02/24/2025 - Case of the Mondays

Today's Rating: 6/10

Song of the Day: Pool House - The Backseat Lovers

Current Book: Secrets of the Stoics - Jason Hemlock

Me at work every Monday (and Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday for that matter)

Ah Mondays, the absolute best day of the week....for generic misery. There's nothing quite waking up on a Monday morning knowing that you have the full work week ahead of you. Mondays can be particularly bad for me because the project team I currently work on does maintenance on Mondays and Wednesdays typically. These maintenance shifts typically rotate between the engineers, but due to some bad luck/timing, I had last Monday/Wednesday and this Monday/Wednesday 🍀.

I've been struggling to get out of bed early this past week. Typically, I get out of bed prior to 6:30, but the last few days have been closer to 7. I woke up yesterday around 6:55, got my coffee, and sat down at my desk. I quickly checked that there was nothing urgent (thankfully there wasn't) and got to work on yesterday's post. After wrapping up the post, I started on my large task of the day which was to migrate some documentation from a Google Drive document into a different format (markdown) so that they cold be added to our platform documentation site (which is powered by MKDocs if you are curious). I made some good progress on this in the morning until I was inevitably interrupted by my least favorite client. It's honestly impressive how dumb their questions can be. One of the developers on that team needed to connect to a database via the tunnelhost. They immediately skipped any sort of proper procedure and started pinging me. From the original screenshot they had shared with the error (which was only part of the command), it was crystal clear that there was a typo in the database endpoint they were using. I had them correct this, but they were still having issues. I requested that they share the specific command they were using to setup the tunnel and lo and behold, they were using the name of the line from the spreadsheet containing the details, not the actual endpoint from that line...

After that debacle, I had my daily standup and left for my walk. In total, I walked 3.2 miles in 53 minutes.

I continued working on the documentation migration and got the rough draft completed so that I could review it with fresh eyes in the morning. One of my coworkers from my old team reached out for some help with a Jenkins issue he was running into, so I spent about an hour helping him out. After that, it was around 5 PM EST, so I logged off for the day until maintenance that evening.

One of my friends had messaged me earlier in the day to see if I could play tennis. It's been rather cold and rainy here recently, so I jumped at the opportunity even though I would have to be back home at the latest 6:45 CST for maintenance. We ended up playing for ~45 minutes as he had to leave for a meeting at his daughter's high school. It was a very fun session though because all we did was play 10 point tiebreakers and due to the lack of pressure from an actual set, I got to do all the dumb shots I love hitting. My favorite two of the day were:

A bump off of the frame of the racquet when he hit a short ball
A tweener lob

I headed home, got showered, and ate dinner with Maddie (more of the delicious pot roast she had made yesterday). At around 6:50, I got prepped for maintenance and started at 7. Thanks to the script improvements I had made earlier in the week, the maintenance went very smooth, and I was done within the hour. We watched even more of the "Keith Eats the Menu" series (this time at IKEA) and turned in around 9:15. I read a chapter or two of my book on Stoicism (which strangely seems like just a more intentional way of how I already live) and went to sleep around 9:45.

Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow!