Weeknote 6 - 2026-08-15

Missed last week’s weeknote. Oh well.

I’ve decided that I will try to write a weeknote every week, but if I miss a week I won’t write a double-length weeknote the next week. A weeknote will be Saturday to Friday, and I’ll either publish it by Sunday evening, or not at all.

I may also not do that at all. It’s my blog and I won’t feel the need to hold myself to rules if all it’ll do is stress me out or make me feel bad.

The intention of the rule is only to reduce pressure.

If I want to write an extra weeknote, I will. If I want to skip a week, I will.

Saturday was a National Trust day. We went out Oxford way, starting at Grey’s Court.

We enjoyed exploring the gardens and the house. We saw — and heard — buzzards overhead.

We then saw Hummingbird Hawk-Moths and were absolutely fascinated with them.

After that, we headed a bit further out to Nuffield Place, the home of William Morris, the founder of Morris Motors.

Morris was one of the wealthiest men, but his house was modest — unlike many of the other National Trust properties we have visited.

He had a workshop in his bedroom!

Morris wsa also a philanthropist, having donated an estimated modern equivalent of £13 billion, including having his factories produce iron lungs for hospitals.

On Sunday we went to East Sussex Wildlife Rescue. For my mum’s birthday, I had booked a hedgehog experience.

Eloise, mum, dad, and I had an introductory lesson about hedgehogs, including advice on how we can look after them in our gardens; they can eat cat or dog food with jelly, but not with gravy, and to go easy on the mealworms.

We then had a tour of the rescue centre, seeing an incredible number of pigeons, along with some sparrows, a kestrel, a buzzard, a fox, and a tawny owl.

We were then introduced to the hedgehogs. We were shown how to clean one of the cages, and then let loose on our own cages.

Each cage had one hedgehog. Most were there for being out during daylight hours.

If a hedgehog is found out during the day, it is likely to be sick or injured, so contact your local wildlife rescue centre.

We would make notes on whether the hdgehog had eaten or pooped, and then clean out the cage. The hedgehogs were mostly asleep and hidden in an upturned box and buried under some newspaper.

We would (wearing gloves) use some newspaper to gently lift the hedgehog out from its hiding place without getting hurt by its spines.

A few of the hedgehogs were awake and alert and were interested in the strange new people.

I returned to work after a week and a half of holiday.

My team had been able to continue making good progress on our project.

Wednesday was the solar eclipse.

We went up to the roof of Eloise’s building. I got there early, expecting it to be quite busy, and set up my camera.

It was actually quite quiet. Most people turned up only around the peak.

We let people borrow our eclipse glasses. One family turned up with some camera film — which would not protect them from the UV of the sun!

I got some really nice photos of the eclipse. I’ll edit them and upload them here soon.

It might not have been totality, but I found the experience fantastic.

I have not gone for a run since before my holiday. I will get back into it this weekend.

I want to start learning C++ more seriously.

I’ve always been a Java developer, and never really branched out from there.

Some web frontend might be the most practical for my current job, but I really like backend systems programming, and C++ is a common language for trading firms.

I like my current job and have no intentions of leaving right now — honest! — but if I were to leave, a quant role or trading firm would be on my radar, and I’d like to have options.

Rust was also a consideration, I really like the language and the features in it, but it needs a stronger ecosystem of libraries. Far too many well-used cargo packages are still version 0, and I don’t want to be using a library that the developer hasn’t decided to commit to yet.

It also just isn’t used in industry as much. Crypto shops, sure, but I don’t really want to be working that deeply in the crypto space. My own work on LMAX’s Perpetual Futures is at the edge of my comfort zone. Maybe I’ll explore why in a post at some point.

Bjarne Stroustrup has recently joined an HFT firm1. I think that is a good sign for the continuing relevance of C++.

📖 Currently Reading

The Signal and the Noise — Nate Silver (affiliate link)

📝 Interesting Things:

Curtis McHale: Virtue Signaling, the web as PKM, and stopping things