Travel

Mittagong and Bowral

We recently learned about Rail Discovery Passes, which allow you unlimited travel on NSW regional trains, as well as extending all the way to Brisbane and Melbourne. This suits our goal of doing more regional travel in 2025, so we recently bought six-month passes. Today we used them for the first time, catching a very early train from Sydney and riding 90 minutes to Mittagong in the Southern Highlands.

We started the day by grabbing some coffee and heading to Lake Alexandra. We patted dogs, looked for turtles, and learned about the history of the Fitzroy Iron Works.

The park has a fun playground too.

We spent an hour or two shopping in town, and I got a couple skeins of wool from Victoria House. Our real destination though – and the original motivation for the trip – was Paste Australia. This award-winning Thai restaurant is run by a Michelin-starred chef who relocated from Bangkok to Mittagong, and we’d heard great things about it.

We had a booking for noon, and it turns out we were the only people there! Other dates were booked out, so I think the cool, rainy weather kept people away. We had the set lunch and chose to start with the grilled eggplant salad…

…along with the roasted duck with rice crackers.

For mains, we had Jeen Juan chicken curry…

…and the restaurant’s speciality, Sator Pad Goong, with prawns, pork, and “Thai cluster beans.”

The set lunch also came with green beans (with garlic and chilli) and rice.

Everything was delicious, and of course, the service was phenomenal since we were the only ones there! Well worth the special trip.

After lunch, we went for a wander over to Eden Brewery and sampled some of their brews. Cool place.

The weather had turned seriously windy, cold, and rainy, so we called an Uber and headed to nearby Bowral. We had several hours until our return train, so we joined every pensioner in Bowral for a showing of Conclave at the New Empire Cinema.

After the film – which is fantastic – we did some window shopping along Bong Bong street. Hey, that’s right, Don Bradman is from here!

And then it was time to head home! Our train was a little delayed so we watched the darkening sky from the platform.

From Michelin-starred lunch to a meat pie on the train. Classy 😂

YOW! 2024

As you may have gathered from some of my posts earlier in the month, this year I was invited by the folks at YOW! Conferences to come along on the tour as part of the team. I introduced the opening and closing keynotes in each city, hosted a track in Brisbane, and helped fill in with odd jobs where necessary. Along the way, I managed to see almost every single speaker on the agenda this year. I thought I’d share a photo and takeaway from every session I saw, to give you a flavour of the breadth and depth of content at YOW events. (These talks were all recorded and they’ll be up on YouTube in the new year.) We kicked off with Day One in Melbourne…

Nilesh Makwana is from Perth and keynoted at all three conferences. His focus is on digital inclusion – how can we ensure that, when we build the glorious digital future, we don’t leave people behind? I was especially interested to hear about his work with the WA government on their Digital Inclusion Blueprint.

I was super excited to hear from Suz Hinton, who I first met at a YOW event back in 2017. Suz always does something interesting, and this time she shared with us her project to use an ant farm to generate entropy for use with encryption. I knew about lava lamps, but ants are next level! One thing I learned is that ants don’t sleep like humans; they just take micro sleeps throughout the day. (As a result, Rodd and I now refer to “taking an ant nap” anytime one of us is tired and needs a rest.) I also learned a fair bit about encryption and how computers generate randomness from her talk.

Next was my very stylish friend Giacomo Cavalieri, making his first trip to Australia. Giacomo is one of the core developers of Gleam, a new functional programming language. While I’m not a professional (or even amateur) programmer these days, I really liked how Giacomo talked about the importance of having a friendly developer experience. He certainly convinced more than a few attendees to give Gleam a shot!

This was from my friend Andrea Magnorsky‘s session on “bytesize architecture sessions.” I met Andrea not long after she moved to NZ earlier this year and even got a preview of one of her talks, so I knew she’d have a lot to offer the YOW audience. She talked about the difficulties in sharing information across teams, and she pitched her architecture session idea as something that can really help. She gave everyone practical advice for running a session and talked about the importance of having psychological safety and a growth mindset.

This guy is Yan Chernikov, aka Cherno. He’s a YouTuber and a developer, and right now he’s working on a long-term project to build his own gaming engine called Hazel. He talked us through his goals for the project: to have a fun challenge; to have content to teach people on his videos; and to eventually make his own game. While there are legit reasons for using off-the-shelf software, it can be overly complex and expensive. Yan talked about how he’s able to leverage Open Source libraries and work within constraints to make Hazel faster and simpler than the alternatives.

