I had a lovely time tonight presenting via Hangout to the members of the AWS Korea User Group “Women in Cloud” group. The organiser is my friend Dahye, and she said her goal was to increase the percentage of women giving technical talks in Korea. She shared with me ahead of time a survey sharing some of their questions and concerns, like making sure they picked appropriate topics, didn’t get a shaky voice when they presented, and how to deal with men asking “gotcha” questions during Q&A. While some of them speak a little English, they used the Cuckoo AI Interpreter and apparently it did a great job of translating my words into Korean in real time. At the end they all wished me a happy birthday! They are such a lovely, welcoming group, and I hope I inspired them to do more public speaking.
Yesterday I was invited to give the final talk of the year for the Tech Leader Chats meetup group, which is run by Multitudes from NZ. I had a righteous rant about generative AI and creativity, and I think I did a pretty good job with it! My references are below, and you can watch the talk online here:
I also wanted to share the list of references and news stories that I mentioned during the talk:
This is a write-up of a talk I gave at the October 24, 2024 meetup of Sydney Technology Leaders. While it wasn’t recorded so this isn’t an exact transcription, I’ve written out my notes and the information I gave as best I can remember. It also builds on and expands a previous blog post I wrote, so you may want to check that out too.
For those that don’t know me, I’m a dual American-Australian citizen. I’m 47 years old, and I’m a DINK—double income, no kids. I’ve worked in the Sydney technology industry in a variety of roles for more than twenty years, but I haven’t worked a day in the last 3 months. It’s been glorious.
Before I get to the HOW, I want to first acknowledge that this is a pretty awkward thing to talk about. I’m very, very lucky. Everyone in the room tonight—unless you were digging ditches today—is very lucky. We live in a country with national healthcare, and you don’t have to worry about your kids being shot at school. We earn good wages. We are at a social gathering, eating free food and drinking free booze. The older folks in this room came of age with the Internet, and we were lucky enough to get in on the bottom floor of all of that.
My point here is I don’t want you to think that I think that if you just follow what I did, you’ll have the same outcome. Your circumstances are your own. But I also don’t want you to think that it’s all just dumb luck, and that it’s not worth putting in the effort. My husband and I both come from families of labourers. I was never taught anything about personal finance growing up. I had a part time job from the moment I turned 14 years old. I was the first on both sides of my immediate family to go to university, which I technically only finished paying off in 2020.
My point is that hopefully everybody, no matter their circumstances, can take something practical and useful away from this today.
You may have heard about the FIRE movement. That stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. Let’s park the early retirement for now, as that’s not necessarily a goal for everybody. I want to spend a bit of time focusing on just the FI part—financial independence. I’ve pasted in the Wikipedia definition here, but what it really comes down to is not having to work for money. Imagine if you didn’t need the pay check from your current job. What would that get you?
It would give you agility. (I’ve tried really hard throughout this talk to put things in terms technical folks will understand!) Agility means you can change your priorities up at any time. Maybe you want to start your own business, change industries, or relocate to another country. If you aren’t reliant on that pay check, you can do that. You can even quit your job—tell your boss to eff-off, effectively—at any time, and know that you’ll be okay.
So where does this FI concept come from?
The guy generally acknowledged as the godfather of this movement is JL Collins. His philosophy is pretty simple: “Spend less than you earn—invest the surplus—avoid debt. Do simply this and you’ll wind up rich.” He gave a talk about it at Google that’s up on YouTube, which was how Rodd found out about him. Meanwhile I started reading blogs like Get Rich Slowly and Mr. Money Mustache more than a decade ago.
So in practical terms—how do you make FI happen?
First there’s one more caveat: this talk is based on the assumption that we live in a capitalist society. Earning, spending, and investing money involves political and ethical considerations. Every one of us has their own moral Rubicon that they won’t cross, and I completely respect that. (You are not going to hear one goddamn word from me about crypto in this talk, for instance.) But if you see all property as theft and want to dismantle the system, good for you. I will 100% sign your petition and support your right to protest. But me, I like living in a nice house and buying a new computer every couple of years and going on the occasional vacation. I accept that if and when the revolution comes, I’m going to be fairly far towards the front of the queue for the firing squad. For now, I can live with my choices.
So the four steps I’ve outlined here are Tracking, Budgeting, Investing, and then possibly Retirement.
Let’s start with Tracking. How much do you spend on groceries every year? How about electricity? Dining out at restaurants? Buying clothes? You probably have a rough idea – but do you have DATA?
