Story idea for the imps project thanks to the conference

Inspiration can come from the least expected places. You need to widen your horizons not just as a writer but as a human being generally and look into all sorts of fields and industries to get ideas and inspirations for your work. It can be surprising sometimes.

This came to me during the first day of the conference where I made a mental note to write about in detail, just thought of it again. Here's the idea. AWS, Google, Azure, all the cloud provider companies, they're just the magic providers where other engineers can create their worlds tools and technologies. The providers all have to work within the physical rules of the underlying world but the way they implement things can be different. The API's often look the same to external users but when you get into the nitties and the gritties you expose the technological chasm and the implementation details. There's benefits and disadvantages to this. The benefits are that the overall ecosystem is more robust -- a bug in the AWS hypervisor for a certain processor system does not affect clients for GCP services working with similar technologies, etcetra. The one big disadvantage is that the incompatibilities become more obvious the closer you look, also it can make adapting and changing things quite hard if you somewhat-kinda have to maintain compatibility with everyone else. Also the fear of competition can scare away providers from making big investment or changes that are needed but could be seen as overly risky in the face of massive competition.

The same could be true for the godly worlds, the system that creates their systems. Sure the Imps look after those, make the rules, make the systems that enforce the rules and maintain everything. But what if we find out in an expanded universe that they are not the only beings who have such a system. That alternative beings races kinds do similar things and have similar 'APIs' for their technologies though sometimes the outcomes can be drastically different. And it would be interesting if all the beings met one another in a conference of sorts, talked about adopting a common standards, discussed the problems they all encountered and ways to tackle them. Obviously the question of clients or employers would also come up and they would all complain about how stupid and lame they are and show absolutely no interest in learning the underlying technologies yet complain if even a minor thing that can be easily fixed breaks.

And what about competition even? What if the Imps go on a strike or what have you, and there's real threat of their entire race being replaced by one of the competitors by the gods who have just had it with them and their rebellious curious nature. Or newly burgeoning potential rivals, perhaps Chandradev and his folks (or any one of the smarter deutas) get a bit curious about how things work, and start coming up with their own home-brewed versions implementations of existing technologies which the imps cant stand because one, that could end up dangerous not integrating well with the existing systems, but also that threatens their services and privileges. What if they weren't given the benefits they got that were better than every other race in the known realms and treated like any other mortal class? Their fears could trigger them backing off and becoming more secretive and actually obfuscating their api's so potential rivals would have harder time figuring out the rules of the universe.