Work

One of my colleagues and I had to debug an issue that caused some of our HTML documents to render � in place of valid characters. Looking at it, it was immediately apparent this was due to an issue with character encoding. It turned out that we were assuming UTF-8 encoding as default from our document store, whereas in reality it could also be Windows-1251 or ISO-8859.

In and of itself that wasn’t super interesting, but resolving it led to another issue where some characters were rendered as =E8 in our text documents. This led us further down the rabbit hole of character encodings to Quoted Printable encoding, which is something neither of us had heard of before.

That turned out to be the only interesting bit of learning in an otherwise straightforward week at work from the project point of view.

Some further reading material on the above topics we read through in our deep dive:

On the internal training program for technical principals, we have been handed our final piece of homeworkm where we have to come up with the technical and engagement strategy for a sample problem statement. This mirrors the kind of response we might have to submit to a large-scale client RFP. This entire training journey has been full of learning, and this piece of work is no different. It is forcing me to think strategically like a CTO faced with a large problem rather than as a developer or a technical lead.

Learning

I ran into a weird issue in my VPS with Nextcloud complaining of a downgrade from v22.2.2.0 to v22.2.0.2 and failing to start. After living without my cloud for one and a half days, this eventually forced me to put in a temporary commit pinning the Nextcloud version in place. I will write more about this in a separate post some time later this week.

Besides this, I spent some time researching RSS readers I can setup on my VPS. I finally settled on Miniflux. I love minimal and no-nonsense software, and Miniflux fits the bill perfectly. Given there was already a Nix Package that set it up perfectly only made it a no-brainer. It is now setup at https://feeddb.balajisivaraman.com.

Personal

I finally got around to setting up the Yubikey 5 NFC I had asked my parents to get from the US on their recent trip. It was only after going through the setup documentation I realised that Yubico suggests treating the Yubikey as if it were any other regular key and buy some spares to keep handy. So I ended up ordering a couple more from Icons who are the official reseller for Yubico in India. I’m currently waiting on them to be delivered before setting all of them up.

Gaming

Going through Mortismal Gaming’s videos, I got enticed into starting a new Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition campaign. I have started a couple in the past that I never made any real progress in. This time around I hope to actually complete the game given it is a CRPG classic. As usual, I rolled a Paladin Cavalier to get the ball rolling as I anyway end up playing as a hero with a heart of gold in RPGs, and a Paladin sort of fits the bill being Lawful Good by default. One of these days though I really should play as an Elf Rogue who specializes in being pure evil. Let’s see!

Software Leadership