For each of the steps, I’ve compared them to an analogous AWS Well-Architected pillar. For Tracking, I’ve gone with Operational Excellence because it’s all about monitoring your running systems and processes, and defining standards for your daily operations.
Way back in 2007 Rodd and I started to think about buying a house, and we used a mortgage broker to help us work out what we could afford. We didn’t have a lot of financial discipline, but we got very lucky and found a place that wasn’t beyond our means. We knew we needed to get a better handle on where our money was actually going. And like good nerds, we looked to technology for a solution.
Really what we wanted was to build a data lake by logging our spending. We also wanted to create dashboards and reports to get visibility on where our money was going, and to help make things easier at tax time. We tried out a few different apps along the way, as well as shared Google spreadsheets to bring things together. Nowadays many banks allow you to categorise transactions, but you might have multiple accounts. So for us, having a standalone app was important, and we needed one that works for both iOS and Android. We considered automation for pulling in bank transactions but ultimately decided that the exercise and discipline of manually entering transactions would be good for us, and it only takes 15-20min a week.
Ultimately the solution we went with is You Need a Budget and we’ve been using it for more than a decade. They have a blog and YouTube channel where they shared a lot of content around financial education and getting out of debt. It does cost money though, but we’ve found it to be well worth it. I’ve included a referral link if you want to get a free trial.
This is how I know exactly how much money we’ve spent on groceries each month. It’s really easy to create reports or search through the logs to see what you’re spending. (Note: I showed the real graphs during the talk, but for the blog I’ve blurred out the actual numbers for privacy.)
Once you get some data and visibility on where your money is actually going, it’s time to actually get insights from it. What targets should you be aiming for? What do you need to increase or reduce? That’s where Budgeting comes in.
The Budgeting step is analogous to Performance Efficiency and Cost Optimisation. It’s all about making sure that everything is right-sized and cost effective.
First and foremost, think about how you can scale up your income as much as possible. Look, maybe you don’t ever want to work for a FAANG company. That’s understandable. But if there’s a way you could double your income NOW—and put that extra money to work—that’s going to make a massive step towards FI. Maybe you could move to a new role, or pick up some on-call shifts.
Next, you want to scale down your expenses. This doesn’t necessarily mean living on lentils, but think about where you could cut things without making a big difference to your life. For us, that means flying Economy class. We cook a lot and make coffee at home. Our pets were rescues. Our furniture has always been IKEA or Facebook Marketplace. We generally subscribe to 2-3 streaming services at a time rather than all of them, and we rotate them around.
I’d also like to suggest trading CAPEX for OPEX wherever you can. This means not buying a thing when you only need it every now and then, but instead just paying for use. We don’t own a car. Instead we’re members of GoGet and we simply rent one whenever we need it. In addition to saving money, it also means we can rent out our carspace and earn some extra cash. (Granted, this is heavily dependent on where you live and whether public transport/car share are available.)
When we started out, we had no idea what our target level of savings should be. Do you know that according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, personal savings in Australia averaged 9.29% from 1959 until 2024, reaching an all time high of 24.10% in the second quarter of 2020 (because it was Covid lockdown and nobody was going anywhere or spending money). Right now, it’s sitting at 0.6%. Ouch.
If you’re just starting out, one useful model you can use is the Balanced Money Formula. I learned about this from the Get Rich Slowly blog, but it comes from a book written by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. It’s a simpler alternative to having a really detailed budget. You may also see it referenced as the “50/30/20 rule.” The idea is that no more than 50% of your income (ideally, more like 35%) should go to Needs – these are things you have to have, like housing, food, transportation, medicine, insurance, etc. And you want to save at least 20% of your income, leaving 30% for Wants.
We used YNAB to roll our spending up to these categories and found out that in 2010, we were at 52% Needs, 13% Wants, and 34% Savings. Not bad!
This is a very simple model, but it can be useful to get you going. As a first goal, having at least 3 months of expenses in the bank as an emergency fund is recommended. But this model is about achieving “balance”; it won’t necessarily get you to Financial Independence.
For that, you’re going to need to be more aggressive.
This screenshot is from the Mr. Money Mustache blog and his famous post “The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement.” In it he says that your time to reach retirement depends on only one factor: your savings rate, as a percentage of your take-home pay. To illustrate this:
At 100% spending, you can never retire unless someone else is doing the saving for you (like superannuation or wealthy parents).
At 0% spending (like someone else is paying all your expenses), you can retire right now.
