#072

Work

Machine learning stuff

We had another good week of ML-enhanced search, with click through rates continuing to climb. We’re now ready to switch over from one model we trained a while back to deploying a new model every day, I’ll be flipping that switch tomorrow morning.

Our hypothesis is that, by regularly retraining the model, it should get better over time, and also be able to respond to trends.

RFC

The RFC I had open has been accepted, so sooner or later (hopefully sooner) GOV.UK will have nice machine-readable information about document attachments. I’ve written up some cards to do the implementation work, I’ll probably whizz through some of the easier ones myself, and then leave the more complex ones to be prioritised as part of the team’s normal work.

Miscellaneous

Books

I read The Fellowship of the Ring, and started The Two Towers. I’m still working my way through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

I ordered a few devops books: the two Google SRE books, the Phoenix Project, and the Unicorn Project. They should arrive some time next week.

Call of Cthulhu

After 28 sessions, spread across about a year and a half, with nearly 400,000 words of notes, my Call of Cthulhu campaign has come to an end.

Now I need to decide what the next game will be.

Dhall for Kubernetes

Dhall is a typed configuration language which can generate other formats like yaml or json. I’ve known about it for a while, but never had a reason to use it. However, this week I came across a blog post about using Dhall to generate Kubernetes config. I thought “hey, I’ve got a load of super-verbose Kubernetes config”, and I decided to try it out.

I’ll let the metrics on the pull request speak for themselves.

It’s certainly a lot less verbose and, because the dhall-kubernetes library is generated from the Kubernetes API spec, I know that any config which passes the Dhall type-checker will work with Kubernetes (as long as I use the version of the library which matches my Kubernetes version, which I didn’t at first). That’s much nicer than having some configuration partially apply.

I feel like ops tooling has a problem with non-atomic commits: terraform can fail part-way through and leave your cloud infrastructure half-provisioned; kubectl will happily apply a bunch of configuration, then barf on a syntax error, and not roll back what it’s already done; puppet just doesn’t clean up after itself (and, again, can fail part way through). Some of this may be unavoidable, but I suspect these problems could be a lot more avoidable than they are right now, and type-checking configuration is one small step towards that ideal.

Migrating away from Google Apps

I decided to make cards on my Trello board for the bits of Google Apps I still use and, this week, I found an alternative to using Google Photos for getting photos off my phone. Just plugging it in.

I don’t know why I’d never tried that before.

Planning and Prioritisation

Last time I wrote about how I was planning to adjust my Trello system by separating “important” and “urgent” tasks, and doing something like sprint planning. Well, I’ve now been using that system for about a week now. I didn’t actually have that many important tasks to do, so it seems I did get through them well enough with the old system, but it wasn’t exactly easy to tell at a glance what was important and what wasn’t. But this week I feel like I’ve got through more important things than usual.

I’ll be tweaking the system for the next couple of weeks and, when I’m happy with it, I’ll update the Self Organisation memo.