Short work week. Not too much work, fixed some bugs, got to play with Django translations, and fixed some legacy code/bugs from earlier projects.
On the not work side, it was a great week, came back from Easter holidays, and went to Elton John’s concert 🕺, it wasn’t only a great concert with great friends, but also provided a new experience on mass events, cities, and public transport. The concert was at the O2 arena, a place that can hold up to 20,000 persons, it was massive, and massive events are a challenge for any city, specially for their public transport.
Getting to the concert was a breeze, a ride in London’s metro, the subway station is directly in the O2 complex, just a short walk from reaching the seats. As always, the arrival of the people is gradual, not everyone gets there at the same time, so we didn’t experience a crowd while getting there. Then, after the concert was over, that’s the moment when the heavy load was put into the metro. Imagine 20,000 persons wanting to get out from a place at the same time (DDOS attack to the city), and most of them trying to use the metro to get out of the venue. It was beautiful to see how the city and the transport system can behave under such demand, from organizing the exits from O2, to making sure that the ones that wanted to take the metro were following a lane, and then opening the gates for the metro to remove an extra layer of friction. However, opening the gates of the metro station implies trusting that everyone will check-in their entrance, otherwise they will not be able to exit the system (at least in a normal way). Once people get into the platform, the final part of the system kicks in, a high frequency metro with a convoy running every two minutes 🤯, and moving people into the city and to theirs destinations. It was great to be part of that sea of persons traveling through the city.
Now to the interesting links of the week, a short collection this week.
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