Ben Sadeghipour also goes by NahamSec, and he’s a full-time hacker, pen tester, and content creator. For the last few years, he’s made over a million dollars from bug bounty programs. Ben introduced us to the White Rabbit Neo LLM and showed us how he uses it to help hack into insecure systems. LLMs can assist with asset discovery, sifting through thousands of subdomains to identify targets. It can also help him generate testing data for Insecure Direct Object Reference bugs, as well as code for exploiting security holes like Java’s “zip slip” hack. It was an entertaining but slightly scary talk, as everyone got a peek at some of the tools being used by both the white hats and the black hats.

Kicking off Day 2 in Melbourne was Allen Holub, a software consultant and prolific author. Allen presented with no slides, simply annotating on a shared Miro board as he spoke. He introduced everyone to Larman’s Law, which explains why software companies are inclined to stick to the status quo rather than try new ideas that might benefit them. Allen explained why we need to speak the language of business, which is all about money and risk. Using the example of mob/ensemble programming, he showed how you can build a successful business case for experimenting with it. Big bang adoptions, he warned us, rarely succeed, and it’s impossible to copy and paste process from one org to another.

Next for me was Pat Kua‘s session on technical leadership. Pat’s an Aussie living in Berlin, and his focus was on the importance of technical alignment. Tech leadership, he said, is all about aligning people in a technical context, and you can do it regardless of your job title. Important skills are empathy, coaching, and conflict resolution. The best way to get started is to look for misalignment and neglect, which gives you a chance to own the issue and demonstrate leadership.

Joakim Sundén is one of the creators of the Spotify model for scaling via agile, autonomous teams. Joakim told us the fascinating story of the development of Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” playlist. The challenge was that even with a search engine and millions of songs available to them, many people (“lean back users”) still needed guidance on discovering new music. They had already developed a custom playlist as part of the “Wrapped/Year in Review” feature, so a team set about experimenting with it. Joakim talked about the many different things they tried, like the frequency, length, and cover art. Rolling it out to the entire user base introduced difficult scaling challenges, but the team had enough data to show that the bet was likely to pay off (and it did).

Steve Smith gave a deep dive session on Rust, focusing on the borrow checker. Steve said that many folks get excited about Rust but get stuck when it comes to garbage collection. Rust, he says, forces you to do the things you always said you were doing (but weren’t). This one was way over my head as a Rust newbie, but it’s always great to see someone really get deep into the technical weeds on a particular topic.

Edith Harbaugh is the co-founder of LaunchDarkly, and her focus was on feature flags and how you can use them at every stage of the software development lifecycle. Feature flags can be used to gauge demand for a new feature, or to give early access for trusted beta users. They’re also useful for controlled release if you have a good feedback mechanism to spot when they are problems (like with the Crowdstrike outage), or to allow customers to opt in/out of bleeding edge deployments.

The closing keynote at YOW Melbourne was from Holly Cummins, who works at Red Hat on the Quarkus team. Holly’s talk was all about efficiency, and how it’s killing both the world (in terms of waste and climate change) as well as us (in the form of burnout). Holly shared simple solutions to reducing waste, such as “LightSwitchOps” – her name for “turning things off when you’re not using them.” This can save you a lot of money and tests your resilience as well. She also spoke about the importance of efficiency in our code, and she pointed out that AI – which promises big efficiency gains – has a bias towards verbosity that can lead to code bloat. I loved the part of her talk about the importance of slack for human beings, which means idle time to rest our brains and sleep. Idle brains solve problems!

And then we were off to Brisbane! After the keynote, I went to David Khourshid‘s session on diagrams. David talked about the importance of different diagrams in making complex software more understandable for human beings. He gave a ton of examples and recommended tools, and promised that he wouldn’t traumatise us all with UML. 😂 To make a good diagram, he said, you need to think about the intent (why?), the audience (who?), and the scope (what?). The biggest mistakes people make with diagrams are drawing pointless, unlabelled arrows everywhere, and giving too much or too little detail. If we took nothing else away, he urged us to “LABEL YOUR ARROWS!”

Next I went to the very popular session on skills for the AI age by Michelle “MishManners” Duke. During times of big technological upheaval, she said, people always worry about their jobs. It happened during the Industrial Revolution, and it’s happening now. She said that the skills that will be needed by workers in the future are persuasion and negotiation, decision-making and ethics, adaptability, empathy and EQ, collaboration, creativity, and the ability to learn. The best way to develop career resilience is to use the tools yourself and keep up-to-date with what’s happening in the field.