In between, there’s a graph… but the interesting thing is that it’s not linear. Because once you start investing your money, it starts earning money itself. It snowballs. So the graph ends up curved. This is a long post and I highly recommend you read it, and it includes a chart that I’ve pasted in here. If you want to be really aggressive about FI, Mr. Money Mustache reckons that if you can save 50% of your income, you can achieve FI in 16 years. And in truth, that’s pretty much about how long it took for us.
But you don’t just stick it in the bank in a savings account! You have to put it to work. And that brings us to Investing.
BUT FIRST – A MASSIVE DISCLAIMER.
I am not a financial advisor. Rodd is not a financial advisor. I actually looked it up, and to be a financial advisor in NSW where we live, you have to do a degree and pass a certification. We’ve done neither of those. This is not investment advice. I am simply telling you what we learned from our research, and what we’ve done in our own financial independence journey.
I have likened Investing to the Reliability pillar, because it’s all about ensuring reliability and availability of your future financial resources.
For us, we started by focusing on paying off our mortgage as quickly as possible. We have a Mortgage Offset account and have reached the point where it equals the outstanding balance, and it simply deducts every month. This is a contentious topic in FI circles, because some folks think you’re better off investing that money in something that brings a higher return. We’re fairly risk averse though, and we preferred knowing that we were never at risk of missing a mortgage payment due to a market downturn.
Next, we were fortunate to work for employers that regularly awarded us shares through Employee Share Schemes. I knew a lot of folks at AWS who proudly told me that they had never sold a share. We did the opposite of that. Every time we vested shares, we sold them. The reasoning is simple: if both your current income and your retirement savings are tied up in the same company, what happens if there’s a downturn? You’re at risk of being laid off, as well as your retirement fund value going down. You’ve literally got a single point of failure. Instead we immediately sold the shares and invested them in low-fee index funds, which basically track the performance of the market as a whole. (Historically the stock market has seen 8-10% growth over the past century, on average.)
Because I’m a dual citizen and we have future goals of supporting family in the US, we have also spread our investments across multiple markets. There are also restrictions on what financial instruments Americans can own, so some things are in my name and some are in Rodd’s. We also have interest earning accounts at a few different local banks, ensuring that we’ve got access to cash if one of them has an outage.
And lastly, we are currently looking to engage a fixed-fee financial advisor to look over our plan and see if there’s anywhere we could optimise. (Those cross-border tax gotchas are a real pain for expats.) Many advisors will charge based on a percentage of your assets, and you don’t want that. Look for someone with a set fee instead.
Here’s some historical data showing our breakdown across Needs, Wants, and Savings over the period from 2010-2022 when Rodd retired. What’s interesting to me is that our Wants are fairly consistent, around 20% of our income. There were a few years when it was more, mostly due to renovating our kitchen and garden. The bumper years were 2016-2019, when we saved more than 50% of our income every year (and my income massively increased due to going to AWS). 2020 ended up being one of our lowest savings years, simply because of paying off my final student loans and our relocation to Germany.
You’ll notice this is a Google spreadsheet graph. I created a couple graphs for myself that I found really motivating over the years.
One of them showed the balance in the Mortgage Offset account versus the amount outstanding. In Google Sheets you can extrapolate a trend line, and I loved seeing the intersection in the future and having a date to work towards.
Another was for Retirement. When we started thinking this was maybe a goal, we picked a number that we thought would be a useful target and then I tracked our progress towards it. The goal number turned out to be a little lower than what we needed in reality, but it was a nice round number to aim for. Note: This isn’t your total Net Worth, but rather the value of your income-producing assets. (You don’t get income from your house; you live in it.) So while this graph wasn’t totally accurate, it still showed progress and helped indicate to us when we were getting close to FIRE.
And so at last we come to Retirement, possibly Early depending on how aggressively you’ve been saving.
The FIRE movement actually includes many different flavours of FIRE. There’s LeanFIRE, for those who want to cut their expenses to the bone right now in exchange for getting to FI as quickly as possible. These are the folks happily living on lentils now, who are happy to live on lentils forever. Then there’s FatFIRE (and ChubbyFIRE), where the goal is to save enough to be able to live luxuriously in retirement. These are the folks who want to fly Business class always. CoastFIRE is where you’ve saved enough in your retirement accounts that they are snowballing, and they will eventually grow to the target you need for retirement. So you can stop saving now, and switch to a lower-stress, lower-income job that just covers your current expenses. And lastly, there’s BaristaFIRE, where you have saved enough to retire but still work at Starbucks for their health insurance. (This one happens mostly in the US; you don’t need to do that in Australia.)
