July Book Club: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Transcript

Mandi Walls: Welcome to Page It to The Limit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to run software in production successfully. We cover leading practices used in the software industry to improve the system reliability and the lives of the people supporting those systems. I’m your host, Mandi Walls. Find me at LNXCHK on Twitter.

Mandi Walls: Alright, welcome back everybody. This is our second summer reading book club. This month we are covering Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. As always, there’s a link in the show notes, so you can pick this up in your favorite format. This one is from 2021, so it’s pretty recent. You can get an ebook and wherever you find your favorite formats. With me today is Joe Block. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Block: Hi. Yeah, so I’ve been an ops person since they called us. Sysdmins.

Joe Block: And currently I work at Zscaler. I work on our government clouds. We do a ridiculous amount of network traffic. Our commercial side does a ridiculous amount of network traffic because all of our customers are basically using us eight hours a day for a varying amount of their bandwidth, depending on the policies that their admins have set. So they may be forced to tunnel all traffic through us, or it may just be internal traffic, and we do zero trust networking and all the good keywords. And I don’t want to turn this into an advert.

Mandi Walls: That’s another show. That’s another show, man.

Joe Block: That’s a whole other thing. And I wanted to join the call because A: I use PagerDuty.

Mandi Walls: Awesome. Love to hear it.

Joe Block: I even use it in my personal life. My home assistant uses PagerDuty to send me alerts for things like, Hey, there’s water on the basement floor.

Mandi Walls: Oh, nice.

Joe Block: Or water under a sink, because I was looking at a bunch of different options for having it notify me and I’m like, I’m an SRE, I’ve been using PagerDuty for a decade. It’s a simple REST call. And this way I can make it so that if I don’t answer the page and a certain amount of time, it falls through to the secondary on call, which is my spouse.

Mandi Walls: Of course. There you go. Yes.

Joe Block: That becomes a P0 incident. So, so far it has not fallen through to the secondary. Yeah. So I’m a science fiction nerd from way back. What are the odds? An ops person who’s a sci-fi nut, I really liked Andy Weir’s The Martian. So when Project Hail Mary came out, I jumped on that right away and downloaded it from the Big river and inhaled it in a weekend. I remember there being a lot of things that reminded me very much of working in Ops and a lot of things that gave some rather painful flashbacks to working in Ops, honestly. So where to begin,

Mandi Walls: Right? Yeah. So brief synopsis for folks who haven’t read it yet, we’ll try not to spoil all of it for you, but the premise is that the sun is going dim and that is going to be, of course, an apocalypse on Earth and will end up in an extinction event that will impact humans and non-human animals as well as crops and all that kind of stuff. A climate damage would be extensive, so as some scientists are trying to figure out what’s going on here, we meet our hero, Ryland Grace, who is a junior high science teacher, which I found kind of endearing because it also means sometimes science fiction gets written for adults. So there’s some spicy language in it sometimes, but Ryland Grace is a junior high school science teacher, so things are a little bit more PG in this one, which I thought was kind of cute. But then the story is told in two parallel chronologies. One is he is in space somewhere and he wakes up with amnesia, and the other one is the story of how he got there as he remembers it. And it is full of unprepared for this particular incident, and there’s no documentation to tell you how to figure it out. So I understand why this one gets really popular with

Joe Block: He’s in space because he was the warm spare scientist.

Mandi Walls: Yeah. He’s the N+1, right? He is the failover guy, the failover to the failover guy. And we don’t even learn that until the last third of the book. He’s just kind of figuring out where he’s supposed to be and what’s going on. And when he gets to that revelation, that was a brain burner. But yeah,

Joe Block: There’s a lot of, well, the character of Eva who gets to cut through all the red tape is like, okay, there’s a VP with a mission.

Mandi Walls: Yes, in my mind, she’s Ursula von der Leyen of the EU. That was just how I was picturing her. But yeah, she’s kind of this shadowy, almost James Bond villain kind of executive force that is able to bring everything together

Joe Block: Who cuts through every bit of red tape for given the ability for spoiler reasons.

Mandi Walls: Sure.

Joe Block: Yeah. So it’s interesting how, I don’t want to get, well, it’s the first couple chapters, so I guess it’s not too spoiler.

