Life

After years of using Thinkpads, I went for a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu. Although I had bought devices with Linux pre-installed and laptops for friends as well, this was going to be my first own laptop coming with Ubuntu straight from the factory. The hardware The specs looked great (big SSD disk, enough memory to play around with VMs/containers, etc.), but I had to brush away some fond memories of old laptops, where I was able to easily replace parts (memory, screen, disk, power jack, keyboard and more for my x220)....

My sabbatical is over and today is my first day working at Weaveworks where I’m joining the Developer Experience team. I’m incredibly excited about this. I got to know quite a few of my colleagues in the past weeks and they were without exception all incredibly likeable and smart people. The company believes in open source, is quite diverse and has an office in Berlin - also I’ll get to work with Cezzaine, Jonathan and Steve again....

Since many of you reached out to me in the past weeks to find out if I was still travelling the world and how things were going, I thought I’d reconnect with the online world and write a blog post again. After a bit more than a year, my sabbatical is coming to an end now. I had a lot of time to reflect, recharge batteries, be curious again, travel and make new experiences....

It’s a bit strange to write this blog post in the same week as Martin Pitt is announcing moving on from Canonical. I remember many moments of Martin’s post very vividly and he was one of the first I ran into on my flight to Sydney for Ubuntu Down Under in 2005. Fast forward to today: 2016 was a year full of change - my personal life was no exception there....

Aït Ben Haddou (Photo by Oscar Gomez - CC-BY-NC-ND) See you back on 9th January 2012. :-)

See you in two weeks! I’m off to the North of Norway from tomorrow on, so if you have anything urgent you want to discuss, I’m sure one of these fine gentlemen should be able to help you out. (Picture by Oddbjørn Steffensen (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/oddbjorn/32041309/)

You don’t see me blogging about things outside the Ubuntu world very often. OK, an occasional mixtape every now and then or some holiday pictures, but I generally try to stay away from topics such as politics or things that happen in the world elsewhere. This is not because I don’t care or don’t have an opinion - it’s quite the opposite. I just prefer to not get drawn into huge arguments about who’s right and I try to avoid writing about and singling out particular events and miss to mention others....

I’ve been slacking a bit when it comes to DJing land picked it up this year again. Some of my mixtapes are on a part of my blog that’s not syndicated, but I set up a page with all the posts. I just posted a new one today. If you have no plans tonight and you’re in Berlin, come to the GNOME3 Launch Lounge (Facebook event page) in c-base tonight. I’ll be playing there as well....

… I must say I had a fantastic holidays. I had a fantastic time, met supersuperfriendly people and was generally constantly surprised. Pictures are available over here.

Jorge and Allison blogged about their mentors and start into the Open Source world and I thought it would be a great way to thank at least some of the people who helped me get started. So I started thinking about who all helped me out in one way or the other in the last few years and I realised that there’s incredibly many people I should’ve been thanking years ago already....

Tuesday next week is my last working day and I’ll be gone for three weeks, without laptop. If you have anything really urgent, talk to any members of my team, Michael or Ara, they know how to get in touch with me. I’m very much looking forward to this one and happy to meet Mehdi of the LoCo team there! :-) I’ll be back on 29th September.

Earlier today I went to a goodbye party of a friend who’s going to Australia for a few months. Great things that happened: Party was outdoors, a few DJs played, great atmosphere, 100+ people at peak times Some of my awesome office mates were there, my sister too The police showed up and instead of shutting the party down, they told us where it was “OK” to have the party We moved all the equipment, the generator, drinks and everything else to the new place, which was nearby, everybody helped I played a 4 hour Drum’n’Bass set, which I (and others) were very happy with, they even collected money for the DJ - glad it was dark, so nobody could see if I was blushing I watched the sunrise by the riverside while the party was still going on I drove home on my bicycle A few guys stopped me to take a picture of them and as a thanks offered me their last beer Oh how I love this city!...

So Robert doesn’t believe me… there’s only little barriers too far to walk over to the bridge and cross that TADAAAAA! dunno how these got here I wasn’t the only one who had the idea

It took a bit, but I uploaded pictures of the Iceland trip a few days ago. One photo I wanted to share here: Seems like Reykjvavík loves Ubuntu! :-)

Guess where we’re headed… :-) We will leave on 18th July and get back 8th August. Two fantastic weeks of hiking and travelling in a marvellous landscape. I’m so looking forward to it. Afterwards we’re going to be one week in Austria to attend Mimi’s sister’s wedding.