There are various calculators and spreadsheets that will help you work out what your goal should be for any of these.
Whichever FIRE model you go for, it’s all about ensuring Security of your assets and future lifestyle. The general advice you’ll see on the financial blogs is that you should aim for 25x (25 times) your annual expenses. This assumes a 3-4% drawdown rate over 30 years. This 4% Rule basically ensures that you can draw down a steady income even in the face of inflation and economic downturns. Of course, it’s safest if you can vary your spending. If you go LeanFIRE and you’re retiring on very little income, you don’t have a lot of wiggle room. Whereas in our case, we know that if the market drops, we can cut back on eating out or overseas vacations.
This is also where having a financial advisor can help, because you might have future goals beyond just covering your monthly expenses. Rodd and I have parents who will need support in the future, as well as nieces and nephews we’d like to help out with their education.
In 2022 we realised that we were at a point where retirement was an actual option. Rodd had a good long think about it, and in August 2022 he left Google after his 10 year anniversary there. This photo was taken on his last day. He hasn’t had a full-time job since.
I continued on for 2 more years, with the amazing perk of having my very own househusband. This helped pad out the fund even more, and also covered the cost of the home renovation that we’re doing.
Finally in April this year, I decided that I was burnt out and would join him. I finished up at the end of June and have been retired for nearly 4 months now.
Lastly, here are a few considerations and gotchas you should take into account if you’re thinking about retirement. A big one is that you don’t get work perks anymore! For me, that meant no more company healthcare or mobile phone plans. I had to sign up for my own. It means not being surrounded by free snacks and food at work, if you’re lucky enough to work in an office like that. It means no more branded swag. (Do you know how many AWS t-shirts and jackets I have?!) And the big one—no more racking up frequent flier miles on your employer’s dime. I have my KrisFlyer Gold status for another year, but then I know it’ll probably drop down and I’ll be sad.
There’s also the risk of being bored, and lacking motivation or purpose. Some people love work, and they need that to fuel life. Rodd has been perfectly content in retirement, and he’s found plenty to occupy himself: getting a part-time job as a beer tour guide, volunteering, being on the apartment Strata committee, and organising our renovation. I used to think I would struggle more, being an extrovert, but I feel like the pandemic really changed my values quite a bit. I don’t necessarily feel like I need to be up on stage anymore to feel fulfilled. I have a long list of projects to do at home, and so far I’m enjoying doing them.
You may also experience pushback from family and friends when you tell them you’re retiring. Most folks have been lovely, wishing us well or indicating that they wished they could retire too. But we’ve also run into a couple folks who just could not get their head around it—some come from a culture where you work until you’re 70 to take care of your parents and family. Others don’t understand not wanting to make as much money as possible, forever. They thought we were making a huge mistake. Not much you can do there.
And lastly, retirement shows you how much of the world is organised around work. We flew in from overseas in September and I had to fill out Australia’s Incoming Passenger Card. And right away I hit that field that says Occupation. What do I write there now?! (I went with Consultant. That always feels safe.) Whenever you meet new people, they always ask you what you do for a living. If you register for any tech events, it’ll ask you your company and job title. And of course, it can get awkward when your friends and family have work problems or get laid off. You want to support them but worry that you’ll be annoying or they think you won’t be able to relate.
Just stuff to think about.
Time to sum it all up. I talked about Financial Independence, and how it can give you agility no matter what your ultimate goals are. To get there, you need to first understand your spending. That means you need to start Tracking today, if you aren’t already. Once you’re Tracking you can start Budgeting, and actually being proactive with your hard-earned dollars. We talked about the Balanced Money Formula, and how ultimately FI comes down to saving as much of your income as you can. Once you’ve accumulated some savings, you need to put it to work through Investing in income-producing assets. And ultimately, if you want you can work towards early Retirement, where you can quit your job and live off your retirement savings, assuming you’ve hit your FIRE goals.
After a quiet January settling back in Sydney, in February I headed to Singapore to help deliver the opening and closing keynotes for AWS Innovate AIML edition.
I headed into the office to meet with a few colleagues. The view is pretty nice…
For the keynotes, we were going to stream them live from a greenscreen studio. I headed over early in the morning for hair and makeup, where I found a special surprise waiting: my colleague Ethan had created a special t-shirt with me wearing my AWS dress!
How cute is that?? We spent a very long day of finalising the content, rehearsing, and pre-recording a dress rehearsal. That night, I headed out to Brewerks in Clarke Quay for dinner. Singapore is such a pretty city.
