I’m afraid I’ve been busy with social things these past few days, which is why I haven’t blogged about starting my job. Well, it’s one reason, anyway.

It’s very funny how I can move into a city where I know so few people (Dave and Liz, and people I met interviewing at MediaLab, and absolutely no one else), and still find myself dining socially two nights in a row. Monday evening was with Dave and Liz, and was a very pleasant chance to get re-acquainted after years of intermittent contact. It was less of a conversation we had than a series of pointers to future conversations – I don’t think we actually finished discussing any topics at all.

Last night was much, much stranger. You see, when Dave and Liz came home, I moved out of their flat (the cat prefers them and she owns the place, really). I’m now staying at the flat of one of Dave’s friends, Patrice, whom I have yet to meet. And Patrice has friends who needed a place to sleep last night, en route to Schiphol. He’d offered them the flat, and there are beds enough for all, so I threw together something easy for dinner*, and had dinner guests from two degrees of separation. We had a delightful time.

But now that’s all done with, and I get an evening alone. There’s some sorting through things to do, since I fly home tomorrow evening. (Which is a good thing. I miss my bunnies.) But really, I haven’t any excuse to avoid blogging about starting work and how it’s going.

Well apart from one. I don’t know how I’m doing. I can’t tell. The learning curve is very steep – it’s a lot of information to take in at once. But more than that, I’m not a standard new joiner. They can’t just sit me down in front of an IDE† and tell me to go code. I’m the first tester, and the first QA person, and it’s a little unclear what they expect of me. I know what I want to do – some of it – but I don’t know how to do a fair bit of that (in terms of what to type into the keyboard to get things to happen, not what I want to have happen), and whether what I want to do will make the company happy.

I just don’t know. And not knowing, I’m prone to thinking the worst.

On the other hand, I had been sure I’d failed my driving test.

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* Chicken breasts wrapped in Serrano ham, in a passatta and basil sauce, served with pasta and salad. Which sounds like an awful lot more work than it was, particularly when the guests then cleaned up the kitchen!

† Interactive Development Environment, the place where coders write their stuff