What I done did in September 2024

Autumn is here!

Played World of Warcraft again

There was a new expansion released for WoW at the end of August so once my housemate, who I’ve played WoW with for ages came back home from a recent trip we started to play again.

When the previous expansion, Dragonflight was initially released I didn’t really have the patience to play through it as it was too much effort when you died all the time but having played through it leveling up a Dracthyr Evoker I found it quite enjoyable (due to the auto-healing thing that happens when under level 70).

However the armour and load out from that play through didn’t prepare that character at all for the needs of The War Within so I had to abandon that for a level boosted character I made anew.

Of course picking up WoW again means I’ve got back into Hearthstone a little too and I’m finding season 8 of Battlegrounds especially enjoyable.

Attended LeedsJS & MoT Leeds

It is Leeds Digital Festival in September so both meetups that I help run had bigger events planned than usual to celebrate and to deal with the larger crowds we get during that time.

LeedsJS had an event on around landing your first job writing JS which had a panel discussion that worked really well. After the event a few people taking their steps into software development asked me some questions so hopefully it was a good exchange for them.

Ministry of Testing Leeds had an event around the new Quality Engineering Charter and what that means for testers and development teams. It was a really interesting evening held at the Accenture offices, which gave everyone a little bit of nostalgia as we used to run the event out of the Infinity Works offices.

Took a trip to Harrogate

It’s been a while since we’d been to Harrogate so we jumped on a train and walked around the various parks that they have there. It just reminds me that Leeds really doesn’t have the same level of green space as some places.

Started my work journaling app

I had a bit of a motivational slump at the start of the month but towards the end I started to get some time and energy to decide on a feature set for an initial release and cracked open Xcode to build the basics of the app across iOS, iPadOS and MacOS.

I’ve still got plenty to do but the knowing that things are technically feasible has been reassuring and means that I’m in a better position to start designing the UX around the app.

Listened to some great new Spatial Audio albums

I love Spatial Audio. I've invested in headphones and speakers that can play Dolby Atmos and this month two great albums dropped in the format.

The first was a re-release of Antics by Interpol which has some of my favourite songs from the band on it so I really enjoyed listening to the songs with more clarity as the instrumentation was more spread out.

The second was a new release by Blood Incantation — Absolute Elsewhere, a band that I enjoy the heaviness of but tend to also bring in a lot of synth elements. The added clarity granted by Atmos meant that those synths can really drive the song so it’s been a great listen.