- Last week’s notes were titled “Sun” after a warm few days, but it was early this week that temperatures here soared to a ridiculous high of 39C.
- We followed the advice, shutting all our windows and curtains to keep the cooler air in the house. It was still far too hot for everyone. Walking around briefly in the fierce heat outside reminded me of a visit to a market in Dubai, not my garden in Hertfordshire.
- My home office’s air-conditioning doesn’t exactly help with the Climate Emergency, but I was lovely and cool during the day. Sorry.
- I would normally have visited our London office, but I was still observing our 10-day stay-at-home rule for Covid following my surprise positive test last week. I felt fine and was free to leave the house according to government rules, but respected others’ wishes not to be infected at work.
- Which also meant I could focus on some deep work at home. I’m looking at productivity metrics for our team, starting with deployment frequency. I cracked open a terminal and wrote a nifty one-liner to parse through git logs to see how often we merge to main, grouped by day, week and month. Who needs commercial metrics platforms when you can (just about) remember Unix tools?
- The boys had their sports day followed by the last day of school before the summer holidays. L now has six weeks of them at home before she herself starts at the school, returning to part-time teaching after seven years. All change.
- We ended the week visiting Graveley Fruit Farm for strawberry-picking, crazy golf, karts and ice creams. Recommended. We now have two very large punnets of strawberries to enjoy quickly before they turn to mush.
