risk of accidentally coming up with the “Live, Laugh, Love” of software development?

Which of course, set me thinking. What is the “Live, Laugh, Love” of software development? Maybe if I deliberately came up with something quite so awful, quite so twee and nauseating, it would reduce the risk of ending up in that zone by accident?

I scribbled a few things down, crossed some out, shuffled some ideas around, and eventually came up with the following. I think it’s pretty good. By which I mean, I feel slightly disgusted with myself.

Code

Create

Care

One of our regular correspondents writes: Yeah, I think you might need a shower after that.

Most definitely. I felt dirty. If you ever find me giving that as advice to my team, please, tell me I need to take a holiday. All the same, if I was to pick a font and put it on a framed print, I wonder how many I could sell?

Keyword noise: work, coding, motivation.

Regular readers might have noticed that there haven’t been many posts on here lately: the pressure of various other things that come before this place. The new job, for example, is one. Going to visit The Mother and help her with various bits of paperwork, another. I was up visiting The Mother the other day, as it happens. Not only did I also fit in a few nice long walks on her local beach, which will be the subject of another post another day, but I went down the pub and met up with this chap for lunch.

In the post about the new job, I mentioned how I used at one time to write lots of posts about my colleagues, giving them all false names and talking about some of the less controversial things some of them got up to. The chap in the picture is the guy referred to on this site as Wee Dave—not his real name of course. I called him Wee Dave because he succeeded Big Dave, although of course that wasn’t Big Dave’s real name either.

I hadn’t seen him for, ooh, it must be thirteen years nearly. We caught up, on and off, about various things that had happened through the intervening time: him on how strange it was, after I left that job, to stay on for a few more years in a business that was slowly shrinking as its owner wound down towards retirement, selling off a department here and shutting down one there, until in the end only Wee Dave and a couple of other people were left rattling around inside an empty warehouse. For my side, I told him all about some of the things I’ve worked on since, some of them interesting and some of them less so.

Naturally, we also reminisced about the people we worked with and that I wrote about here. “Say hi from me!” messages were passed over, and we talked about how few of the people there we actually kept in touch with, and quite what a strange place it was to work. Wee Dave ended up working with someone else from that place at his next job; unlike me, of course, disappearing to the far end of the country. Like me, though, he’s moved from general IT work into software development, partly because it’s far more interesting and challenging than setting up servers, rotating backup tapes and generally being a systems dogsbody. We shared the usual gripes that all software developers have, such as nobody really agreeing on what Agile is supposed to mean even though everyone claims they do it. That, indeed, is something I might have a long ramble about on here some time.

Thirteen years is a long time, from one meeting to the next. Of course, as I have to go up there and visit The Mother fairly regularly nowadays, I’m going to be in the area much more often in the future. Hopefully the gap until we next have a drink together won’t be quite so long.

Keyword noise: Wee Dave, work.

I passed a very minor milestone yesterday. Duolingo, the language-learning app, informed me that I had a “streak” of 1,000 days. In other words, for the past not-quite-three-years, most days, I have fired up the Duolingo app or website and done some sort of language lesson. I say “most days”: in theory the “streak” is supposed to mean I did it every single day, but in practice you can skip days here and there if you know what you’re doing. I’ve mostly been learning Welsh, with a smattering of Dutch, and occasionally revising my tourist-level German.

My Welsh isn’t, I have to admit, at any sort of level where I can actually hold a conversation. I barely dare say “Ga i psygod a sglodion bach, plîs,” in the chip shop when visiting I’m Welsh-speaking Wales, because although I can say that I am wary I wouldn’t be any use at comprehending the response, if they need to ask, for example, exactly what type of fish I want. To be honest, I see this as a big drawback to the whole Duolingo-style learning experience, which seems essentially focused around rote learning of a small number of set phrases in the hope that a broader understanding of grammar and vocabulary will follow. I’ve been using Duolingo much longer than three years—I first used it to start revising my knowledge of German back in 2015. When I last visited Germany, though, I was slightly confused to find that after over a year of Duolingo, if anything, I felt less secure in my command of German, less confident in my ability to use it day-to-day. Exactly why I don’t now, but it helped me realise that I can’t just delegate that sort of learning to a question-and-answer app. If I want to progress with my Welsh, I know I’m going to have to find some sort of conversational class.

