Starting a new role

As of the 12th of June and after nearly four years, I'm no longer working at Ocado. At Ocado I had the opportunity to work with a number of amazing people and on amazing projects. I also picked up immense knowledge and new hobbies as well.

But now it's time for a new challenge.

Come Monday, I'll be working for the Metaswitch part of Microsoft. It's nothing short of surreal to interview for and start a new role remotely but Microsoft made the process really easy and smooth. In the meanwhile I've had a chance to meet part of my team face to face in a nice outdoors team lunch and everyone seems very nice.

With the three weeks I had between jobs (between leftover PTO at Ocado and the fact that at Microsoft there are fixed days of the month to onboard new-starters), I decided to work on my side projects and brush up on my C++ skills which I hadn't used for a while. One of these side projects came sort of impromptu: I decided I was going to eat some of my own (future) dog food and move my blog (this one where you're reading this) to Microsoft Azure. This blog has no backend and is composed of static pages which are generated by a mix of Emacs' org-mode and Jekyll. As such all it really needs is something that can serve files behind custom domains with HTTPS.

In these three weeks I also finally managed to get my Home Assistant instance talking to my IKEA Tradfri smart lamps, as well as all the Xiaomi switches and motion sensors using Zigbee2mqtt. It now means that in the rooms where I have a motion sensor, the lights come on and turn off automatically, without ever touching the switches.

With all of that sorted out and out of the way, I'm all set to start anew. I have my Microsoft hardware ready, my new desk set up, and I have a call set up for Monday morning with my new manager where we're going to go through my account setup.

Time for a fresh start :)