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I recently wrote about the system I use to purchase Minecoins for my son. Not long after I got this figured out, my son informed me that all his friends were playing Roblox, and he would like to start using that now too. Fortunately, the process for Robux is a lot simpler than Minecoins and Minecraft Tokens.

Robux are a type of token that you can use to buy stuff in the various Roblox worlds. There are links to buy things everywhere, in your face, all around you, always. This is because Robux are a way for creators in the game to earn money. It’s unfortunately difficult for younger children to understand exactly what the big numbers beside cool things mean, or what the impact of buying them is, so I suggest considering how you want to approach this as a parent before dumping your kids into it.

I have a Windows workstation sitting under my desk at home. This is where I do all of my professional development. I like this setup because it keeps my work completely separate from my personal stuff. If I’m honest, though, my main reason for buying it was because I poured a glass of water over my development laptop. But now that I have it, I highly recommend it.

When I’m working at home, I connect to this workstation using Remote Desktop (RDP). It’s a fantastic protocol for accessing a Windows machine across a network. It’s built in to the operating system, and it’s generally pretty smooth. Most times I can’t even tell that I’m using it.

At the end of last year we got ourselves a new coffee maker: the Philips LatteGo 5500. This is a lovely machine. It’s a super-automatic espresso maker that grinds beans, pulls espresso shots, and steams milk all on its own. If you fill it with good beans, it can make delicious coffee drinks at home with little effort.

The 5500 can make a lot of drinks. I couldn’t find a description of what the differences are, so I made my own list. It took months for me to try every drink. This was partially because I prefer iced drinks in hot weather, but also because I didn’t want to waste good coffee.

My son is getting really into Minecraft right now. It’s a game that exercises design, creativity, exploration, and even teaches some basic programming skills. The stock game has quite a lot to do and explore, but at some point it’s natural to want more.

Minecraft has a built-in store with a wide assortment of extension, skins, and even whole worlds. Some of them are free, but most require some form of credit.

I’ve written before about our hallway whiteboard. It’s been helpful, and we still use it, but we are now transitioning to a digital display mounted on our refrigerator.

The digital display has two major advantages over the whiteboard. We can access it from anywhere, even outside the house. And it can include dynamic elements that are updated automatically, such as the weather, our calendars, and various bits of information from our home automation system.

I spent a few years studying Japanese with my wife. It was challenging, interesting, and fun. We met a lot of cool people in our classes, some of whom are still good friends. I found it so interesting, in fact, that I have also developed a love of talking about it. Fun for me, and a nuisance for anyone around me.

There are a lot of things I could write about, but I’m just going to share one Japanese word. It is my favourite word. If I could wave a magic wand and import it into English, I would do so with little thought.

Although it was years ago, I still remember the conversation vividly. I was having my regular check-in with the CTO. It was also sunny outside, and the view from his office was particularly nice that day.

He asked me, “Is our app scalable?” After a moment of thought, I answered, “Yes.”

I spent the next few years remembering that conversation, wondering what would have happened if I had asked what he meant by scalable.

For various reasons, I’ve had to set up new computers a few times lately. This is still a time-consuming task that I try to avoid, but as I’ve been automating more and more of the process, it’s getting faster and more consistent. This post is essentially a note to my future self, or any colleagues that want to use this as their baseline for their own setups.

Many of the tools I use are free and open source, but some of them are not. Make sure to review and purchase licences where you need to. I’ve used most of these things fairly heavily, and am comfortable recommending all of them. It’s also easy to remove anything you don’t want to use.

I have been feeling frustrated with my personal organization of late. I had a bit of time before starting a new project, so I put some time into improving my process. The post below is a simplified version of the notes I took while I looked for alternatives. I’m sharing this as an example of how I do research, and as a more realistic example of the architectural report structure I typically use, which I’ve written about before.

Many years ago I worked on a large system with a number of interconnected services that had grown organically over the years. As new services were added, they became dependent on each other in ways that nobody on the team fully understood. When our hosting provider announced a planned outage, we had to figure out how to safely shut the system off, and more importantly, how to safely and quickly start it back up again afterward. We had never done either of these things before, so we put a lot of effort in to make sure it would go smoothly.