Mandi Walls: Yeah. First couple hundred pages can spoil

Joe Block: That the sun is being dimmed because this extra terrestrial life form, single cell lifeform is basically soaking up energy. Then when it’s got enough energy, it goes to Venus uses the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to reproduce, and then the child and the parent go back to recharge. And if I’m remembering correctly, it’s essentially, it’s not so much that the sun is getting dimmed as there’s so much of this matter on kind of, it’s a scum on the surface of the sun. It’s blocking radiation from coming to Earth, so it’s going to crash the ecosystem. And interestingly, they end up figuring out how to use this stuff as fuel.

Mandi Walls: That was so fascinating

Joe Block: And shielding, which is like, I respect that he tries to do the very minimum amount of you have to suspend your disbelief. He sets things up in the way that the biology of the astrophages works. And then every other use of that is consistent with the initial explanation. And there’s never any, “oh, and by the way…”, that contradicts anything that you’ve learned in previous flashbacks,

Mandi Walls: It seems more plausible and less hand wavy than a lot of other science fiction goes. Oh, there’s a magical hyper drive, or there’s dilithium crystals or whatever other kind of hand wavy thing is going on here. But here we have a biological life form and it looks reasonably familiar and has certain properties that are kind of, whether they’re plausible or not, they’re at least understood.

Joe Block: They’re understood, they’re simply stated. And it’s not like, oh, and we have this and that. And the other thing, they’re even even good justifications for some of the material science things that you find later in the book that are spoilery, but it doesn’t feel like something like Star Trek or Star Wars, where every time you turn around there’s a new thing that violates every bit of physics that you’re aware of, and you’re just expected to suspend your disbelief. And I remember years ago, somebody saying, I’m okay with suspending my disbelief, but I don’t want to suspend it by the neck until dead.

Mandi Walls: There you go. Yeah.

Joe Block: It’s like

Mandi Walls: There’s only so far you want to go.

Joe Block: You only get so much before you’re really talking about fantasy and space. And there were some things that bothered me. They don’t seem to ever send a follow-up expedition. The whole world basically joins forces to send the literal project Hail Mary ship, and nobody says, Hey, we have all the designs in place, we have all the machinery to make this in place,

Mandi Walls: Build another one.

Joe Block: We’re sending this thing with only three astronauts, and if they all die,

Mandi Walls: What happens?

Joe Block: The whole world dies. But we’re not going to go. And whenever you read about, say, a military procurement for a new weapon system, it’s always like 90% of the expense is developing it. And building the first unit. And then it becomes like, okay, now we crank out the F35s and depending on how many F35s you buy, they get cheaper and cheaper as you get more of them. So it should have been the same thing. Hail Mary should have only been the first of a fleet.

Mandi Walls: Absolutely. I get to page 300, 350 or whatever, and I’m like, okay, so where’s the backup mission? Why aren’t they here yet? Because I’m flashing back to the movie Contact where the crazy people blow up the first one and oh, there’s a secret backup because why wouldn’t there be? Of course you built two and the backup never shows up. And I’m like, this seems crazy. They had all this stuff, they were ready to go. You could have just, okay, so we don’t have a backup. Alright, we’ve been there before.

Joe Block: And the poor guy, not only does he not have documentation, but for reasons, they have inflicted amnesia on him that was

Mandi Walls: Horrible.

Joe Block: So he wakes up and he has no idea where he is, what he’s supposed to be doing doesn’t even realize a hundred percent where he is.

Mandi Walls: It takes him a couple of hours or at least, or maybe a day or more that he’s fully conscious, even recognize he’s in space somewhere, and that he’s looking out at a star that isn’t our son and does some math to figure out where he might be. And when we get to the revelation of how that happened later, I was at the gym, I’m on the elliptical reading this on my Kindle, and I’m like, son of a, and of course the people beside me are like, what is she doing? That was not nice. That was mean.

Joe Block: And the Eridani didn’t send a second expedition either.

Mandi Walls: Right. So he meets a friend. That’s the best thing you want when you’re a deep space is to meet a buddy. And fortunately turns out, but yeah, that other species that he comes across too, they didn’t send a back up either. And I’m like, what?