The second AI talk of Brisbane for me was Thomas Vitale‘s highly entertaining “concerto for Java and AI”. Thomas’s side hobby is musical composition, and he showed us an example of building an application to help soundtrack composers using Spring AI. Along the way, he covered topics like mitigating malicious prompt injection, semantic search, vector stores, and retrieval augmented generation. As his finale, he used his application to help generate music for an action movie set on Mars! Very fun.

My third AI talk of the day was Rod Johnson‘s on building an AI chatbot using Spring. Since he’s the creator of Spring, I was excited to see that he was mostly doing live coding for the whole session. Enterprise developers, he says, have an important role in making AI actually usable. One really useful tip he gave was to make use of Ollama, which allows you to run open source LLMs locally. He also talked about advisors and showed how they can be used to build a “toxicity guard” to keep your application away from topics you don’t want to address.

I needed something to counter all the pro-AI talks, so I was glad to attend Rasmus Lystrøm‘s session on “how to lead AI transformation.” Rasmus said leaders need to ask themselves hard questions, like what are we racing towards and why? There’s a lot of FOMO and FUD around. He walked us through the approaches organisations can take towards AI, from waiting it out (your employees will just go around you and leak your data anyway); building your own (a hopeless endeavour as you can’t possibly keep up with the pace of innovation in the industry); creating an AI center of excellence (which is really just creating a new silo in your org); or signing up for a paid service (possibly low ROI and productivity gains). You can’t just announce a new tool, Rasmus said, you have to re-organise your entire company if you want to adopt AI and move towards full-stack, empowered teams.

Theodora Bock was unable to travel, but she still delivered an entertaining (live!) presentation from her home in the US. She said that games are very good at education, and that learning is often an unintended consequence of play. She explained to us a project she worked on to create a gamified experience to teach astronauts how to use an ultrasound wand for the upcoming Artemis missions. It’s more interactive than reading a manual, and allows you to craft a progression curve as people learn. This was a fascinating topic, and she gave us several demos of the game she worked on. Very cool!

Lu Wilson had one of the most entertaining sessions on the whole agenda, starting with an explanation of how computer interaction models always seem to start with text and then move to a graphical canvas. But how will LLMs move to the canvas? Lu showed us many demos and experiments from their work at tldraw, like drawing a UI and then turning it into a working prototype with only the click of a button. Lu showed us all that we don’t really know yet what AI will look like beyond chat, but there’s a lot of fun stuff to get excited about.

Next were the talks that I track hosted. First up was Rúnar Bjarnason, who hails from Iceland but lives in Boston. Rúnar introduced us to Unison, a “friendly programming language from the future.” He talked about some of the challenges of Microservice architectures, like complexity of orchestration and deployment, added latency, and protocol versioning. Most of Microservice architecture work, he says, is not coding, but rather managing the “meta infrastructure” of builds and deployments. Unison, by contrast, describes complete computation and has dependency resolution baked in via implementation hash. He demoed how to deploy to Unison Cloud, and there was a lot of interest from the audience.

Next was Marty Pitt, the creator of Taxi and Orbital. Marty started by talking about integration, and that it always seems to involve a lot of glue code that ends up tightly coupling data producers and consumers. His new approach is to build systems that connect on demand to solve a problem with no glue code. Taxi does this by capturing semantic metadata, allowing you to know that “this thing is the same as that thing.” Taxi can be embedded into API specs, and once it’s published, you can build a graph to figure out how to solve a problem. TaxiQL allows you to use semantics to query data, and Orbital is the query execution engine. He gave us a demo of how this worked, and again it seemed like something that was useful to a lot of the attendees.

And now for the final city – Sydney! Oscar Nierstrasz is a retired professor in Switzerland who now works for feenk.com. Oscar told us that one of the problems with legacy modernisation is that systems are opaque, and even if you look at the source code or docs, they might not tell you the full story. Instead you need “moldable development,” which is using analysis tools to get the software to “talk to you.” He demoed some of the features of the Glamorous Toolkit, like using the object inspector to expose domain concepts. It’s all about asking questions and doing experiments.

Next was my friend (and fellow Kris) Kris Jenkins, host of the Developer Voices podcast. Kris’s talk was about types, and how they have a lot of information that can help you talk to your team and analyze your code from multiple perspectives. Kris talked specifically about algebraic data types and gave examples of how they help describe data, relationships, and context. Type signatures give clues to implementation, like revealing structure, flagging problems, and giving clarity of scope. And because they are machine readable, it makes the computer just a part of your team. I really loved Kris’s way of explaining things with lots of examples, and I learned a ton from this talk!

