infryq

Yesterday I confirmed with OIE that we’re not accidentally going to get our external F1 intern deported if her start date is waaaay later than what it says on her I-20, which is a relief. I went to the orientation meeting for one of our new data partners who will be providing us with vast amounts of medical claims data, and learned how to access their system and how the development and production phases will go. They’re more organized than we are, which isn’t surprising, but what was surprising was that R came right out and said so, adding that while all of us had DUA permissions, none of us had been prepared ahead of time for the meeting or had any idea what the plan actually was. Completely accurate, but also, like. Embarrassing. I also wonder what that did to their perception of our general competence, and how that will affect our working relationship with them in the future.

After that was the big group meeting, which was fairly straightforward, then lunch. I fixed a data issue with one of the new indicators, then met with Engineering, then shipped the release off to marketing for testing. The rest of the afternoon went to generating a big batch of hiring freeze justification forms for the management staff we want to bring on, debugging the data.table installation on my laptop (I got it to build finally but now R crashes when I run the code, which isn’t great), and converting one of the run modes of the combination cases and deaths signal to automatically check the API for the most recent date so it can pick up from where it left off instead of blindly generating yesterday.

P and I made pita, then dinner, crossword, She-Ra, submitted the DigiKey order, snack, sleep. Long problem-solving dreams, the details of which have vanished.

I’ve been reading Wicked as You Wish by Rin Chupeco, which is an alternate-present fantasy story with strong themes of immigration justice, anti-racism, and anti-fascism. It could have used a better copy editor for grammar and style, and the reliance on knitting together as many fairy tales as possible sometimes seems a bit forced, but the characters are complex and the magic system is fascinating and it’s People Solving Problems In Groups, which we all know is always compelling for me. CN so far for police violence and violent homophobia, which are explicit but well-handled in the text, and oblique reference to sexual assault, also well-handled.

Yesterday a couple things went awry with the aggregations, but I managed to clean them up and submit in time for the automated pickup. I did a pile of renames until we finally decided to maybe stop and think about what the names should be and get buy-in from all stakeholders on them. R revealed that he either had not read, read but had not retained, or had some kind of mental block about all my reports for the last two weeks, since it turned out the one new sensor we’d developed that wasn’t a raw import from another institution, wasn’t actually supposed to be going up in the interface at all this week. I had a good talk with him about all the reasons why that’s a problem. He agreed, and scheduled a larger talk with the indicator leads and RR about how to fix it going forward.

I went to a meeting with F and the team from M about how our smother works, and also got some reassurances that csv files from international browser locales don’t break the R scripts we’re currently using for analysis. I tested out the new standard error code and it worked beautifully. Lunch, then I attempted to merge in L’s branch for automated integrity checks. There were too many diffs, which is odd since it should have been an exact match to what’s in the API. Figuring that out later. Did a retrospective with the indicators team, which largely turned into a mutual love-fest, my second favorite kind of feedback session. Team leads meeting was productive; we hashed out ideas for written specs and making rigorous use of the github issue tracker that should help prevent things from getting so persistently lost in future. Helped A with some documents for kicking that off at today’s group meeting, then called it done.

I finished Exit Strategy and started Network Effect, which is full length. Good.

Dinner, a very stubborn crossword, DS9, snack, sleep.