July 2017
List
I watched Neil Gaiman speaking to students last week, and it reminded me that I did have specific things I’ve wanted to do forever. Unlike Gaiman, though, I’ve never noted them anywhere, so I’ll search my memories and write them down here as I find them again:
- I want to invent something.
- I want to publish a scientific paper.
- I want to forge a blade.
- I want to travel to Antarctica.
- I want to pilot a glider.
- I want to learn a martial art.
- I want to build a giant machine.
- I want to live in a lighthouse for a bit.
- I want to publish a novel.
Okay, so they’re a bit more like dreams. Still, I think I could get to achieve at least some of them in the next few decades!
End of a job
This has been a very very busy month, and absolutely exhausting. Due to the large amounts of operational knowledge I had accumulated without opportunity to pass it on at my last job, as well as no less than three last minute large-scale migrations that I needed to be part of to ensure a smooth move (I hope!), I spent my last month at McKay flat out trying to document and finish everything right up to my last day.
I was very happy to be done with it all!
Start of a new one
I started at Uber (not the taxi company) last week. It’s going well! There’s a lot — and I do mean a lot — of technical details which I’m going to have to get my head around, including a whole bunch of protocols and acronyms I only have a vague grasp on.
On a human level, there’s two things I’m really happy about with this new job, although it is subject to confirmation as I work there longer.
Externally, it is astoundingly refreshing and comfortable to work with someone who knows their shit, and makes similar jumps of thought when reasoning about code and problems.
Internally, I am no longer stressed the fuck up and in two days that has had noticeable effects on my tiredness and well-being, despite technically working longer hours. Also, I now have a flexible hour-long lunch, and holy shit is this nice. It took me a bit to break the habit to have a fast lunch, but now I take the entire hour to walk to the Town Basin (a kilometre away), have lunch there, watching the boats and passants, and walk back. Awesome.
On a project level, I can’t really say because I haven’t seen enough yet, but what little I have leads me to believe that there is so much fucking potential and that while there will be some tedium as we work with a massive codebase with a decade of history in its commits, there’s many interesting things to be done.
From the outset, I expect to stay at Uber for one or two years, and I very much expect to leave the system in a better place. I’m excited about this!
Much writing
I’m nearly finished with the full first draft of the first story in the “In The Darkness of Dawn” universe Star Wars fanfic. This one is also canon-compliant, ignoring some small references to future dawnverse stories, and stands fairly well alone even if you’ve only seen the films.
Once done, I’ll do one or two editing passes myself, before either publishing outright or finding some advance/beta readers for more feedback.
As of yet, there is no title. The working title is Naema, from the second main character and OC, but that might change before publication.