Superb Fairy Wren

I was riding my bike along a bike path yesterday through a fairly industrial area. The bike path has been under development for at least the past 12 months and linked to the development of a free-way, but I'll take it. They've been planting a bunch of thick shrubs along the path - exactly the type of plants that smaller birds like the Superb Fairy Wren need to get away from slightly larger and more aggressive birds like the Noisy miner. It's pleasing to see a little bit of thought being put into these sorts environments and seeing direct results in a fairly short period of time. Birds are usually the first indicators of changing environments because of how easy it generally is for them to migrate short distances.

Speaking of which, last month I went out the the Werribee Wetlands and was really delighted to see a paid of Brolgas. It was special for this very half arsed twicher. Oh, and the Tawny Frogmouths are back at my local dog park.

It's local council election season here in Victoria and the first time that many councils will have single member ward electorates. The (Labor) Victorian Government thought, in all their wisdom, that the multi-member electorate system that has been running for decades was in need of reform. Of course we all know that, while giving a more accurate representation of the proportionality of the vote, multi-member electorates tend to mean some minor parties win seats. So to "ensure councils are more reflective of the communities they represent", the Victorian Government decided that it was best to make them all smaller single-member electorates which I have a sneaking suspicion will mean the major parties win more local government seats and just possibly not actually represent the diversity of their communities.

Here is a write up of the implementation of the UK Government's Exit This Page functionality. It's a broad discussion on why they chose three pushes of the Shift key rather than the Escape key to trigger a quick redirect to the BBC Weather page for people that need to access the UK Government's website in a potentially unsafe situation. I love that people are thinking about this and testing it in so much detail with accessibility in mind.

I've been talking a lot about Internal Developer Platforms at work lately and found this piece from Slack about applying product thinking to their internal platform very illuminating. Hat tip to Team Topologies once again (I promise I'll read it soon).