infryq | Entries tagged with job

Yesterday two new job postings went up (stats developer and survey coordinator, hmu if you know someone) so I added them to the website PR. I worked with B to figure out the best way to recover from my rebase snafu. I went to the team leads meeting and presented the website PR and the plan for 1.7, and ran a feedback/process revision session to see if we can make it easier to remember everything. Lunch, then I met with V about getting the hospital-admissions code to run. I met with Engineering and went over the results from the team leads meeting and from the backend meeting from Wednesday, and completely forgot that I’d intended to do another feedback session until we’d run out of time. R and I had a call to go over some details of my official permanent transfer to Delphi (I won’t be able to get a raise until after the freeze is lifted, but we can change my job title now and use that as justification for a raise later). In the cracks I made the rebase fix go, made the final edits to the website PR and merged it, created a pile of Slack workflows to automatically notify everybody about release schedule checkpoints, updated the release schedule with the edits we proposed in the team leads meeting, did some git issues maintenance, and put some more work into the survey of missing-ness across all indicators that will help us design a system to encode deletion in the data versioning system.

Dinner, crossword, almost finished felling the center back seam, Imposters, snack, sleep. Dreamt of refurbishing old bedsteads, knives, birds, Canada, alarmingly large but harmless insects.

Yesterday I converted the team leads notes into announcements for the all-hands meeting, dropped the demo of the 14-day direction computations on a server so it’s easy to link to, and got stuck down a rabbit hole of converting the R notebook to make it easier to compare N direction calculations directly. Went to the big group meeting, asked about relative risk with an individually-tested but not fully-tested API for the data versioning system that was set to be deployed today, and ultimately decided to try and test it in the staging rig first. It was a good idea; we found a few problems that the Docker tests don’t look for, so we’ll be able to fix those today instead of getting an unpleasant surprise in production. Met with T and discussed hiring my replacement; he’s of course sorry to see me go but happy for the new direction my career is taking, which was nice to hear. Spent the rest of the afternoon rebuilding the automation for the surveys sensor to use the new codebase.

Dinner, crossword, noodled around on Twitter for an hour, then snack, measured ingredients for another batch of nut and seed bars, and sleep. Dreamt of a bleak but hopeful sortof novel set in nineteenth century England, solving mazes and giant mechanical architectural puzzles.

Yesterday the aggregations were totally horked. Ultimately it turned out I never did submit Thursday’s stderr updates to the server, but it took us all day to be confident in that and understand a couple other weird components (some of the worst diffs had their old value approximately equal to their stderr, and the new stderr 10x larger, which seemed very suspicious). Meanwhile, decided on Slack to release only the new deaths and cases signals at noon and push the combined signal to next week. Met with indicators, and A and I delivered our plan for release schedules and task management and got no objections. Group meeting was very efficient, and A gave a slightly quicker version of the spiel there too. Met briefly with RR and R to figure out what to do about the 7-day trend indicator for the deaths and cases signals, and decided to disable it for this release. Lunch, somewhat abbreviated. Went to M’s thesis meeting; we’re still debugging why we can’t seem to get this model to overfit. Spent an hour running variations of the validation code on aggregations; each run takes 8 minutes so in the gaps I built up git issues for the next release, set milestones, and organized labels based on the new rules for releases. Finally had some overlap with T’s free time and gave him a call — I’ll be staying with Delphi for the summer. I despise being poached but these are special circumstances. Can’t really tell the pandemic to hold off for a month or two while I train a replacement. Went to team leads meeting and finalized the details of all the approval processes. Finished up planning with A for the next release and called it a day. Should largely be a weekend off.

Dinner, crossword, DS9, snack, sleep. Dreamt of shabby bazaars, dysfunctional local government, gameified DIY duplication of dream-world popular fast food franchises a la Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, murder mysteries, steam trains, drag races.

Network Effect continues excellent.

We received the gift basket from R: pears, nuts, crackers, and cheese. The pears are gorgeous, P will take care of the crackers and cheese, and I get the nuts because cashews.

Yesterday I made another batch of nut and seed bars, and washed the towels and half the regular laundry.

