#159

Work

Still trucking along with the migration to the Digital Identity auth service this week. There’s very little left for our team to do, and most of that is blocked on the other team implementing a few remaining things. I think the main thing to do is to actually write down the switch-over plan: it exists in various people’s heads, but a list of steps like “merge PR #XYZ”, “deploy puppet to production”, etc will be nice to have.

In other news, I gave my first phone interview this week. Well, “phone interview”… it was actually a webcamless Google Meet (or Hangouts? whatever it’s called these days) call because, in the before times, we’d do it in the office by having two interviewers on speaker-phone talking to the candidate (generally one doing most of the talking and another just taking notes and asking the occasional clarifying question). But, since we’re not in the office, we do it online, rather than try to set up some sort of three-way phone call.

I was doing the talking this time. I think it went well, we have a nice list of standardised questions with points we’re looking for and timings, so it was easy to steer the conversation appropriately and make sure we had time to get through everything. I’m sure I’ll be doing more of them in the future, and eventually participating in an “in-person” interview.

Books

This week I started reading Fall of Light, the second book of the Kharkanas Trilogy, but for some reason I’ve found it very slow going. I’m not sure why; I’m really enjoying it, the prose isn’t cryptic, it’s just taking me a while to get through.

Gaming

The Traveller game I’m running will be starting on Thursday next week (we’ve had to shift from Sundays due to a player’s work; unfortunate, but can’t really be helped). So I’ve been watching Dark Matter, a 2015 Canadian sci-fi show about the crew of a space ship who wake up in their stasis pods with no memories, for inspiration.

It’s very good, and I’m definitely planning to take some ideas from it and make corporations a much bigger player in my universe. My game will be taking place in the Trojan Reach sector, which is a border sector where two major powers (or three, or four, depending on who you include) have some presence. It’s not entirely under the control of any one power, but there are still very busy trade routes, so the corporations which control those routes are natural factions to bring into play.

Miscellaneous

This week a new month began, and so the tradition of saying “white rabbits, white rabbits, white rabbits” took place. Why? Lost to time.