Kerry Buckley

Weeknotes 2026-12 – only one day late.

https://www.kerrybuckley.org/2026/03/23/weeknotes-2026-12/

Me, a programmer, shouting at a podcast for laughing about how the 64 in “$64,000 Question” is “weirdly random”.

I wrote up a deliberate process of narrowing down a performance issue using a profiler (with a brief digression into benchmarking tools). Fortunately (given that I was writing the post in parallel with doing the actual work) it turned out well, delivering a 30–40× speedup. #MyElixirStatus

https://www.kerrybuckley.org/2026/03/18/zooming-in-on-slow-code-with-profiling-and-benchmarking-tools/

Weeknotes 2026-11: a quiz and a half (by which I mean neither a very good quiz nor 1.5 quizzes).

https://www.kerrybuckley.org/2026/03/15/weeknotes-2026-11/

Weeknotes 2026-10: high blood pressure all round.

https://www.kerrybuckley.org/2026/03/12/weeknotes-2026-10/

Resisting the urge to bother commenting on an internal “suggested GitLab branching model” that somehow manages to be even worse than GitFlow, while optimistically claiming to be consistent with continuous deployment.

Oh look, the government’s uninformed parroting of AI companies’ investment hype turns out to be smoke and mirrors. I’m shocked.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/09/revealed-uks-multibillion-ai-drive-is-built-on-phantom-investments

Weeknotes 2026-09: temporarily missing cat.

https://www.kerrybuckley.org/2026/03/01/weeknotes-2026-09/

Today’s helpful phone autocorrect*: meant to type “in the polls”, but it came out as “on the pills”.

*Or whatever you call the Google drag-your-finger-through-the-letters keyboard thing.

Great news from Gorton and Denton, but it feels like we really need some form of PR soon, before all those claims of “but it’ll give seats to the far right!'” massively backfire.

Pretty sure it’s the progressive policies more than environmentalism that’s attracting people to the Greens at the moment. This makes about as much sense as their other tactic of adopting xenophobia to attract Reform voters.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/25/lost-species-released-england-labour-greens-election-threat

I popped outside at lunchtime, and it almost feels like a summer’s day. In February. If this is global warning, then IT’S STILL AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS THAT WE SHOULD BE PAYING FAR MORE ATTENTION TO.

Weeknotes 2026-08: poorly-performing code, plumbing and legs.

https://www.kerrybuckley.org/2026/02/22/weeknotes-2026-08/

Maybe we could go back to the old system where when the monarch dies any claimants to the throne have to battle it out amongst themselves. Or, you know, just abolish the lot.

Oh, look, that story the other day about an AI bot writing a whiny blog post after having a pull request rejected was probably fabricated nonsense. I am so incredibly surprised. https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-fabricated-quotes-about-ai-generated-article/

Weeknotes 2026-07: did you see that ludicrous display last night?

https://www.kerrybuckley.org/2026/02/15/weeknotes-2026-07/

Not saying my brain’s full of useless facts, but listening to a few episodes of Radio 4’s The Unbelievable Truth I spotted two truths before the panelists had actually said them.

Good. Seems like that would mean a lot of wrongful arrest actions on their way, although in practice I expect imprisoning people for breaking an illegal law is probably considered perfectly OK.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2026/feb/13/high-court-to-rule-on-lawfulness-of-home-offices-decision-to-proscribe-palestine-action-live

I like a good pun, but I swear it was completely accidental that in a discussion about an old bug with infinite scrolling on a page I just said that I “didn’t think we’d ever got to the bottom of it.”