In a way, this summer has been an ordinary one, apart from the floods. Perhaps El Niño had something to do with it.

My son is now nine months old. He smiles a lot. Cries a lot, too. He's already cruising along the furniture nonstop. Already?

So with that little life update out of the way, I’d like to share a project update.

A quick life update first.

My son is now five months old and developing surprisingly quickly. Meanwhile, I continue to develop chronic sleep deprivation and persistent muscle soreness at an unreasonable rate.

A quick personal update. Our baby has been born and doing well, but isn't home yet. I'm taking paternity leave in a few days. It's going to be a long break, several months, maybe longer. When I told my manager, he accepted it immediately. No hesitation. No drama.

Still, I can't shake the guilt. Maybe it's just me, but I'm anxious about stepping away from my career for a while.

I read a fascinating article written by Sagasaki, the VP of Corporate at Acompany. In this post, I'd like to walk through some of the key points and share a few of my thoughts.

It's just a bit of small talk, but I started using the Arc browser recently instead of Google Chrome. I think it's splendid. One of the things I like about it is that it supports Chrome extensions, which allows me to use the Vimium extension. Unlike Google Chrome, which tends to get cluttered with lots of tabs or separate windows, Arc keeps everything contained in a single window.

Continuing from my previous article, we're taking a closer look at generating QR codes for OTP apps. The purpose is not to dive into the specifications of QR or the encoding technologies that it employs, such as Reed-Solomon codes for error correction. Instead, we'd like to wrap our heads around the process of capturing QR codes with apps like Authenticator and verifying TOTPs within the app.

Lately, at Acompany, we started using IDaaS, and steadily making use of One-Time Passwords (OTPs) has become a regular part of my daily grind. Motivated by this, I decided to dive in and get my hands dirty, exploring the nitty-gritty of generating OTPs. I'll share the insightful stuff I gained after falling down the rabbit hole.

This article is the 33rd entry for the #AcompanyChristmasAdventCalendar2023. I'm Yamauchi Katsuyoshi, a backend engineer from the Data Clean Room team of Acompany's Product Division. Founded in 2018 at Nagoya University, Acompany is a pioneering startup in the field of privacy tech. We've developed QuickMPC, a robust engine for secure multiparty computation, and have made it available as OSS.