I had a very early start the next day for the actual live stream. It went really well. Thanks to Ethan and my awesome co-host Dean for making everything so fun!
The weather wasn’t great in Singapore that week, but I did manage to work by the pool for a few hours.
I also attended the AWS Singapore meetup one night, which we held in our offices. Massive turnout, and a really great evening of talks.
The next day, I met up with the two members of my team based in Singapore – Cathy and Donnie!
We also hosted a dinner for some of the AWS Community members in Singapore: AWS Heroes, AWS Community Builders, and user group leaders.
On my very last night, I went out for dinner with my good buddy Gabe and his wife Alex. They took me to a local place that was super crowded, insanely tasty, and so cheap. Singaporeans are spoiled for food, I tell ya.
It was a quick trip – just a week – but it was great getting to catch up with all these folks!
A couple weeks later, the Snook and I both flew to Melbourne where I’d be delivering the closing talk of ServerlessDays ANZ.
We made it just in time to attend the speakers’ dinner that night, and then had a lovely walk back along the Yarra.
The next day was the conference. The venue at Federation Square was gorgeous! My buddies Lars Klint and Pete Hanssens were on the organising committee and kicked things off.
Great crowd!
Here are some of the amazing other speakers! The talks are all up on YouTube.
My session was the last one of the day…
Thankfully it went realy well and I was happy that it was so well received! Thanks to my colleagues Paul, Stephen, Gregor, and Derek for all their help with the event.
After the conference, we all headed to a nearby bar for the afterparty…
The next morning we headed out into the city to be tourists. We mooched around the Queen Victoria Markets and enjoyed the sunshine. The hot weather helped us justify stopping off at Brick Lane Shed for a sneaky beer!
We had a plan to meet someone at ACMI but had some time to kill, so we decided to check out the “Story of the Moving Image” exhibition.
Then we headed up to the lab to meet my friend J Rosenbaum and check out their fascinating new artwork Gender Tapestry. We took selfies that were uploaded and featured in some of the creepy generated faces.
That night, the Snook – a notorious hater of musicals – gave me a lovely birthday present of attending & Juliet with me. (It helped that I told him all the songs were from the catalogue of Max Martin, Swedish Pop producer extraordinaire!)
I LOVED IT. It’s a retelling of Romeo and Juliet with loads of pop song mash-ups, a gay romance, great costumes, fantastic dancing, and Rob “Millsy” Mills as Shakespeare. I mean, WAS THIS WRITTEN FOR ME?!
Afterwards, we headed to trendy Bar Ampere for dinner and cocktails.
On our last day, we headed down to St. Kilda to enjoy the sunshine and check out the markets.
We went for a walk along the beach. I always think of the line from the Paul Kelly song – “Where the palm trees have it hard.”
We finished our trip with a spot of furniture browsing in Collingwood followed by beers at The Craft & Co.
And that’s where it would have ended, a nice ending to the weekend… except for a little accident on the way back to the hotel. Here’s how I described it to my sister:
So Rodd and I were briefly walking back to our hotel in Melbourne so we could head to the airport. Down one of the busiest shopping streets, people everywhere. I walk over, like, a manhole or something. And my left foot lands crookedly And I start stumbling forward And I can’t get my feet under me And it’s like slow motion, and I’m like, yep, I’m going down. 😂 And rather than try to land on my knees or my hands, perhaps sensing that I could risk breaking something that way, instead I face plant. Literally belly flop on the pavement, taking the brunt of the fall on my boobs. The Asian couple in front of me were like horrified “ARE YOU OKAY?!?” And Rodd helped me up and I’m okay Skinned my elbow a tiny bit But I suspect my chest is gonna hurt tomorrow. So that’s me. Still falling on my face, as a grown-ass adult.
Over the course of the next week, my chest started to feel increasingly sore. I didn’t have any visible bruising, but sleeping on my left side was impossible and it got harder and harder to breathe. Finally I started to get worried that something was really wrong, so we headed to the hospital.
A few hours and a couple X-rays and an EKG later, they confirmed that I wasn’t having a heart attack. The doctor couldn’t rule out a cracked rib, but didn’t see one on the X-ray. The only thing I could do was wait until it stopped hurting, which took a few more weeks. In retrospect, seems likely that it was a case of costochondritis, where the cartilage between the ribs gets inflamed. I’m super grateful to the Australian health care system and the doctors for helping me rule out anything more serious! (Oh, and it didn’t cost me anything. 😅)
At the end of November I had a couple work commitments a week apart in Paris and Luxembourg, so we decided to combine them into a single trip – the last and biggest of our time in Europe. (I suspect it’ll also be the longest blog post!) ❤️
We kicked off with a very early (6:45am!) Sunday morning TGV train from Munich.