Joe Block: And they’re both the sole survivors of their mission.

Mandi Walls: That was a little too kismet there, but it’s what it is.

Joe Block: Yeah. It is what it is. And I get why he did that. It made the narrative a bit more streamlined than if we’d have to keep track of multiple alien characters.

Mandi Walls: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Joe Block: And big kudos to him for making them actual aliens and not people with different skin glue on their face.

Mandi Walls: Yes, yes. Yeah. The other species is actually really interesting. So folks read through that. There’s a lot of interesting stuff there that he put into that species is like,

Joe Block: Yeah, he clearly thought them out. Well, and again, one of the things I like about Andy Weir is he’s very consistent in his novels about they always reek of a lot of research.

Mandi Walls: Yes. Oh,

Joe Block: That he’s done a ton of research and it feels like he’s written up his world guide and he’s got, okay, this alien can do this, this, and this. Their biology works this way, and he’s using that to stay consistent through his treatment because in a lot of stuff that I read, they’re just not consistent with how the aliens work or how the tech works. And even some of the weird error conditions that happened towards the last third of the book, as soon as you discover what’s causing them, they’re dead on consistent. You don’t feel cheated.

Mandi Walls: Yeah. And you’re right, there’s so much research and stuff in this thing, reading through it, he’s bouncing around, obviously he’s the only one there. The other two astronauts didn’t survive, so he has to fill in the things that they would’ve been the specialists for. And I’m like, okay, this feels like a lot for a junior high science teacher. There’s a lot of physics in it. And he’s doing a lot of hand calculations from things like that, which Okay, we’ll go with you. And then we’re doing some microscopy and then we’re doing some cell biology, which is his original PhD area of expertise. And then we’re getting into some more mechanics and engineering and all these, there’s so much in there, and I’m like, this is a lot for this poor dude to have gotten into as a junior high science teacher. And it’s like, well, what would’ve been with the original planned crew? It would’ve been amazing. But

Joe Block: Yeah, and that’s actually something which makes it feel, it makes it a more enjoyable story to me that it’s the guy who’s not the person who spent their entire life being an overachiever and doing everything they needed to do to become a cosmonaut and not only become a cosmonaut with the fact that, okay, they’ve got to have at least a master’s degree in something to even qualify for that, but they’re the cream of the cream of the cream. And he’s the one who’s like, well, his last published paper basically got him on the radar because he was writing about xenobiology and his paper was the closest thing to predicting what they found. So they pulled him in. But as you said at the beginning of this call, he’s been a science teacher in junior high for, it’s not clear how

Mandi Walls: Long, it’s not clear how long. Yeah.

Joe Block: But he’s out of the game as far as doing hands-on research, but he kind of mus through and

Mandi Walls: Yeah, he’s able to cope with the wet-bench chemistry parts of this and all the other orbital mechanics part of this and all this other stuff. And I’m just like, man, this guy’s got it all.

Joe Block: And it’s almost like it’s better for him that he doesn’t have an engineering degree in some ways because when the Eridani is proposing certain things, he doesn’t go, oh, that’s ridiculous, but our materials can’t do that. Rocky is just like, oh yeah, this is what we’re going to do. And he’s like, okay, if you say so, I’ll go along. Sure. I’ll help you make this long.

Mandi Walls: This alien I met in the middle of outer space. This is great.

Joe Block: And it’s interesting that they agree we both have the same problem. Let’s team up and try and figure it out together rather than each work separately. And an unrealistic thing to me was it seemed like the Hail Mary didn’t have any weapons on it, and that just doesn’t feel like something that world governments would do.

Mandi Walls: Right? There is no way that that would get built that way without something on board of all the things that seem like we’re missing. I’m like, he doesn’t have any weapon systems, but I guess too heavy. I don’t know, but doesn’t really get into it.

Joe Block: Larry Niven in one of his short stories, when the Kzinti first encounter humans, they’re like, oh, there’s no weapons on the ship. Yeah, no weapons except for the drive.