I first met Trisha Gee when she presented at YOW many years ago and brought along her new baby. The baby was back with her this year but is now a pre-teen! 😳 Trisha is an IntelliJ IDEA power user, and her talk showed all the tips and tricks she’s learned that help her be more productive and stay in a flow state. Her talk had an interesting overlap to Holly’s keynote, in that she also talked about efficiency and productivity. I was particularly interested to learn about the SPACE Framework, which helps you to get away from vanity metrics. I also appreciated her rant about AI coding companions and whether they actually help you or just increase cognitive load.

In a neat bit of synchronicity, the next talk was from my buddy Damian Brady from Github. Damian started by talking about the evolution of AI-powered coding tools, and how moving from a separate chatbot to having something embedded in the IDE was really the killer app. Damian’s talk touched on many of the same topics as Trisha’s, including the SPACE Framework. He also introduced us to the Good Day Project, which mapped developer sentiment to Github metrics and showed that deep focus time is the #1 thing developers need to feel productive. Damian then showed a lot of examples of how Github Copilot can help developers save time. My favourite example was explaining regular expressions – those always trip me up.

And then, guess what, I saw Holly Cummins present again! One of the speakers had to leave early, so Holly was drafted in to give another presentation. This one was all about optimisation, and getting us to consider the trade-offs in any planned optimisation project. She walked us through a lot of pitfalls and anti patterns, like leaning on intuition and making assumptions, and relying on leading indicators rather than lagging indicators (which are harder to change). She gave practical advice and tools for identifying places for optimisation, and reminded us that performance waste is actually harming the world. (Data centers use 1-2% of the world’s electricity.) So good performance actually makes us good too.)

Johan Janssen is a software architect from the Netherlands, and his talk was a speed run through dozens of Java’s “hidden gems” (aka tools and libraries to make your life easier). He demoed loads of tools to help with testing, implementation, security, and builds. I’m not a Java dev, but if you are, I guarantee there’s something useful for you in this talk.

Unmesh Joshi is a principal architect at Thoughtworks and author of the book Patterns of Distributed Systems. Unmesh explained how knowing patterns makes you an expert, and helps you acknowledge essential complexity while avoiding accidental complexity. He walked us through some common problems of distributed systems, like mapping keys to nodes or ordering requests across replicas. Patterns serve as a guide to achieving “platform sympathy,” which means aligning with a system’s design to gain optimal performance.

And last but not least is my friend Josh Long. Josh is a developer advocate for Spring, and he’s one of the most entertaining presenters I’ve ever seen. He started by introducing us to his dog Peanut, who he described as a “terror,” and then proceeded to build an entire demo around adopting dogs. He went 100mph and had everyone laughing and jotting notes as he raced from topic to topic, including event-sourcing and CQRS. He’s like a virtuoso of live coding, and if you ever get the chance to see him – regardless of whether you’re a programmer or not – I guarantee you’ll have a wonderful time and learn something from him.

Thank you again to Steffen and the YOW! team for inviting me to be a part of the event this year, and to all the speakers and volunteers who helped make the conferences possible. These events are a ton of work, but they’re such a great opportunity for Aussie developers to come together, learn from some of the smartest folks in the world, and build important connections across our industry.

Straddie

Day trip to North Stradbroke Island! Lovely day for it. Rodd even did today’s Advent of Code from the beach. ❤️☀️🏖️⛴️

YOW Melbourne 2024

Having a great time so far at YOW 2024 Melbourne, catching up with friends and learning from some amazing speakers.

Singapore, Melbourne, and the Emergency Room

So many trips to document! 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 also had a late lunch of some very tasty bagels from Bowery to Williamsburg.

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 were delighted to discover the nearby St. Kilda Community Gardens. Lovely place!

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. 😅)

Sydney, we’re home ❤️

It’s the last day of 2022, and we’ve been home in Australia for two weeks now. It feels… truly surreal.

For the last month or so in Europe, I kept having conversations with people who either A) didn’t realise we were moving back to Australia or B) thought we’d already left. For the record, the plan when we moved to Munich back in 2020 was always to return in a couple years. I had a vague idea that it would likely be in 2023, and that’s the time frame we shared with our German landlord, our Australian tenant, and my manager at AWS.

Things suddenly got real in January 2022 when my manager asked me to call him. It turns out that my buddy who headed up the AWS Developer Relations team in Asia-Pacific had decided to resign and go work for a startup. My manager wanted to know if I was interested in the role. On one hand, it was a promotion of sorts, and it would be the #1 role I’d have wanted if I was moving back. But on the other hand, this was way ahead of schedule. I also knew that if I didn’t go for it, they’d hire someone else and that role wouldn’t be available when I eventually did move. I asked my manager if it would be possible to do the role remotely for the rest of the year, and he said it was as long as I was willing to deal with the timezones. I interviewed for the role, got it, and officially took it on in April 2022. For the last 8 months I’ve been managing a team of Developer Advocates in Asia-Pacific from Germany, which has meant being on calls at 6am and late into the evening.