We bought coffee and pastries to have breakfast on the train, and we just relaxed and watched the scenery as the sun came up.
By 10:30am we were crossing the Rhine into France.
The train had been moving pretty fast through Germany, but you could definitely tell when we crossed over and started really moving. (That’s about 200mph.)
The French countryside is very pretty.
We arrived at Gare de l’Est around 12:30pm and caught a taxi to our hotel. We were staying at the Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile in the northwest of the city. Not an especially touristy area, but it was fairly close to my office. After we dropped off our stuff, we headed out for a walk and ended up at the Arc de Triomphe.
We took the underground passageway and popped out right at the base of the arch.
The Arc de Triomphe honours those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Those carvings there amused me, as the ones on the right are meant to be bearded Germans while the ones on the left are the French. In the middle under the archway is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I.
Hey, there’s the Champs-Élysées! While it’s considered the most beautiful avenue in the world, on a rainy day with lots of traffic it just looks like any other street.
We next headed towards the Seine, passing by some very fancy shops. Mr. Snook was looking pretty fashionable himself in the Belstaff.
We crossed the Seine at the Pont de l’Alma and got our first glimpse of the Tower.
And then we were at the Tower! There’s a lot of work being done around the base, presumably ahead of Paris hosting the Olympics in 2024.
We crossed back over the Seine at the Pont d’Iéna.
On the other side, we walked up past the Trocadero Gardens to the Palais de Chaillot. Our only previous trip to Paris had been in 2001 (21 years ago!), and we both had a vague memory that this had been where we posed in front of the Tower all those years ago. Unfortunately it was fenced off for renovations…
…but I peeked through the little window. Pretty sure that’s where it was.
The date was Sunday, November 20th, which means it was our 18th wedding anniversary. I had planned something very special for dinner that night – a river cruise with Ducasse sur Seine.
This is a beautiful glass restaurant boat docked right at the Pont d’Iéna. (Note: our Uber driver was confused by the directions as the wharves are below the level of the street. He ended up letting us out on the corner and we went down the stairs to the docks.) The host took our jackets and led us to our table, which had a perfect view of the Tower.
I had booked us for 4-courses with matching wines, starting at 19:30. That meant we had an hour before the boat actually left for the 2-hr river cruise at 20:30. We had both dressed up and we were feeling pretty special.
The menu from our dinner is currently on a boat somewhere between Amsterdam and Sydney, so I don’t have exact details on what we ate. (The online menu has been updated since then.) But we started off with some small bites along with bread and butter.
There was also a small soup… potato, I think?
At 20:00, the twinkle lights went off on the Tower. 😍
For the second course, I had a beetroot and pomegranate dish while the Snook had a duck terrine.
At this point, the boat started moving! We slowly cruised east along the Seine. Here we are passing under the ornate Pont Alexandre III bridge.
We also cruised past the Tuileries Garden, where I knew a big Christmas market was happening!
Mr. Snook was enjoying himself.
The cruise goes all the way up to Île de la Cité, under the Pont Neuf, and around the island before heading back. Unfortunately the angles were such that we couldn’t really get a good view of Notre Dame.
For the mains, I had scallops while Rodd had lobster.
And then it was time for dessert! Mine involved chocolate and ice cream, while the Snook’s was clementine (orange) flavoured.
On the return trip we got to see the other side of the river (the Left Bank). Here’s the Musée d’Orsay.
And then the Tower came into sight, and we knew we were at the end of the trip. What a wonderful evening! Good food in an unforgettable setting, with my favourite person in the world.
Recently I was very honoured to be invited by some of my friends in the DACH (aka Germany, Austria, Switzerland) tech community to be the keynote speaker for AWS Community Day 2022. This was going to be their first time back in person after two years of virtual events, and I was very excited to finally meet some of them in person. Rodd was going to accompany me, of course, and he had planned out some fun touristy things for us to do as well.
We caught the Tuesday morning train from Munich. It was about a 4.5hr trip, including a short transfer in Leipzig. I mostly used the time to finish off my slides for the keynote!
On Tuesday night, the local AWS Dresden group were having a pre-Community Day meetup so we went along. Here’s my buddy Mohamed presenting about a couple serverless apps he built, as well as Martin from Groundfog sharing how they built a personalised web experience for visitors.