Mandi Walls: Oh, that’s true. Yeah. Yeah. You can melt things with the Astrophage Drive drive,

Joe Block: But I mean, fortunately it didn’t come to that, but I remember at some science fishing convention, somebody said, yeah, any sufficiently advanced drive is a weapon.

Mandi Walls: And I’ve read some short stories too, where it happens to be, if they’re dealing with fusion cores or whatever they’ve decided is the propulsion system, you can pull them out, set them to critical and jettison them at your, whatever’s following you around and those kinds of things, but yeah.

Joe Block: Or I’m brain cramping on the name of the technology, the one where the fuel’s atomic bombs that detonate behind a pusher plate.

Mandi Walls: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That was in, yes, I know exactly. I’ve read those too. Now don’t remember. What was

Joe Block: That was in Footfall, another Niven book. Another Okay. A Drive is a Weapon.

Mandi Walls: Yeah. I think it was in one of the sequels to Three Body as well.

Joe Block: I still haven’t gotten to that. It’s on my list and it’s constantly five or six novels down in the backlog,

Mandi Walls: And they’re such door stoppers. They’re just,

Joe Block: That’s part of the problem. Yeah.

Mandi Walls: They’re so

Joe Block: Long. Every time I get around to being like, okay, I need to start reading these, everyone’s talking about them. Then one of the authors that I read regularly comes out with a new novel and it’s like, well, I’m going to read that first.

Mandi Walls: Of course. Yeah. We got to deprioritize that for sure.

Joe Block: Last time it was Charles Stross and the latest Laundry files.

Mandi Walls: Oh, I will put down anything for a laundry book. Absolutely.

Joe Block: Yeah. He was a perl hacker.

Mandi Walls: Yeah. Oh, yeah. He’s got a long history in tech too. Speaking of how some of these books are so appealing to sysadmins.

Joe Block: Yeah, he’s a and a perl hacker and worked on payment systems, and I want to say it was just before he was actually a keynote at some perl conference.

Mandi Walls: Oh, I think so. Yeah. Maybe 2019,

Joe Block: Something like that. Yeah. But I’ll stop reading in the middle of a book if a Laundry novel comes out.

Mandi Walls: Yeah. I think the next one’s coming in April, so yeah.

Joe Block: Yeah. I’m waiting. I won’t pretend that it’s patiently.

Mandi Walls: No, not even. And I read his blog and I’m like, he’s been through some stuff in the past few years, and I get it. I don’t like to be one of those folks, but I’m just like, man, I really want another one.

Joe Block: And the thing is, when he writes other things, they’re good too. And I definitely don’t want to be one of those people who are like, oh, I’ve fallen in love in this particular fictional universe that you do, and I want you to spend all your time writing in that. Don’t ever stretch yourself by doing something else. Have you read his Merchant Princes?

Mandi Walls: I haven’t read Merchant Princes, but I have read Glasshouse and Accelerando and some of the other ones. I have merchant princes in my backlog, but I have not gotten to

Joe Block: Yeah, it’s another one of those ones where there’s like, okay, there’s one change, and he really tears apart all the consequences of that one tweak. And yeah, I don’t want to spoil it or go too far off topic, but it’s also doorstop because I think it’s nine novels in that cycle. Yeah,

Mandi Walls: It is huge.

Joe Block: And none of them are small, but it’s great. If you need something for binging, it’ll fuel a binge for a while,

Mandi Walls: I’m sure. Oh my gosh.

Joe Block: But getting back to Hail Mary, let’s see, what else did I have in my notes? They don’t send a second expedition test and prod. Yeah,

Mandi Walls: It’s all test and prod for sure

Joe Block: Warm spare scientists. I mean, it’s not even poor documentation. It’s basically no documentation.

Mandi Walls: Yeah. That was super interesting. Eventually he sort of figures out that, oh, because he’s the American English reader speaker on the ship, that it’s giving him all the information in English, and it’s also available in what Chinese and Russian, but there’s no basic handling and instructional manual for this thing. That seemed weird because they did sort of talk about this coma process at the beginning that sort of sets them all on this ability to go on this journey. And they kind of recognized at that point, yes, amnesia was possible. I’m like, oh, if you know that amnesia was possible, why did you not stock some HOWTOs on the basic components of this ship?