We left the timeline vague as long as we could. We knew we wanted to experience Oktoberfest and as many Christmas markets as possible, and I wasn’t sure yet whether I’d need to go to AWS re:Invent in November. Then the Snook resigned from his job at Google and finished up at the end of August (after 10 years!), which meant he only had a couple months to stay in the country legally on his visa. Our tenant Kelly let us know that she wanted to go visit family in Perth for Christmas, which meant that we’d need to arrange someone to look after Petey. Honestly, that made everything a lot simpler. On October 1st, we gave notice that we’d be out before the end of the year and we booked our flights for December 14th.

In early November Rodd started organising for the furniture shipment and we had to decide what to keep or get rid of. We quickly decided not to keep the giant TV that we’d shipped from Australia, and I sold it to an Amazonian. We also sold off our gaming chairs, my IKEA desk, the Sodastream, my bike, and a bunch of other houseware items we didn’t need in Sydney. We also donated a bunch of old clothes that we hadn’t worn in ages to charity.

We got back from our trip to Paris and Luxembourg exactly two weeks before our return flight to Sydney. There was so much to do! We made a “punch list” of sorts to make sure we didn’t forget anything.

We used the same shippers we had two years earlier – OSS – and they were scheduled to arrive one week before we left. We set out all our suitcases and started filling them with the things we knew we wanted to carry back to Australia.

Then we started pulling together everything that would get shipped back. The challenge was that we had rented our place furnished, so we had to make sure we didn’t inadvertently ship back anything that belonged with the house. (Thankfully the Snook had taken very detailed photos of every drawer and cupboard when we moved in, which helped a lot!) Everything we were shipping from the kitchen went onto the dining room table, along with the coffee machine, grinder, and KitchenAid.

We also had designated areas upstairs and downstairs so the movers would know exactly what to take.

Rodd also turned off the server and packed it up with the other things from his office, including his standing desk.

The movers turned up on time and got to work packing it all up in boxes. They were finished within a few hours and carted it all away. It was only about five cubic meters in the end. It will eventually be loaded into a shared shipping container in Rotterdam and then begin the long journey back to Sydney. The normal estimate is up to 20 weeks, so we’re not going to see that stuff for a while!

To my delight, two days later it began to snow in Munich. It was like the city wanted to give us the perfect send-off.

My old team in Europe hosted a fun goodbye session with a special trivia quiz themed all around me. They even got Rodd to help them out with some questions! The highlight was definitely the one about Rodd’s favourite type of nut, to which one of the answer options was “Deez.” 😂

On our last weekend, we had one last Weisswurst Frühstück at the Augustiner Bräustuben. It’s an odd feeling, knowing that you are doing something for the very last time. I felt really emotional.

We went into the city to do some final shopping. Rodd was very keen to buy himself a Janker before we left. This is the traditional collarless Bavarian jacket. We went to several different shops trying them on before he found the perfect one in Lodenfrey. It’s a grey-green linen, which we figured he’d get more wear from in Australia.

It was snowing very prettily in the city, and we took the opportunity to enjoy the Christkindlmarkt one last time.

We took the U-bahn to Poccistrasse and walked across the Theresienwiese. It was snowy and foggy, so much that you couldn’t see the far end. It felt like another world. Hard to believe a few months earlier it had been heaving with millions of people at Oktoberfest.

Our last few days in Munich were a flurry of cleaning and packing, with occasional breaks to look at the snow outside. We cleaned out the fridge and cupboards, and I returned my work laptop and some office furniture I’d borrowed. I gave the rest of our liquor to my colleague Viktor. We rehung our landlord’s artwork and restored the place the way we’d found it. We set up mail forwarding.

And then we were ready! The suitcases were packed full and just within the weight allowance. We did a final inspection and handover of keys the night before the flight, and then headed to an airport hotel for our final evening.

On the 14th, we walked over to the airport and dropped off our bags. We were flying Thai Airways through Bangkok, and we’d splurged on a business class upgrade. (It was the cheapest we could find.) We were chilling in the lounge when Rodd groaned. “The weather forecast,” he said, “is not looking good.” Something about blizzard ice. 😱

We went to the gate at the nominated boarding time, but it was pretty clear we weren’t going to be getting on the airplane anytime soon. Eventually we started hearing announcements that Lufthansa were cancelling all their domestic and short-haul flights, and we saw lots of frustrated travellers lining up for rebookings. Our crew were optimistic though that the long-haul international flights would eventually make it out. After a few hours we started to see some activity from the snowplows on the tarmac.