Wednesday was the big event, so we headed over early in the morning to the conference venue to help set up. My friends Linda (from Vienna) and Markus (from Munich) were going to be kicking things off in the morning.
Markus insisted that I wear the AWS dress. 😂 He was also going to be introducing me on stage.
Eventually everything was ready and the hosts kicked off the morning. I was very excited to see them launch the Förderverein AWS Community DACH, which brings together all the different AWS groups into a single association. (Bonus points for the pun in the logo – in German, “Dach” means “roof”.)
Markus gave me a very humorous intro in which he’d scraped some dubious photos from my social media accounts, but thankfully he ended with the nicest one. ❤️
My talk started out quite personal, talking about how isolated I felt in the first ten years of my career. It wasn’t until I started going to meetups and hackathons that I finally felt like I belonged. At that point, it turned into a big soppy love letter to the folks in the room, who were my first friends when we moved to Germany. I ended by talking about how much AWS values the external community, and some of our plans to support them even more in the future.
One last photo of me with Markus and Linda, who I’m going to really really miss. 😢
We spent the rest of the day at the conference, going to sessions and meeting sponsors and attendees. It was a small but passionate crowd, and everyone was so excited to get back together in person. Thank you to the organisers for inviting me!
We were pretty tired that night but of course had to take advantage of the hotel sauna…
I worked from the hotel the next day, but Rodd got me out into the sunshine for a quick walk and lunch in the city.
We were very amused to see that there is actually an Australian restaurant in Dresden! The Snook was dubious, but hey, they serve kangaroo goulash soup. 😂
We walked up to Brühl’s Terrace, a large elevated terrace overlooking the Elbe. It was a beautiful day.
Here we are with the Hofkirche (Dresden Cathedral), the most important Catholic church in the city.
We also found the Lego store, which had a “Selfie Point.” Okay, then.
Our hotel was very close to the famous Frauenkirche in Dresden. This Lutheran church was destroyed during the firebombing of the city in 1945 and left in ruins as a war memorial for 50 years. It was only rebuilt after German reunification and was completed in 2005. The darker stones you can see were salvaged from the original church and were able to be reused in the reconstruction.
We went inside to take a look as well. It was all soft pastels, trompe l’oeil, and extravagant carvings. Very pretty! The story of how they rebuilt it is truly amazing.
That night we had booked a special dinner at Genuss-Atelier, a local Michelin-starred restaurant. It was described as “rustic vaults” and it felt very cozy.
One of the coolest things was that the tables had built in drawers with all the cutlery you’d need, so the waiters didn’t need to keep bringing fresh sets. I’ve never seen that before.
We went with the six-course “Surprise” menu, and since it’s all seasonal and not printed, I tried to keep notes on my phone about what we had. We started with a couple small bites: pickled herring with potato chip, and felafel with yogurt.
The Snook enjoyed the little bread rolls and butter. (He may have also been drafting a post for We Want Plates.)
Our first proper course was beef tartar with sour cream and chives.
Next was a vegetarian course – turnip cabbage (aka kohlrabi), celery, and yuzu.
Next was the fish course – “eagle fish” (which we think is also called a “meagre“) with radicchio, celery, and capers.
For the meat course, we had lamb with pumpkin and polenta, and of course we opted for the extra shaved black truffle!
Everything was delicious and beautifully prepared. We were also having matched wines with each course, all of them from the local area. Rodd was amused when the waiter excitedly told him how one of them was matured in oak, which is something of a novelty in the region. (It’s very common in Australia!) Needless to say, we were having a wonderful evening.
And we finished with TWO desserts! First was “blueberry, butter cookie, and vanilla.”
And lastly, “banana, coconut, mango sorbet.” Yum!
Highly recommend Genuss-Atelier if you are ever in the Dresden area!
Thank you very much to David and the folks at the Biblioteca Salvador Vives Casajuana @bibliotequesxbm for inviting me as a guest for their Roald Dahl book group discussion today! That was a lot of fun. ❤️📚
Apologies for the extended radio silence! It’s been a busy couple of weeks and I’ve been travelling all over.
On March 1st I headed to Perth for our very first YOW! Night of the year. Evan Leybourn was presenting on “business agility” to an eager crowd at Bankwest headquarters.
If you want to learn more about business agility, you’re in luck – we’re bringing the Business Agility Conference to Australia this year!
I also got to let everyone know the big news that YOW! West is now YOW! Perth, and it’s moved to September to line up in a tour with Singapore and Hong Kong. Should be fun and allow us to bring even more amazing folks to that part of the world!
