A cathartic rambling on my first year as a manager

A brief tutorial on using file streams with PHP

Today is the annual budgets, and the big topic of discussion is tax cuts. We already had a cut to national insurance in January, and now they're announcing more tax cuts. I don't want tax cuts. I don't need tax cuts. I need public services to be funded and functional

I've been working on adding a [now page](https://iwader.co.uk/now) to my site, which is largely automated pulling in data from Apple Health, Strava, and last.fm.

2023 was by far the biggest change of my life so far. We had our first child, I lost a lot of weight, and made some big changes to my lifestyle.

We recently had a problem with our Laravel queue workers. We kept finding a particular queue job kept silently failing, not always, but often enough to cause us a significant headache. We weren't getting any of the usual logs or exceptions we'd expect with a potential timeout, memory issue, etc. We resorted to add some debug logging in production, profiling our memory usage, etc. but nothing was helping us get to the bottom of the issue. Eventually, I found something useful in the supervisor logs `exit status 137; not expected`.

My family have been making this stuffing cake for quite a few years now, and it's a firm favourite of mine throughout the Christmas period. We have it with our Christmas dinner, but it's also great cold either by itself or with onion chutney.

We came across a bug at work related to query strings and how there’s basically no agreed way of handling complex structures, or anything beyond strings. I guess that's a given seeing as it's a query string

My [home page](/) has a couple of sections which display my health and activity data. This is powered by a Shortcut that runs on my iPhone every day at 9am. I query data from Apple Health, and then trigger a deployment via GitHub actions. This was working well, until I started exercising a lot more during the summer months. The Shortcut was taking longer and longer to run, and before long started hitting many problems. Over time, it got slower and slower, sometimes running from 9am and into the afternoon. This was destroying my phone's battery and making the device hot for long periods. Eventually, it ended up throwing an error most days.

A list of apps I use daily. Inspired by Robb Knight and Hemispheric Views podcast