Current mood - 3/5

What I Did

This week I increased the winter 2025/2026 snowblower usage count to 15 since November 11, 2025. When you add in the other times where the driveway and path to the front door were cleared just with a shovel, we are up over 20.

Certainly feels like an endless winter around here.

At work:

My main focus was the work to port over a Python RabbitMQ-backed worker to use PHP with Laravel and instead get the data from Kafka.

I discovered a pattern that should be familiar to anyone who ends up doing work at an "enterprise" sized organization: people replacing data sources with new ones that do not contain the same information.

As an example, the queue worker was pulling the following information out of the queue:

• merchant name
• merchant description
• merchant domain name
• merchant affiliate network membership
• "suppression" windows where we do not allow cashback offers to be redeemed

The new Kafka topic I am supposed to work doesn't have the affiliate network
details and the suppression window stuff looks a little different than what we had before.

Ticket asking for this work has been updated to ask where I am expected to get the other information from.

At home:

I did a hardware update to my small 3D printer where I added a chamber heater to it. The reason to do this is that some filaments require an enclosed printer or else they warp really easily and not adhere to the print bed. By adding a chamber heater, you can get a very consistent temperature inside the enclosure, which can lead to more consistent results.

I am not a handy person (I am getting better through practice) and was happy that the installation instructions where clear and straightforward. The chamber heater module was pre-assembled and ready to go. Here's what I did:

• moved the printer bed down to it's lowest setting to give me room
• remove the back panel of the printer
• remove the acrylic safety cover for the power supply (power was off!)
• thread the wiring harness through an opening inside the printer
• connect the two power cables with fork connectors to the L and N power terminals (screw terminals)
• connect two small cables with JST connectors to the printer's main control unit at specified locations
• reassemble everything
• modify a printer configuration file to include a chamber heating config file (already pre-existing)
• restart
• be happy I now have a working chamber heater

As I type this out I am doing a calibration print before moving on to some other more functional prints.