Four hours after our original boarding time, they announced we could finally board the plane! Everybody cheered.

We settled into our seats and I hit the button on my goodbye post on Instagram. The Thai business class seats were comfy but nowhere near as over-the-top as the ones on Qatar on the way there. The attendants told us that we’d be waiting a bit before the wings could be de-iced. We ended up sitting there for two hours! Eventually it was our turn for the de-icer, and then we could finally take off.

Once we were in the air the flight was proceeding smoothly. We were a good six hours behind schedule so I knew we’d miss our connection in Bangkok, but it was out of our hands at that point. I was just hoping that we’d be still be able to stay in business class on whatever flight they got us on.

Right as they were serving dinner, one of the attendants from Economy came running into our cabin and said something frantically to another in Thai that included the word “choking” in English. Clearly a passenger was choking(!), and there was a lot of dashing about and getting first aid kits and such. At that point, I honestly expected them to announce that we’d be turning around and landing somewhere to get the guy medical attention. That didn’t happen though, and our attendant told me later that there was thankfully a doctor onboard and the passenger was okay. Eventually they brought him (in an oxygen mask) and his wife up to sit in two of the free business class seats. Phew! It felt like the universe was really trying to keep us in Europe.

As we got closer to Bangkok, we paid for wifi so we could check whether we’d been rebooked. Nothing yet. I look tired here, but I did manage to get some sleep. A lie-flat bed helps enormously, and I’m happy to report that at 5’10” (178cm) I just fit in the Thai business class seat.

When we deplaned in Bangkok, we immediately spotted a Thai Airways attendant holding up a sign with our names on it. She collected us and another guy who’d missed his flight as well. She explained that we were being rebooked on Qantas and helped us clear Security and get into the Lounge. We spent several hours in the Lounge waiting for our new tickets to be reissued. (The Lounge was nice enough, but I was disappointed the showers weren’t open.) Eventually we got our tickets, and as expected we’d lost our Business class seats. Not only that, but we were going to be sitting in the middle two seats of the middle block of four. 😩 But I tried to look on the bright side – the staff at Thai had done everything they could, and we were almost home!

Right before we boarded the Qantas flight, we got a notification on the app that our seats had changed. They moved us to a bulkhead row! Those are the seats that they reserve for people with infants, but there weren’t any on the flight so they bumped us up. That was really nice and had us feeling better about the nine-hour flight. We settled in for the final leg…

We landed in Sydney on schedule and were through immigration and customs quickly. Before you know it, we were in a taxi heading back to town. We had actually booked two nights in a hotel, knowing that the house wouldn’t be in a state to immediately move back in.

We dropped off our luggage at the hotel and then headed to the house. Kelly had moved out a few days earlier but had been coming by to feed and water Petey. We found him in the closet, and thankfully he seemed to forgive us pretty quickly for leaving him.

It was honestly a little depressing to return to the house. It was in decent shape, but two years of unprecedented rain had taken a toll. There were spots of mold on the ceiling (despite Kelly cleaning it repeatedly), and everything we had put in storage was either musty (at best) or covered in mildew (at worst). We also didn’t have much furniture beyond our bed and dining room table. Kelly had left us an old couch (that Petey had torn to shreds) and a small TV with a broken remote. Rodd said exactly what I was thinking: “This feels like camping.”

We set to work unpacking and cleaning. I tackled the bedroom and the bathroom while he worked on the kitchen. The washing machine broke on the very first load, but we persevered and ordered fresh sheets from Amazon. By Saturday night, we were sleeping in our own bed again. On Sunday we were restocking the kitchen and signing up for new mobile plans.

Unfortunately by Monday it was clear that I was sick. I started to feel a lot of chest congestion, and then my nose stuffed up completely. By Wednesday I was blowing green goo and I couldn’t smell anything. Repeated Covid tests were negative, so I went in to see my GP. He reckoned it was a sinus infection and put me on antibiotics, with some codeine to help me sleep at night. That knocked me out for the rest of the week, and I couldn’t really do anything but knit. It made for a quiet and rather depressing Christmas. The only highlight was that my sense of smell came back on Christmas Day so I could celebrate appropriately:

Petey eventually left the closet and became very, very clingy. He wants to make sure we never leave him again!