Joe Block: And it’s even worse than that because the ship won’t let him go through that one doorway until he can tell it his name. So they clearly know that, okay, there’s a chance these astronauts are going to wake up with amnesia. And we don’t want them going into the control room where they can do something permanently damaging to the mission, but we’re not going to give them even a FAQ of “So you woke up on a Starship. step one..”, and it feels like from the description that some stuff isn’t even well labeled. It takes him longer than it should just find uniforms.

Mandi Walls: Absolutely. Find the storage area to get out of the main compartment, to figure out how to get food out of the thing. Just,

Joe Block: And then the other thing is they send him on this mission saying, okay, it’s going to be a suicide mission because we can’t give you enough fuel to come back. Well, what’s stopping them from sending a robot ship afterward with a refuel? Like what a tanker? Be like, okay, we’re sending you there with five years worth of supplies, and sometime in that five years, the tanker resupply mission is going to come and it’s going to bring maybe some more scientists or the logistics were challenging to accept. Yes. It was actually harder for me to accept the logistics choices that were made than it was to accept the astrophage.

Mandi Walls: And the aliens and the

Joe Block: Aliens.

Mandi Walls: It’s like, I can get this part out, but there are some OpEx not working here.

Joe Block: It feels like nobody talked to anyone in logistics. Nobody talked to anyone who was a incident commander, whether it be in tech or firefighting or FEMA or any of the other things where you have incident commanders and just the lack of reinforcements. I keep coming back to that as that’s like every science fiction book that I read always has something which bugs me.

Mandi Walls: Exactly. Exactly.

Joe Block: There’s just something which is like, okay, I was able to accept all the other sci-fi elements of this story, but this one thing really was just hard.

Mandi Walls: You can’t be so smart about all this, and then so dumb about that.

Joe Block: And I guess maybe part of it’s because I know about things like incidents and I know about backups and I know about spares and things like that. So the fact that all of those are missing, I guess they don’t really have a reason to talk about it, but you would think that there would be more tooling available on that ship.

Mandi Walls: I mean, they went to the point of the woman who’s in charge. She basically decides that most of the components that are going to be in the ship are going to be off the shelf and stuff that’s well established. I totally understand that. Not designing a bunch of new crazy things that haven’t been sort of battle tested as it were in the commercial sphere. So a lot of this stuff that he says is on the ship is all that. So they went to the point of like, okay, we need to trust all of these things. But they left so many other things kind of hanging out there. I felt bad for him as they’re getting through the first couple hundred pages. I’m like, man, I feel bad for this guy. This is a hell of a job to step into and try and figure all this stuff out with no help from your past self. This is your 3:00 AM self swearing at your 2:00 PM self that there’s not enough documentation.

Joe Block: Oh, it’s even worse than that. This is your 3:00 AM on Tuesday, self and start day. You got your laptop and your passwords on Monday.

Joe Block: There may be documentation somewhere, but good luck. Nobody’s told you where it is. And internal documentation, I mean, we’re all so spoiled by page rank that it’s popular to bash on Confluence. And there are a lot of things to hate about Confluence, but bashing on its search is really kind of unfair when their search engine has to work without any page rank, without any of the other things that Google uses to give you a good search result. So you go and you search in Confluence, and it turns into every job I’ve had since too long for me to want to admit my web browser has had a folder that is just chockfull of links to the internal documentation. Of course, because I know that I’ll never find it again. I’ll never find that page again. And the bigger the company, the more chance it is of like somebody mentioned this in Slack at some point I was about to date myself and say, HipChat chat. And then you have to think of the right magic words to pull it up in Slack search. I’m that guy who will write a summary and then throw in a whole bunch of keywords at the end of the Slack message so that later on I can find it if I look for

Joe Block: Whatever, because it may not, the word that I want to search for may not be in the actual summary of this is how you fix this particular problem. It’s not necessarily obvious from the fix that What system are we talking about? No idea. And it’s a great book book. I mean, it’ll make a great movie at some point. It’s a fun read. Like I said, I inhaled it in a weekend’s. Really good. Weir is really good at that sort of book. He’s another one that I’m waiting for the next book.

Mandi Walls: I know.

