It’s mid april in London again and compared to last year, this spring feels much more like it. I didn’t intend to leave this website so un-maintained(almost exactly a year, there is clearly something about spring), and I’m surprised I have!

At the moment I’m still firmly rooted in south london, I moved home around a year ago to save money and wait for things to line up before me and my partner move in together. It didn’t make sense to dump the best part of 12 months salary into an absantee landlords pocket in the meantime, and I’m grateful to have more time to spend with my parents.

Work is going well, at Anzen we are on track to kick off our largest project to date and the oppertunities for growth and ownership of key components remain fantastic. Most recently I’ve finished refactoring our core product’s database integration layer. The previous implementation was encoding and decoding database query results directly to and from protocol buffer message structs, and we decided to define a clearer boundary between our database ‘connectors’ and microservice servers. The new implementation is definitely more verbose, but we save a lot on readability and it’s helped to clarify which functionality we expect to be offloaded onto database providers, and which we need to maintain ourselves. My next task(which incidentally materialised today) will be to generate a threat model for our inital design for aforementioned largest project to date.

In my personal life, I’ve started playing around with some physical computing projects, about 6 months ago we took on a local studio space which I’ve been making good use of over the last few weeks now it’s finally started to warm up, and I am long overdue for a holiday of any kind.