The last few months, and especially the last few weeks, have been incredibly hectic. The giveaway, I suppose, should have been how little I’ve blogged recently: it’s a dead giveaway that I’m really busy when I’m able to neglect writing about how busy I am. I’m not complaining, of course, just apologising to the Internet at large.
Mostly, my time’s been eaten up by Three Rings. We launched Milestone: Iridium, the latest new version of the helpline management software, at the weekend, after an extended testing period and a long-extended development cycle. There’s a metric fuckton of new features in this release, including the massive Rota Autopopulation feature, which uses some incredibly complicated mathematics and fine-tuneable weighting preferences to find the best people for each shift, with minimal human interaction. Oh, and we got a new server. And launched a documentation website. I’ve no doubt that this is our biggest release to-date.
It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come. It still boggles my mind every time I look at the statistics, and see that we’re now helping over ten thousand volunteers. When I started, we were supporting about ten. Sometimes it scares me. Mostly it thrills me. It’s a great project to be involved with, even when it does consume all of my free time for weeks on end.
This evening, I found myself momentarily at a loose end. I felt like there were things I ought be be doing, urgently, but there weren’t. There’s a backlog of personal email to catch up on, and a stack of little jobs to be doing, but there’s nothing critical.
It took a few minutes to reassure myself that I really had nothing that needed doing immediately. Then I poured myself a glass of wine, popped my feet up, and played some video games. My Steam catalogue has gotten bloated, full of games that I’ve bought over the last few months to play “when I get the time”. Time to cut that list down.