David Peach

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Posts by David Peach

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8th June 2025

The ever-growing sleep debt

I have a compounding sleep debt.

We have a 2 year old and a 6 week old. To say my wife and I are tired is an understatement to say the least.

Our children are definitely worth it all but I am looking forward to a full night’s sleep again.

It’s like being in a constant foggy haze — a fugue state.

The weird thing, is that I know I will miss these times. When they are all grown up, or even a little bit grown; when they no longer need us for basic survival; when I’ll no longer be woken at 3:30am to feed her a bottle, followed by an hour of playing Silent Hill 2 remake whilst she rests on me as her milk settles before she sleeps.

Also those decaf cups of tea in the middle of the night. Delish. And the opening of the fridge door to get the milk, only to be greeted by an ocean of melted ice below the fridge door.

These times will be but a memory sooner than I think — I should enjoy the insomnia while it lasts.

3rd June 2025

The Tsunami in the fridge

This morning I opened the fridge door to be greeted by a slight splash of water.

Okay — not quite a tsunami — but that’s clickbait for you.

Underneath the veg drawer of our modest 500mm wide fridge freezer lies a small pool of water in the recesses of its base.

First thought of course is “Ah great. Amazing. The fridge is buggered. One of the stalwarts of the modern home… packed in.”

But no.

The fridge is fine.

Upon lifting the vegetable drawer out I notice a block of ice on the back edge of the fridge base.

What I’m assuming is that the temperature drops to freezing to create this block over time, then as the fridge goes through some kind of cycle where it’s not quite freezing, it melts a bit.

I should do something about the temperature but I’m yet to find the dial.

If I should find it surely I should fix the issue with a simple nudge in the direction of non-freezing.

If I was loaded I could trash the old fridge and get a brand spanking new one.

But then… That would be cold…

15th May 2025

The ActivityPub plugin for WordPress is incredible.

1st May 2025

This morning i had my last decaffeinated tea bag.

All I have left is Alta Rica coffee. I’ve had half-portions but something tells me that I’m going to be wired for half the day, before having a big caffeine crash.

School boy error.

Overtaking — a wake up call

Yesterday I gave a family member a lift somewhere.

On the way there, entering a country road I began overtaking the car in front as I was struggling to get the person to their appointment on time.

The road ahead was clear and overtaking was permitted in this particular part of the stretch.

When all of a sudden a white Tesla — of all cars — came around a corner at the far end of the road I was overtaking on.

So i put my foot down as far as I could to finish the manoeuvre.

As I passed the car I was overtaking, the car In front was getting ever closer — not sure if they were speeding but being a Tesla I wouldn’t be too surprised.

I then pulled across as the on coming car flashed it’s lights twice at me “I’m here”. I flashed once back “sorry”.

Of course signalling with your lights is not encouraged and possibly illegal except under very specific circumstances.

Nevertheless we exchanged our vague highway morse code.

At the time it was obvious we weren’t going to impact.

But since then I’ve been stressing about the “What ifs”.

It’s even been running around my head about “What if the other driver reports me with dash camera footage, and I get prosecuted for dangerous driving”.

My mind automatically goes to the worst-case scenario.

Apparently if a letter isn’t received before 14 days has passed since an incident, then no action will be taken.

Thirteen days to go.

Hopefully I can look back on this post in a couple of weeks and laugh at myself.

Either way it gave me a wake up call to be extra mindful. And to not risk it all to save a potential few minutes. Because the trade off could be the rest of mine, and any passengers, days.

Stay safe out there.

21st April 2025

There’s a strange sense of joy and accomplishment that comes after mowing the lawns and thus filling the garden bin.

Knowing that you’ve cleaned the garden somewhat.

And knowing that you’re getting your money’s worth from the garden bin subscription.

Nothing worse than seeing that collection truck go past for another week and having nothing to meet them at the bottom of the drive with. Another few quid wasted (pro-rata).

But not this time. This time I’ll have an almost full bin and I won’t lie — feels pretty good.

Black Mirror: Common People

Dark as fuck. And so brilliantly doing a send-up of the modern “subscription culture”.

