Weeknote 8 - 2026-08-28

Last weekend stated with a trip up to north Wales.

We went camping, staying at Llyn Rhys campsite.

On our first full day, we went to Bodnant Garden, which offered some really lovely gardens and woodland to walk around, and then up to Conwy where we visited the castle, went over the suspension bridge, and walked the walls of the town.

Day two, we went east to Chirk Castle and Erddig.

Day three, Tuesday, was the return trip home. We stopped at [Attingham Park] [attingham] and Benthall Hall. The route from Benthall Hall took us right into Ironbridge where we saw a large National Trust sign, so we stopped at the Ironbridge Tollhouse to pick up the stamp and see the bridge close up.

Blists Hill Victorian Town had recently reopened — now managed by the National Trust — but it was too late in the day for us to visit, so we have reason to return another day.

The weather has finally had enough of the dry, but fortunately for us held off until we returned. We were a bit underprepared for how cold the nights were getting though.

At Attingham, there was a volunteer in the kitchen making honey biscuits. We’ve taken a photo of the recipe to try ourselves.

I’ve changed my desk set up.

I was previously using a Samsung 32" 4k display, and had my laptop on a stand as a second screen.

I have now changed to two Dell 27" U2725QE monitors. With this set up, I have more screen real-estate, can see most of one monitor at once, and can have both laptops (work and personal) plugged in at once.

My work laptop (Dell) is connected to the first monitor via a Thunderbolt 4 cable. The monitor provides power, data (USB, Networking), and display all down a single cable.

The monitors are daisy chained together: the thunderbolt 4 port of monitor 2 connects to the thunderbolt-out port of monitor 1.

This means I can use the USB ports on monitor 2 too!

My personal laptop is currently connected via display port (HDMI can’t carry two monitors worth of signal) to monitor 1, but then also needs a USB data cable from the monitor, and a separate power cable.

I don’t really want to have to deal with three cables everytime I want to take my laptop somewhere, so I am getting a thunderbolt 4 hub that will take those connections. Then I only need the one cable to the laptop.

I am not sure if I will be able to drive both monitors from one display port cable with the dock I have ordered, but if it doesn’t work I can run a cable to each monitor from the hub. Hopefully I won’t have any issues there.

I have been playing around with Claude Code a bit more. I’ve paid for a month to really get to experience it. The free trial ran out fairly quickly.

I’m having it build an AI mentor and planner.

The app starts with having a conversation to elicit your personal and professional situation and goals. It will help plan your days based on your commitments, goals, and priorities.

The user will journal at the end of each day, and have a weekly review with the AI. The AI will use these journals and reviews to track and update goals, and help with long-term planning and identifying any trends in behaviour.

I am currently just building it locally, but intend to deploy it to my homelab soon. I will keep it to personal use for now.

The biggest issue I ran into was hitting request limits on the AI I was using as the “mentor”, so I had to keep switching model.

I’ve been using AI at work to help me on a side project. I was trying to get GLM-5.1 to help me implement some complicated, low-level algorithms.

Just telling it the algorithm and the situation it had to apply to didn’t get me all the way there. The best I got was about 2/3rds of my unit tests passing.

What did work was to give it a reference implementation of the algorithm in C++, and then ask it to implement the same algorithm in Java with the constraints of the problem. It ended up implementing the solution pretty quickly, with all tests passing.

My project — if it works as I hope — could be a massive contribution to LMAX’s technology, and end up being open-sourced. To have something I wrote be open-sourced alongside the Disruptor would be quite something.

I finished reading ‘The Signal and the Noise’ whilst on holiday. I wrote a little review.

Next up is ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde.