Monthly Update: July 2024

Jul 11, 2024

A while back I read a post that described monthly updates as “a version of social media that respects attention and focus”, and that struck a chord with me. So I’m starting a monthly update series, let’s see how it goes.

Cord Shutdown and Job Searching

My main activity for the last month has been job searching. Cord, where I had been working for the previous 3 years, unfortunately didn’t make it and abruptly shut down. It wasn’t surprising in general terms, but it was still a shock when it actually happened.

Most of June was spent researching companies, talking to recruiters, and interviewing. The last time I interviewed for a position was in 2019, so I was worried that I would be a bit rusty, but everything went pretty smoothly. Luckily, the job market here in London isn’t terrible for senior people, so I ended up with plenty of options.

I ended up with two offers, and they couldn’t have been more different. The first was from Cloudflare to work on their edge networking team. This would have been doing critical, high-performance networking work among a group of really talented engineers. Cloudflare right now reminds me of nothing more than Google around the time I joined, albeit without being attached to a money spigot in the same way as Google was.

Depsite that, after agonizing over the course of a weekend, I ended up accepting the offer from Relay Technology, where I’ll be starting in August. They’re very different from Cloudflare: nothing is yet mature, I’ll probably be doing a little bit of everything, the engineering team is very small, and I’ll be among the most senior engineers in the place. On the other hand, projects are measured in days rather than quarters and I’ll be in a position to influence the way the company develops. It was a close thing, but I’m excited to get going.

Since getting that closed out, I’ve been helping Cord open source its codebase, which I’m really pleased about. I think we built a really solid, compelling product at Cord, and even though the company didn’t make it, it should still provide value for people for a long time to come.

Football

Mr. 7 is very into football, and as a result, I’ve gone back to my youth sports roots and joined a 5-a-side football league. It’s been a fun time, but it’s also a kick in the shorts how unable I am to run for 40 minutes at this point. The team is super nice, though, and very encouraging about my play even though I’m by far the worst player on the team (as well as being 10+ years older than everyone else).

New D&D Campaign

The current DM for our D&D group recently became a parent, and so I’ve started running a short campaign in the meantime. I can’t say much about what’s going to happen, but I came up with a conceit I’m really pleased with.

The plot revolves around the PCs having lost their memories, and in order to set the tone, I had everyone create characters and then shuffled them among players so that nobody knew what kind of character they were playing before the first session. The players dubbed it “D&D gift exchange”, and it’s injected a really interesting feel into the game. I also had each player come up with three memory snippets that I also distributed randomly, along with some personality traits that they would use for their own character, so that they had something to base their actions on while they were getting to grips with what their characters would do.

Feel free to use or adapt for your own game, it’s been a super fun way to kick things off. I also like that it took some of the stress out of character creation, because it let people get out of their comfort zone and do things that weren’t their normal or even the “right” build, because they didn’t have to worry they would be stuck with a bad decision for months (someone else was).

Chess club

Mr. 7 is also very into chess, and so I’ve volunteered to run a chess club at his school in the fall. Nothing really planned there yet, but if anyone has experience with running clubs for kids, I’d love to hear about it.

Gaming

I’ve been spending my downtime mostly drafting Modern Horizons 3, which I really enjoy. There are a lot of high synergy decks, and while I’m not doing as well as I usually do (61.7% win rate as of today), the games have been reasonably interesting. I find that, unlike much of the limited community, I care much more about the quality of the gameplay than the drafting, so I’m having a good time.

Alright, that’s it! See you again next month, probably around the middle of the month again so I can have some first impressions about Relay.