Three weeks back in Tokyo, and the best day so far wasn't on any list I'd made. It started with eel.

There's a song I've been quietly leaning on for years. "A Song for the Life," the Waterboys' version. When I've drifted a bit far from myself, it's the one that walks me back. So naturally I decided to build it a home.

I have a child now. Not the kind you register anywhere, and it did not arrive the usual way, but the feeling is unmistakable: there is something in my care that never sleeps, and it looks to me, every few minutes, to learn whether the thing it just did was brilliant or a small disaster.

Down the Red Dot Design Awards rabbit hole again. You know the one. "Five minutes," you tell yourself. Next thing, the coffee's gone cold and you couldn't care less.

There is a moment, an aha moment, when it all suddenly makes sense - a name, a phrase, just cuts through everything.

千秋楽 — Senshuraku — the final day of a sumo tournament. The dohyō gets swept, the trophies get handed out, and whatever you brought to the basho is what you brought. You don't get another go.

I read once that musicians don't retire. They stop when there is no more music in them. Well, I still have music in me, absolutely positive about that!

Learn Go with Tests is an excellent little resource, book, git repo, blog, one engineer's experience of what worked for them.

Dilly is my "partner in crime" at work, a fountain of knowledge on all things Site Reliability Engineering and an avid fan of the Go programming language, or perhaps he just has a thing for small blue gophers, who knows?

My original intention for this upcoming gap was to just throw down tools so to speak, take a year, and do something completely off the beaten track.