Joe Block: I know. I haven’t even heard rumors or whispers of what the next one’s going to be or when.

Mandi Walls: No, I went looking. I was like, okay, well, we’re talking about this one. I’m like, I’m looking at his pages. What’s next, man? What are we? What’s,

Joe Block: Yeah, because it’s been

Mandi Walls: Nothing. This is 2021. This was

Joe Block: 2021, so it’s been three years. You’d think he’d have another one. But I mean, different people write at different speeds. And the amount of research he does makes it clear that his books are going to take longer to come out.

Mandi Walls: Definitely.

Joe Block: But that doesn’t make me any more patient.

Mandi Walls: Not at all.

Joe Block: It makes me understand it, but I’m still not thrilled that it might be 2026 before I see another one.

Mandi Walls: I know it was really good, and this is the first one of his that I’ve read. I compulsively buy stuff when it’s cheap or whatever, and then it’s in my backlog, and then I just don’t get to it. And then as I was looking for suggestions for the book club, everybody, I got three or four different suggestions on this one, and I was like, all right, and we’ll bump this back up the priority and we’ll pull this one in. But yeah, it’s really good. And it’s one of those ones that are, like I mentioned earlier, sometimes there’s stuff in adult sci-fi novels that you don’t want to necessarily give to your teenager without having a discussion about it. I don’t think there’s any of that stuff in here. It’s very, PG maybe PG-13 friendly content in here. There’s none of the weird stuff that you find with a 1970s science fiction stuff where things get a little off the rails.

Joe Block: Or sixties or, when I read Heinlein, I was 12.

Mandi Walls: Oh, dude.

Joe Block: And I’ve since gone back to reread some of them and it’s like, yeah, only my 12-year-old brain really likes this one. There’s just too many things that I just didn’t pick up on as being problematic. And he’s not the worst of them. Asimov is way worse.

Mandi Walls: You outgrow that stuff. And whether or not even, I won’t say it’s good, bad or indifferent to actually read it, but it’s out there and it’s classic for a reason. But yeah, I feel like you outgrow a lot of that stuff eventually

Mandi Walls: The time we live in a different time than

Joe Block: You have to remind yourself it was a different time. Some of the things that they say that look pretty misogynistic looking at them today, we’re actually pretty forward thinking at the time because it’s like he makes it seem like it’s this big huge revelation and highlight in particular that, oh, women are fighting in Starship Troopers. But then he ends up having to be sexist about it by saying, okay, the women are basically all the pilots and stuff like that, and the men are on the ground doing the pulling up of things, but it’s like, okay, but at least he’s saying they’re in a combat arm and not just Oh, well, they’re the nurses and

Mandi Walls: Nurses and medical wing.

Joe Block: The nurses and the logistics.

Mandi Walls: Your quartermaster has course as a woman.

Joe Block: So it’s like, okay, it’s better than his peers. Yes. Better than his contemporaries.

Mandi Walls: Yeah, definitely.

Joe Block: And sometimes that’s really all you can ask for.

Mandi Walls: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s so true.

Joe Block: Yeah. Progress is incremental,

Mandi Walls: Definitely in that way. This one feels very, very modern.

Joe Block: Yeah, it definitely feels modern. We have Eva in charge.

Mandi Walls: Yeah.

Joe Block: The only real mention of it being that, oh, she’s a woman, is in the beginning description, and then from then on there’s no treatment as if there’s anything special about this. They’re like, okay, she’s crazy competent, but they’re basically searching through the whole world to find that person that can do that. But there’s no plot line of some guy having to learn that she’s competent after all.

Mandi Walls: Right? Yes.

Joe Block: None of that of

Mandi Walls: None of right. No.

Joe Block: It’s like, nope. I flipped a coin. Coin said, this character’s female moving on. She’s what it felt like.

Mandi Walls: She’s exactly. She’s just there. She does her job. You say there’s no revelation that it’s amazing and magical that she’s a woman, that she’s capable of putting all this stuff together and people actually listen when she talks. And there’s no international incident where someone from another country is like, there’s a woman in charge and this is horrible!

Joe Block: She’s making the hard decisions without getting all emotional about it.