Both leads were great.

This is the second thing I’ve seen Chris Dowd act in after The I.T. Crowd. So it was a complete departure for me.

And he is incredible in it.

Similarly with Rashida I’ve only seen her in The Office and Parks and Recreation.

She too was great.

They missed a trick in one scene though.

When they thought that his wife’s implant was malfunctioning and they headed to the Rivermind building. They didn’t have Chris Dowd ask “Have you tried turning it off and on again”.

This is the first time in recent memory I’ve needed to watch something light-hearted after seeing an episode of something.

A bleak, subscription-based nightmare.

And I loved it.

18th April 2025

Hospitals and Supermarkets

What do hospitals and supermarkets have in common?

Go on – take a moment to think about it.

Got it?

No? Well, I’ll tell you.

Both are places where absolute fucking plebs congregate right outside the front doors, smoking.

Smoking is an individual choice, regardless of how completely dumb it is, but Christ if I don’t wish they would bugger off 100 metres away.

And the complete hypocrisy of a hospital placing one of their smoking areas directly outside their cancer wards. *smh*

Walking through a cloud of nicotine fog is not something I want to be doing.

Go away smokers.

Go away.

16th April 2025

The Last of Us series 2 episode 1

On the whole it was great to see the series back.

I’ve played through part 2, the game on which this series is based, five or six times through. So seeing certain scenes happen in this episode that were towards the end of the game was very strange for me.

But I get it from a storytelling perspective. Games are just completely different beasts to TV shows. Certain reveals and motivations need to be shown earlier.

Dina and Ellie at the Jackson New Years Dance

I just have to mention though. The Jackson dance scene was just incredible. I’m not 100% sure, but it seemed to be a shot for shot remake of the same scene from the game. And it hit just as well.

In fact, dare I say it hit slightly harder — mainly due to Joel seeming to have slightly more of a temper against Seth.

The shots, the dialogue, the chemistry between Dina and Ellie, and the music just fell right into place here.

Beautiful.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

My prediction is that the series will end at the closing of the third day at the pinnacle theatre. It just seems like the most logical place for me for it to cliffhanger.

But who knows what changes they will make.

15th April 2025

What the hell was I thinking

“What the hell was I thinking?”; “Huh?”; “Who’s the fucking idiot who did this?.. oh. It was me…”.

Three questions every developer / coder / programmer / whatever-er asks themselves from time to time.

And I am definitely no different.

I built an initial version of a web-based tool for work some time ago. I built it with some speed to get it done as quickly as possible. But I should have taken longer and focused in more on the ongoing code quality.

I wrote tests from the get-go, but I let it slip a little when I would dip back into the project for little updates and tweaks across the last twelve months.

The other day I ran a static analysis tool over the project for the first time.

Christ on a bike.

So for the past day or so I’ve been battling hard to climb up the 9 rung ladder to the highly sought after status of level 9 all green. (Larastan/phpstan this is).

I’m currently on level 7 with about 15 errors to fix.

I have found that from implementing the fixes — many of which have been type hinting and generics-related — I am understanding the code — and the underlying framework Laravel — much better.

I’ve even found a very odd design decision in Laravel. The `auth()->id()` method can return either of the following:

  • int
  • string
  • null

Why not just “int” and “null”?

Anyway.

It’s been fun and I’m looking forward to fighting through level 8 before defeating the final boss — level 9 All Green. 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

What to write about

I’m having a great time keeping up to date with the blogging journey of a friend of mine.

And I mean keeping up — he must post at least three times a day.

And I have found it inspiring.

I used to write often back when I’d commute to work. But weirdly since working remotely I have written less. I suppose it’s not surprising — at home I have many things to pre-occupy myself.

But I want to start posting more often. Maybe not three times a day, but much more often than i do.

I do tend to post my daily Wordle plays, but I’m not counting those.

Who knows how this will go. Or even if it will go.

Let us see.

10th April 2025

Trying to move my wordpress site over to using the composer-driven “bedrock” structure of wordpress.

It’ll be a new server running docker, but will hopefully make it easier to make changes and deploy those changes to my site.

We shall see.

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