13th August 2021
I’m on a post-COVID-vaccination summer trip. The heat dome of late June in the northwest of North America almost cancelled our plans, but fortunately we’ve been lucky enough to be able to visit family that we haven’t seen in a long while.
While doing some vacation lounging, I’ve been enjoying some summer reading, and I keep coming back to the opening scene of The Ministry for the Future. It’s an intense start to a great book that’s worth your time, but an unworthy short summary: mass casualty caused by a few days of high wet bulb temperatures.
Simultaneously this summer in BC there’s: oppressive heat, almost no precipitation, brimstone forest fires, destruction of inland towns, and an unusually high number of people dying due to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Though these have not been events on the same scale as those described in the novel, you have to strain awfully hard to believe there won’t be many more extended heat events coming soon, coincident with high humidity.
… I went to work at Electronic Arts two decades ago because dang, I liked video games and it seemed like a fun time. And it really was!
… I went to work at Google a decade ago because working on Chrome seemed pretty important to get the web doing more, better, safer, faster when state-of-the-art was an abandoned IE6. Later, I worked on Fuchsia’s new kernel to try to make computing safer. Working on those teams has been wonderful, and more fun than I could have imagined!
… It seems very clear that before the next decade has flown by, most of us are going to have to be working directly on climate change. So after a burn-out avoidance break, I’m going work towards that, starting with either re-education, or finding somewhere where plain ol’ programming is a transferable skill.
And all that rambling to say: I’m newly unemployed! Thank you to all the
Chromies and Fuchsians who made the last decade an amazing one. <3
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