Passing the 1,000 days milestone made me start wondering if anyone has produced something along the same lines as Duolingo but for computer languages. In some ways it should be a less difficult problem than for natural language learning, because, after all, any nuances of meaning are less ambiguous. I lose track of the number of times Duolingo marks me down because I enter an English answer which means the same as the accepted answer but uses some other synonym or has a slightly different word order. With a coding language, if you have your requirements and the output meets them, your answer is definitely right. In theory it shouldn’t be too hard to create a Duolingo-alike thing but with this sort of question:

Given a List<Uri> called uris, return a list of the Uris whose hostnames end in .com in alphabetical order.

1. uris.Select(u => u.Host).Where(h => h.EndsWith(".com")).OrderBy();
2. uris.Where(u => u != null && u.Host.EndsWith(".com")).OrderBy(u => u.AbsoluteUri).ToList();
3. uris.SelectMany(u => u.Where(Host.EndsWith(".com"))).ToList().Sort();

The answer, by the way, is 2. Please do write in if I’ve made any mistakes by being brave enough to write this off the top of my head; writing wrong-but-plausible-looking code is harder than you think. Moreover, I know the other two answers contain a host of errors and wouldn’t even compile, just as the wrong answers in Duolingo often contain major errors in grammar and vocabulary.

Clearly, you could do something like this, and you could memorise a whole set of “cheat sheets” of different coding fragments that fit various different circumstances. Would you, though, be able to write decent, efficient, and most importantly well-understood code this way? Would you understand exactly the difference between the OrderBy() call in the correct answer, and the Sort() call in answer three?^* I suspect the answer to these questions is probably no.

Is that necessarily a bad thing, though? It’s possibly the level that junior developers often work at, and we accept that that’s just a necessary phrase of their career. Most developers start their careers knowing a small range of things, and they start out by plugging those things together and then sorting the bugs out. As they learn and grow they learn more, they fit things together better, they start writing more original code and slowly they become fluent in writing efficient, clean and idiomatic code from scratch. It’s a good parallel to the learner of a natural language, learning how to put phrases together, learning the grammar for doing so and the idioms of casual conversation, until finally they are fluent.

I realise Duolingo is only an early low-level step in my language-learning. It’s never going to be the whole thing; I doubt it would even get you to GCSE level on its own. As a foundational step, though, it might be a very helpful one. One day maybe I’ll be fluent in Welsh or German just as it’s taken me a few years to become fully fluent in C#. I know, though, it’s going to take much more than Duolingo to get me there.

* The call in answer 2 is a LINQ method which does not modify its source but instead returns a new enumeration containing the sorted data. The call in answer 3 modifies the list in-place.

Keyword noise: Duolingo, learning, languages, coding, Welsh, Cymraeg.

What do you do on a random Saturday with zero plans? Walk up a mountain? What an excellent suggestion, thank you! So yesterday morning I headed off for a gentle amble up to the summit of the Blorenge, the mountain that stands over the valley of the River Usk opposite the Sugar Loaf, and separates the urban environs of Blaenafon from the rural tranquility of Abergavenny and Crickhowell.

I say “a gentle amble” because it’s not a particularly strenous walk. It’s not like the sort of mountain where you park your car at the bottom and hike up a path so steep you’re almost too scared to come down again. The road over the mountains north from Blaenafon isn’t that much lower than the summit, only about eighty metres or so. The walk, therefore, is essentially a cross-moorland ramble more than anything else. Still, it’s definitely a good way to spend a morning.

