Once more unto the breach, with a seemlingly random post about what's been happening in my life.

Today started off with (as is so often the case these days) a rewrite of some of my code, this time moving code from a few different places in my main work project (a customer portal) to a single dependency library that manages all aspects of authorisation. The code has some smarts around JWTs and scopes, and the beauty of it is that it can be used both in the backend (including in Apollo GraphQL) and the frontend to easily figure out if a user is permitted to make a request. Having a single set of code for the entire project keeps things simple, which is part of the appeal of using JavaScript in the backend - and that keeps me happy!

I received a call late in the morning from Graeme Hill, who I used to talk with regularly on the radio. He's currently covering for someone at Magic Talk, a national radio station here in New Zealand, and wanted me to come on for a few minutes to talk about medical myths. As I'm the head of the Society for Science Based Healthcare, it was a good opportunity for me to dispel a few of the simpler pervasive myths out there (do we only use 10% of our brain, does chewing gum get stuck inside us), and also tackle the pernicious problem of vaccine acceptance, which even in a country as enlightened as New Zealand is an ongoing battleground.

After my chat with Graeme, I spent some time playing a nice, simple game (Hidden Folks) with my youngest daughter. It's like a hipster version of Where's Wally (or Where's Waldo if you're American), although I fully accept that at my age anything rustic looks hipster, and I'm probably just shaking my walking stick at shadows here.

I finished off the evening with a long council meeting for the NZARH, where we discussed the Religious Diversity Centre, secular education, refugees and our upcoming strategy day. It'll be interesting to see what comes of our strategy day, and I feel Sara's going to help the organisation clarify the path it's taking through New Zealand's journey to becoming a properly secular society.