I am finally on the mend, and the house is starting to come back together. The washing machine repairman came out and estimated a thousand bucks for a new motor for our 14yo machine, so we said “Stuff it” and bought a new set on Appliances Online. They delivered them two days later, hooked them up, and took the old ones away. Yay for clean laundry!

We also took advantage of the Boxing Day sales to get a new OLED 4K TV. Hooray for overly giant televisions! (He claims it’s the same size as the old one. 🤔)

Rodd was very happy to get back to his induction stovetop, and he has used it to cook me some very excellent meals over the past fortnight. We’ve made a couple trips to Coles as we begin to restock the pantry, and I’m once again blown away by the quality and variety of produce we get here in Sydney.

And finally this week I was well enough to go into the AWS office. I picked up my new laptop from IT and started tackling a backlog of emails and overdue tasks.

So… we’re back, and people keep asking me what it feels like. It feels weird. It feels like we never left. It feels like if I didn’t have physical proof that we were there – mainly in the fact that our house is still missing most of its furniture – I’d think it was all a dream. We were gone for 842 days. 120 weeks. Two years, three months and change. Did it actually happen? How did it go so fast?

I’m happy to see Petey. I’m happy to see my friends and neighbours and family again. I’m happy to not struggle daily with a foreign language, and to hear the Ocker accent again. I’m happy to see the ocean, eat amazing Asian food, watch the cricket, and drink a beer that isn’t a Helles. My hair texture has already changed for the better. (Munich water is *very* hard.) Australian cafe culture breakfasts are the best in the world. These are all good things.

But it’s really hard not to miss Munich. I miss having four distinct seasons. I miss the lack of humidity. I miss riding my bike all over the city and not having to worry about an irate driver hitting me. (Sydney is not cycle friendly.) I miss living in a city that is beautifully maintained, where piles of rubbish and empty storefronts are rare. I miss cheap and convenient public transport, and high speed rail between cities. I miss frozen, bake-at-home giant pretzels. I miss not needing to drive a car, pretty much ever.

I completely realise how all that sounds. Believe me, every single European thought we were crazy for being sad about coming back. And I know – I know – how incredibly fortunate we are, no matter where we live. This is just the normal comedown you have after a fabulous vacation, except that the vacation lasted 842 days. We’ll be all right.

Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.

Thanks to everybody who helped us out along the way. Thanks to our family and friends who supported us in the move, and to our employers who made it possible. Thanks to our European friends for welcoming us so heartily. And thanks to Kelly for looking after our place and our dear Petey Cat.

It’s nice to be home.

Christmas Market round-up

One of my goals before leaving Munich was to hit as many Christmas markets as possible before leaving. We had been to the Munich Residenz Weihnachtsmarkt and the Köln Hafenweihnachsmarkt when we visited in November 2019, but all Christmas markets were cancelled in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. And even though I knew timing would be tight in 2022 since we would be leaving for Australia in December, I still wanted to try.

We ended up visiting 7 of them!

The first was the Praterinsel Weihnachtsmarkt. I had noticed a big sign for it when riding my bike down the Isar in November, and with an opening day of Nov. 10 it was by far the earliest one. That happened to coincide with a visit from our friends Emily and Clare, so we took them along that weekend.

Truth be told it barely qualified as a market, it was so small. It consisted of a couple stalls near the river, and there were a few dozen people standing about drinking glühwein. Still, it was festively decorated and we felt like it was a cheerful start to the holiday season.

A week later was the opening of Das Weihnachtsdorf (“The Christmas village”), the market at the Residenz that we had visited in 2019. We were having dinner with some friends in the city so managed a quick visit beforehand. The market takes place in the inner courtyard at the palace, and the entrance is lit up with neon.

Inside they have lots of stalls selling food, drink, and gifts. It was pretty crowded even though the weather was cold and drizzly.

One corner is set up as a Märchenwald (“Fairytale Forest”) with animatronic holiday scenes from stories for little kids. The giant robot mouse in the beautiful colourwork sweater was a particular favourite.

We had Glühwein as we had done three years earlier. We were standing there sipping our hot mulled wine and feeling quite relaxed when suddenly we realised we had made a major error on our first visit. All of the Glühwein stalls serve their drinks in real mugs, and you usually pay a couple extra euros deposit (“Pfand”) that you get back when you return the mug. Back in 2019… we did not understand this. We thought the mugs were commemorative and that we had purchased them. Whoops. 😳 And that’s how we ended up with two Residenz Weihnachtsmarkt mugs in our cupboard for the past three years! (Sorry!!)

Our third Christmas Market of 2022 was “La Magie de Noël” in Paris, which you can read all about on that blog post.