When I thought of posting this, I was intending to turn it into something hugely informative: a long story full of history, geology, packed with information about the mountain. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite work out how to get into it. It turned into something dry and meaningless, without flavour, when I wanted to write something evocative, something that would make you really feel you were on the mountain alongside me. What I do have, though, are pictures.

I started here at Keepers Pond; at least, that’s what it’s called on the signs. The Ordnance Survey map calls it Pen-ffordd-goch Pond—the head of the red path. Older, Victorian-era maps call it Forge Pond. The whole area around the Blorenge is filled with ancient industry: pits, hollows, old quarries and old mining tips, joined up by tracks that were once horse-drawn railways. Nowadays Keepers Pond is busy with wild swimmers, canoers and paddleboarders. The only ancient industry I found was one length of Victorian railway rail.

Despite all its ancient industry, the Blorenge now is a quiet place, a place where the loudest sounds are of songbirds. There are many hikers, but they walk silently, conversations blown away by the wind. In the distance you can see all the way to the Severn Sea, in the far distance the coast of Somerset, but on Saturday the skies were grey, the clouds low, and sea, sky and distant land all merged into one continuous blue-grey palette.

At the summit, naturally, there’s a trig point. On the ground, though, unmarked, a second benchmark was carved. An old one, by the look of its shape. Possibly, it is the benchmark labelled on an 1880s map as 1,832 feet.

To the north, at first, the view was lost in cloud, leaving just impressions of a valley. Then, slowly, as I returned back to the car, it started to open up again. The valley of the Usk, the Black Mountains and the Sugar Loaf. The grand vista stretched before me, before the cloud came back down again once more.


Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, hiking, Blaenafon, The Blorenge.

Back in the day, back in the mists of time when I first started writing this blog, I wrote quite a lot about work. If you go into the appropriate category there are many, many posts of slightly-disguised stories about the various characters I worked with: Big Dave, the cute one from the Accounts office, Wee Dave, Big Dave, the office tea fund lady, and, well, usually Big Dave. It all backfired somewhat in the end: it turned out that they all knew about it, and eventually the office tea fund lady complained I was being too sarcastic about her and I was asked to stop. I’m glad to some extent that I did it, but I’ve never risked being quite that open about the people I work with again.

It’s on my mind at the moment, though, partly because I’m changing jobs soon. I’m almost at my last day in my current position, and as part of that I’m considering, when I write to everyone to tell them how to keep in touch, giving them the address of this website in case they want to read it. If I did do that and you’re reading this, rest assured, there is absolutely nothing about you on here; and none of you have interesting slightly-fictionalised names either.^*

There’s a new job starting for me very soon, and it’s going to be a whole new world: people I have no idea about yet, new things to learn, things to do, and hopefully worlds to change. I’m apprehensive about it, partly because I have no idea at all what is around the corner for me. But, moreover, this is an unusual change of job for me, because I genuinely have regrets about it. I really do love the people I work with, in a sense. Collectively, they’re one of the best groups of people I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside, and going forward into the unknown means leaving them behind. I’m only a small cog there, and my departure won’t really have any effect on the company as a whole, but they’ve been a big part of my life for the last few years.

Naturally, I’m not going to write about the new job either, although if we do anything particularly earth-shattering I might drop hints about it occasionally. When we do anything earth-shattering, of course, I mean. If I write about tech stuff on here, it won’t be anything that relates directly to work; it’ll be general tech stuff like “how the git version-control system works” or “tips I’ve learned from working in tech that are also useful in daily life”.

I’m scared, I admit, of exactly what’s around the corner. Soon, though, I’m going to find out. Whatever happens, it’s going to be an adventure, and I’m sorry I can’t bring all the people who currently work around me, with me on that adventure. I’m sure they’re going to do their own great things too, though. I’m sure they’re going to go out and change the world.

* If I do ever write about that workplace, which I doubt I will, I’ll just call everyone Matt. Most people there were called Matt at one point, so it’s probably right.

Keyword noise: work, Big Dave, Wee Dave, The Cute Accountant.