I cleaned the stitch length face plate, first with regular sewing machine oil and then with fast orange, and wow does fast orange brighten things up! It looks nearly new now. I cleaned the stitch length control pins and the plate they’re mounted to, then removed the plate to reveal a ton of black crud caking the ratchet and cams. Cleaned that, and the knobs turn a bit more easily now. Cleaned and oiled the spring for the reverse lever, still quite stiff but less sticky now. Re mounted the control plate and moved on to where the throat plate mounts. It is sticky for some reason? I did a pass with oil and one with fast orange but I’m not sure I got it all.

I ran out of podcasts and switched to music. Yesterday was lemon jelly, today will probably be Air. Mellow electronica with acoustic samples and heavy refinement in production. Anything you might imagine for a Sesame Street interlude from the 70s.

In the afternoon I got email inviting me to join an effort in my department working on crowdsourced predictions for the COVID-19 pandemic, with permission from T for this to replace my regular work. I said yes, and will be starting meetings for that later today.

Meals were all good, I’m obeying my eat alarms. After dinner we did the crossword, then I watched DS9, had a snack, and went to sleep. Dreamt of secret messages, upstairs/downstairs dynamics, a ghost scullery powered by a half-broken submarine, cucumber plants, and nearly falling off someone’s balcony.

Yesterday I read a bunch of papers and dressed up semi-nice for a job
interview that landed perfectly (more details in the f-locked post), and so
long as all the paperwork goes through I’ll be seamlessly moving to a new
lab in June when my current boss leaves for Google. Hooray!

I forgot to vent the cold frames before I left, but they seem not to have
cooked anything too badly so I’m crossing my fingers.

Got a good start on the hem of my sweater; the end is tantalizingly in
sight and I won’t even have to play yarn chicken! And we’re sure to have at
least one more cold snap before spring, despite the record-breaking temps
today (78F! In February! Not Right).

Yesterday I went to a lunch for women in my department, which is going to
be a regular thing. We have the expected variety of opinions on how to
respond to sexism (lean in vs change the culture) but it was a good time
regardless.

Had a good whiteboarding meeting with a student. Amazing how much drawing a
picture helps.

I got my bloodwork done, and it was way easier than I expected.

I did some job interview shopping, and found a couple shirts and some
slacks that mostly fit. I have different standards for fit now, I think —
the top of the sleeve cap is rotated too far back, the rise on the slacks
is alarmingly low for something called “mid-rise,” and there’s the usual
wad problem that happens when they try to save fabric by shaving down the
crotch sweep, then cover for it by adding width back at the hip. I don’t
think I can do much better though in my price range, so I’ll just cope.
Maybe this summer I tackle button-up shirts.

I did some research into seed-starting racks and cold frames, and into how
to remove the glass from old windows without breaking it. We saved all the
old ones from the house for that purpose, though they were certainly
painted with lead paint at some point in the last 120 years, so I can’t
just use them as-is in the vegetable garden. It looks like setting a pane
of glass into a new sash is complicated though so I might just tape the
edges and lean it on 2x4s as a temporary solution. I just need two; one for
onions and one for nettles.

I have one more TODO in my CV to update, and then it’s for editing and
formatting.

A little spinning, a little knitting, and I actually managed to have snacks
at reasonable times.

Yesterday I had lunch with C and D, where it was universally acknowledged
that I should work for T next if I can possibly manage it. Our labs worked
together closely a few years ago, and I agree.

I finished the final bobbin of the first half of the teal combo spin, and
started the next. It turns out the storage bobbins I bought last year are
longer than my other set, which is annoying since it means I have to move
the setting on the winder. Alas.

P went to the Strip and got cheese, thyme, a fun new Thai rice called
riceberry, and found a vegan mushroom-based oyster sauce, which is
intriguing.

While making lunch I heard many mouse sounds, and eventually it gathered up
enough courage to dart across the floor and behind the stove. So, P took
apart MouseTown #1, which is the ikea shelves by the window that probably
are what give them access to the table. Threw out a bunch of stuff,
sanitized the equipment in the appropriate dishwasher cycle, and started
thinking of what kind of wall-mounted storage solution we might like to
replace it with that will be a bit more mouse-proof.