Mandi Walls: Right?

Joe Block: Yes. And very hard decisions like Shanghai this poor guy and put him on the ship because, well, we don’t have time. Our launch window is this. And well, he knows enough. He’s able to be put in this medical coma, and if he doesn’t like it, well

Mandi Walls: The better of the planet.

Joe Block: See you buddy. It’s too bad for him. Yeah. We’re just going to knock you out and you’re going to wake up in four years on

Mandi Walls: Exactly. Your gonna like it.

Joe Block: Don’t even care if you like it. You’re going to be there and we’re going to hope that you at least do your mission that on-call shift could have been worse, could have been in deep space,

Mandi Walls: Right?

Mandi Walls: Could have been zero G and we don’t know why. Yeah.

Joe Block: Although sometimes when you get that page at Oh God in the morning and nobody’s awake to respond to you if you don’t know the details of that service.

Mandi Walls: Yes.

Joe Block: Yeah. It’s like

Mandi Walls: It is peeking out the porthole and seeing another star and not knowing where you are

Joe Block: And you’re like, okay, I’m trying to figure out the behavior of this system from the shadows that’s casting on the wall.

Mandi Walls: Operations as Plato’s Cave is definitely how that works. 100%

Joe Block: And then you’re just like, well, I’m going to pull the lever and see what happens because it’s already broke.

Mandi Walls: Can we make it worse? Probably not. I’m try it anyway.

Joe Block: So this was a fun excuse to reread this story and to also go be like, okay, now I got to go look and see when his next novel’s coming out. It’s been a while. I can’t remember the, I mean, this was the last one I remember reading from him. And like you said earlier, that’s 2021, so I should really go and figure out the cadence between his book releases.

Mandi Walls: I know it’s like this one, Artemis was the one before it and The Martian was the first one, and that was like what, 2016 or something like that, or maybe earlier. So yeah, we’re about due here. So yeah, this has been great. Joe, thanks for joining me.

Joe Block: Yeah, thanks for having me on the call. So this is episode two, so I hadn’t even heard about ep one yet. Is this summer book club all sci-fi books? Or

Mandi Walls: Is it, yeah, so what we were doing this year is I wanted an excuse to dig through my TBR basically. And I started out in January, we’re reading tech books. So we read a couple of those and by the time I got to May, I was like, okay, June, July, we’re going to do some summer reading and do some novels. And so that’s what we’ve done for June and July next month I have a DevOps book and the author’s joining me on the next episode. So we’re going back into learning for the rest of the year. And for anybody else out there who wants to chat books, we’re on the hangops Slack and we’re in the book-club channel over there. And there’s lots of like-minded folks who enjoy all this stuff. And if you’re looking for anything to add to your reading list, there

Joe Block: There’s a long list of stuff that gets discussed.

Mandi Walls: Limitless list of potential things to read that get discussed in that channel.

Joe Block: And if you feel like you don’t have a local tech community that you can talk DevOps and security stuff to hangops is the online place to be. Absolutely. The moderators are really good about keeping out the spammers and the not so nice people. And yeah, I’ve been there for, let’s see, it was before I moved to Denver and that was 2016.

Mandi Walls: It’s been around a long time

Joe Block: And I think I had been on for a couple or three years before that, so it’s been around a long time.

Mandi Walls: Yeah. I’ll put the link in the show notes for folks and you can hang out with us over there. And yeah, if you’d like to be on a future episode, gives a shout. I haven’t picked the books yet for the fall, so if you have a suggestion out there or something you’d like us to talk about, you can drop us a line. Our team is community-team@pagerduty.com. We’d love to hear from you about all the stuff that you’re doing, whether it’s about the podcast or anything else. Free to reach out anytime. So Joe, thanks again for being on. Thanks. It’s been great for everybody else out there. We’ll talk to you next month and we will wish you an uneventful day.

Mandi Walls: That does it for another installment of Pager to the Limit. We’d like to thank our sponsor, PagerDuty for making this podcast possible. Remember to subscribe to this podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can find our show notes at page it to the limit.com and you can reach us on Twitter at page it to the limit using the number two. Thank you so much for joining us, and remember, uneventful days are beautiful days.