This week
Life
Big week! I spent three days at the annual YOW developers conference last week (including a one day CTO Summit), which is always a great chance to step away from the usual rhythm of work and get your mind in a different place. And then on Sunday I flew to Malaysia to spend a week in our Kuala Lumpur office. It’s my first time traveling in south east Asia, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It turns KL is pretty westernised, but with awesome food. My hotel is at one end of an enormous shopping complex (with two “megamalls”) and the office is at the other end… so I am forced to shop morning and night!
Unfortunately I am not going to have any time to explore KL or surrounds since I am only here Monday-Friday, so the malls and outdoor strip of restaurants are about all I will get to see. But I am planning another trip here next year, hopefully with a bit more time for touristing.
The down side of all this excitement is that I have seen very little of my wife and kids. And apparently the dog keeps running to the door to see if I’m coming home. Poor puppy. (And poor Jo having to deal with a jumpy dog all week.)
Training
Between conferences and travel, I haven’t touched a bike in over a week now, which is not great. Lots of walking and the occasional swim are hopefully keeping me in touch with some cardio fitness, and I managed to spend 40 minutes on the exercise bike in the hotel gym. But I’m going to have a bit of work to do to make up the miles when I get back home on the weekend.
Work
As mentioned above, it’s been all conferences and travel this week. My experience of YOW was a bit different this year — I spent most of the two days on our booth in the exhibition hall, talking to attendees and showing them our VR kit. Exhausting and draining but also incredibly energising. I did manage to get to a few talks, including the keynotes, the highlight of which was Brian Little’s talk on personality types and what they mean for how you exist in the workplace. tl;dr you can act outside your disposition on the introvert/extrovert scale, but you will go insane if you don’t give yourself “recovery” time (i.e. quiet alone time for compensating introverts, stimulating party time for suppressed extroverts).
I am spending this week in our Malaysian office getting to know the development teams here and introducing them to some of the practices we’ve established in Australia to “scale” architecture as we grow. Like YOW, this is exhausting and draining, but also very energising. So long as I remember to get some quiet alone time in the evenings to recuperate. ;-)