The fourth market was actually two of them – the Lëtzebuerger Chrëschtmaart and the Wantermaart – in Luxembourg. Again, more photos on the blog post.

The fifth market was back in Munich on Dec. 2 – the Mittelalterlicher Weihnachtsmarkt (“Middle Ages Christmas Market”). Rodd had found out about this one somehow, and it was right around the corner from my office. We checked it out in the evening, and it did not disappoint. If you’d have asked me ahead of time to imagine a Middle Ages Christmas Market, this is pretty much exactly what I’d picture.

There were rough-hewn wooden stalls selling “ye olde” gifts like drinking horns, medieval dresses, fur slippers, honey candles, and weaponry. All of the vendors were dressed in robes and costume.

You could buy jewelry, dolls, and gear for knights and princesses.

There were also lots of food stalls, including one that was roasting a whole wild boar.

There was glühwein, of course, but beyond that there were several stalls selling more obscure medieval drinks. This one offered Hypocras, a Roman drink of spiced wine that was thought to have medicinal properties.

The one I was most excited about was the Feuerzangenbowle (“Fire-tongs punch”). I had seen people drinking out of these odd ceramic cups and was excited to try it. It’s a hot mulled red wine, but the cup has a little bowl set into the lip that they set a rum-soaked sugar cube in. And then they light it on fire, and the hot melty sugar runs down into your wine. How bad-ass is that????? (You wait until it goes out to drink it, of course.)

While I was indulging my pyromaniac tendencies, the Snook only had eyes for one stall: the Metschänke (“Mead Tavern”).

He ended up with a tankard of hot spiced mead.

Incidentally, the deposit on these fancy ceramic mugs was €10 each, so there was no way we were walking off with these!

It’s Germany, so there was also beer of course.

We were hungry so we hit up the Knödel (“dumpling”) stall for dinner and ate it with sauerkraut hunched over a barrel like medieval peasants.

We went straight on to our sixth Christmas market that same night – the Munich Christkindlmarkt (“Christ Child Market”). We walked over to the Marienplatz and joined the huge crowds checking out all the stalls in front of the Rathaus.

There were lots of stalls selling Christmas decorations, ornaments, toys, and gifts.

Did I mention it was crowded??

We made our way up Kaufingerstrasse, checking out the stalls along the way. There were a lot of stalls selling hot roasted nuts, food, and drink. The Willenborgs Crambambuli place was very popular, offering their fancy organic mulled wine.

I was also delighted by this glühwein stall that had a mini Frauenkirche on its roof, set up right in front of the actual Frauenkirche.

Mmm, sausages.

Eventually we reached the end of the stalls as we got to Stachus, and there ahead of us was the Münchner Eiszauber (“Ice Magic”) – an outdoor ice skating rink with several bars!

We went up to the second floor to have a look at the skating. Lots of folks were sitting up there having drinks.

Our seventh and final Christmas market came two days later on December 4th – the Tollwood Winterfestival. We had attended the summer version of this arts and music festival back in July. The winter version was set up on the Theresienwiese, near our house.

There were several music venues and a covered market, as well as lots of outdoor stalls.

Since it’s an arts festival, there are also large scale artworks dotted throughout the grounds.

A few folks were on the Eisstockbahn playing Eisstockschießen, a German winter sport similar to curling. There was no ice though, so it was really more like shuffleboard.

Time for sustenance! We went over to the crepes stall and shared one with applesauce and cinnamon sugar.

They also had a Feuerzangenbowle hut, which was hilariously decorated with wooden flames all over the roof.

We wanted to try something new though so ended up at the Met-Amensis stall. This is yet another meadery, and the Snook ended up with one of their GoldenDark mead beers. I chose instead their “Drakenbluod” (Dragon’s Blood), a hot spiced mead with cherry juice and ginger. It was delicious and warming on a cold day.

On our very last weekend in Munich, we made a final visit back to the Christkindlmarkt for some shopping. Amazingly, it was snowing.

It was perfect. We picked up some Schmalznudel (fried Bavarian-style doughnuts) and ate them along with glühwein in the Viktualiensmarkt.

It was a lovely way to say goodbye to the city. You know, I love an Aussie summer Christmas: cricket on the telly; fresh mangoes; maybe a trip to the beach. But there’s just something special about the holidays in a snowy climate. I’m so glad we got to experience it once more time before we left. 🎄🌟

Paris and Luxembourg

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.

We walked along the pedestrian promenade towards the Tower and passed by the Memorial National de la Guerre d’Algerie.

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.

Continue reading “Paris and Luxembourg”

DACH Community Day in Dresden and the Sächsische-Schweiz

Back in October, 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.