After Perth I headed to INDIA for the first time ever! I was speaking at Agile India 2018 in Bangalore. I didn’t get to see much of the city outside the conference, but the speakers and the community were wonderful. It was also nice to catch up with so many folks from the extended YOW! family like James Stewart, Jeff Patton, and Fred George.
I was still fine tuning my own presentation, but I did manage to catch some great talks over the three days I was there. One of my favourites was from Dan Makoski, the VP of Design at Walmart. Dan talked about making design more human, humble, and accessible, I especially liked this observation:
“Only two industries call their customers ‘users.’ Software development… and the illicit drug industry.” – Dan Makoski
Dan actually had us do some creative exercises during his presentation. In one of them, we used small cans of PlayDoh to imagine a futuristic toothbrush. (Mine was a pill “full of nanobots” that you chew on. 🤖) In another, we had 60 seconds to draw the person next to us. I made a new friend in the process!
My new friend Sohan Maheshwar from AWS gave a talk on building voice-enabled experiences with Alexa. Obviously this is a topic in which I have some interest! There are interesting challenges around feature discoverability when you talk about “zero UI.”
Jeff Patton‘s session was super popular, as always. He uses a technique where he mixes slides with live sketchnoting, which he projects using a fixed camera above the lectern. It’s a great way to keep an audience engaged with that you’re saying!
I was fascinated by Nils Kappeyne‘s talk about Shell, one of the largest companies in the world. (Roald Dahl worked for Shell in Africa during the 1930’s!) They’re investing huge amounts of money in IoT, AI/ML, renewable energy, and even working to disrupt themselves in various ways.
My talk was on Friday, and I started the day with an EPIC STACK – falling flat on my face in front of half the audience! Luckily only my pride was bruised, and I had plenty of time to recover before I spoke. 😂
The focus on the last day was on DevOps and Continuous Delivery, and it started with a keynote from my friend Gregor Hohpe. Gregor’s talks are always entertaining and filled with useful info! I especially liked his challenge to those who judged their current level of test coverage acceptable.
My session was called “Building Software That Lasts,” and you can see my slides here. I said that too often in technology, the immediate response when inheriting legacy code is to chuck it out and start over. This is rarely a good idea. I talked about some of the trade-offs and choices you can make to build software that lasts and evolves over time. I had a small but engaged crowd, and I got some good questions after too! I even convinced someone he needs to look into property-based testing.
I also saw an informative session from Nikhil Barthwal on chaos engineering. One technique he mentioned in particular was running Game Days with your team – events to simulate how you’ll respond in the event of a real service failure.
My friend James Stewart from the UK spoke about cloud security. James said that security is about gaining trust through demonstrating competence, and every breach you suffer erodes that trust. Customers these days have more and more options, and they will leave (that even goes for government sites).
The award for my favourite talk title at the conferences goes to Thierry de Pauw for his session “Feature Branching is Evil.” Thierry told us about his experience introducing version control to a team that had never used it before, and he made a lot of good arguments in favour of trunk-based development.
After Agile India, I headed from Bangalore back to Singapore for a couple more meetups. The first was the excellent Women Who Code Singapore, where I spoke on giving “Better Tech Talks.” Thanks to the excellent folks at Engineers.sg, you can watch it online now! The night also featured a panel of folks covering other aspects of speaking – like coming up with ideas and handling Q&A sessions.
On the last night of the trip, I attended the Junior Developers Singapore meetup. This is an offshoot of the community that started in Melbourne and has now spread to Perth and beyond!
There were four excellent talks on the night, but the one that really touched me was by Mai Jianlong. He spoke plainly and bravely about his struggles with depression, and he gave advice to those starting out in tech for how to deal with mental health issues and recognise when you need to get help. It’s a powerful talk, and you can watch it online here:
It was a wonderful but exhausting two weeks, and I’m definitely happy to be home now!
Other Stuff
The Call for Presentations for YOW! Data and YOW! Lambda Jam has been extended to Friday, so you’ve still got time to get in a submission! Don’t delay any longer though…
We have several upcoming YOW! Nights happening in Brisbane, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Perth over the next few weeks – including a very special one we’re doing in conjunction with the AWS Summit!
Did you read this Jon Skeet’s post on Stack Overflow Culture? He proposes a covenant for both askers and answerers that basically boils down to: “Don’t be a jerk.” AskMeFi has struggled with this one as well and has some nice guidelines that are worth a look.