New Job Ramp up, OS Bridge and the Prelude to the Epic Road Trip to Utah

I was expecting this to be an easy month. Boy, was I so wrong!

New gig ramp up involved a flight to Palo Alto, the first time I was away from the kiddo and relinquishing control of his life to the husband for 3 days. The trip itself was not anything special but I did mull over my anxiety over leaving kiddo under husband’s care. My mother-in-law had always told me to accept that my son will be well taken care of, just not the way I would do it. It is quite easy for me to sarcastically throw a line of the format “so…I should expect my son to be alive when I get back home?” but this is unproductive. I am reminded of a book I read called All Joy And No Fun where the author tells the story of two parents with non-overlapping job shifts and two different styles of parenting i.e. the wife is completely involved in the raising and the husband puts ‘me time’ high on the priority list (I would argue, on the top of the list). There wasn’t any talk about how the kids turned out; it was a book reflecting on the effects of parenting on adults, however, I did take away from this that kids turn out OK as long as they are not left in free play limbo in front of the TV for very long. So I am learning to let go of control over my kid’s life just a little bit more.

OS Bridge 2017 happened this month and I got to go! Granted, I signed up for 8 hours of volunteering so I could go so there was nobody funding me. However, I thought this was a great way to pay for a pass. That’s right, you can put in 8 hours of volunteering for the entire length of the conference to get a free pass to go for the entire length of the conference. OS Bridge is also an leading edge conference where one can listen to talks about the meeting of technology and people. I was blown away by the quality of the talks! For the first time, someone expained what Eigen Values were better than the Wikipedia page I linked to just there. Someone attempted to explain The Lambda Calculus. I went in not knowing what it is…and now I have a vague idea. I listened to the talk on containers and was blown away by how many players exist in this space; It’s crowded; It’s very crowded; It’s scary! Most of all I was blown away by the variety of backgrounds and people that attended and spoke at the conference. Needless to say I now have a goal to submit a talk or three here.

The Epic Road Trip to Utah is coming up…actually it’s this Friday. Hence I am frantically writing this post to make my commitment of posting to this blog once a month regardless of the quality of the post. This is not a high quality post. All I talk about is myself. I don’t even report well on the awesome conference I attended. This is a young-girl-talking-about-herself post. Anyway, I digress again.

This is my plan:

I know it’s a vague plan. I’m chalking the rest upto “adventure”. If all else fails, I hope I have enough money to get us on a bus back home. Here goes nothing!