Day: 28 January 2026

I like it when the Internet says "yes, and".
I like it when the Internet says "yes, but".
I even like it when the Internet says "no, because".

I'm not so keen when the Internet says "well, actually",
(Probably because it reminds me of what
a shit I was in some not-yet-forgotten time.)

But I don't like when the Internet rallies a brigade
To pick apart a character flaw I have, but hate,
Or to attack something I'm not, and expect me to defend.

So perhaps next time, start with "yes, and", "yes, but",
Or even "no, because"... or just say nothing, and
Remember what it means to connect with a human.

Highlight of my workday was debugging an issue that turned out to be nothing like what the reporter had diagnosed.

The report suggested that our system was having problems parsing URLs with colons in the pathname, suggesting perhaps an encoding issue. It wasn't until I took a deep dive into the logs that I realised that this was a secondary characteristic of many URLs found in customers' SharePoint installations. And many of those URLs get redirected. And SharePoint often uses relative URLs when it sends redirections. And it turned out that our systems' redirect handler... wasn't correctly handling relative URLs.

It all turned into a hundred line automated test to mock SharePoint and demonstrate the problem... followed by a tiny two-line fix to the actual code. And probably the most-satisfying part of my workday!

This morning it took me three attempts to put on a t-shirt the right way around.

I don't think I slept too well.