Every year since 2015, Eric Wastl creates a two-part programming problem for each of the 25 days of Advent. He publishes a new problem every day at adventofcode.com at exactly midnight EST which is 22:00 the day before for me in MST. The last two years, I decided to do the problems as soon as they came out and streamed my problem solving sessions on my Twitch channel and uploaded them to my Youtube channel. Last year, I also updated a blog post after each day which I intend to do again this year.

On my way back from my work retreat in Mexico City, I took the weekend to visit my friend, Nic, who lives near SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southern Texas. Nic is a photojournalist for nasaspaceflight.com and reports on the developments at Starbase.

My flight on Saturday was to Harlingen through Houston. The flight path from Mexico City to Houston took me basically right over my final destination, but I wouldn’t arrive for some number of hours because of my connection. The United flight I was on from Houston to Harlingen was on an Embraer 50-seater plane. The flight itself was only 45 minutes, but we taxied for what felt like half an hour. At that rate it felt like we could have almost driven the plane to Harlingen!

This week, my company (Beeper) had our Fall retreat in in Mexico City, Mexico. We have company retreats about once every four months and this was our fourth. Similar to all the previous retreats, the goal was to provide valuable in-person time to collaborate and connect as a team on a personal level. I was able to meet a couple people who had joined the company since the last retreat and reconnect with many coworkers that I’d met during previous retreats.

Today I had to leave the beautiful city of Berlin to head back home from the Matrix Community Summit. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the city and at the summit.

Getting to the airport via the train was uneventful and my quick flight to Munich was fine as well. On the flight from Munich to Denver, the seat configuration was a 3-3-3 in economy, and I was in D (outside of the middle row). In a stroke of luck, the middle seat in the row was unoccupied, so I was able to put my backpack under the middle seat and have more legroom.

The main purpose of my trip this week was for the Berlin Matrix Community Summit, an event organized by members of the Matrix community in Berlin. Matrix is the chat protocol that Beeper (the company I work for) is building our chat app on top of. The protocol is developed openly, and has a large community of open source developers, projects, and businesses all building on top of Matrix. This summit was the first Matrix-only event. There have been other events at which Matrix had a large presence such as FOSDEM, but this was the first ever Matrix-only event.

I’m in Berlin for the Matrix Community Summit 2022, but I arrived a few days early so that I could spend some time sightseeing. I am still trying to put in mostly full days at work while I’m here in until the Summit starts by working afternoons and evenings.

On Monday, I went to the TV Tower, the tallest building in Germany. I took the S-Bahn from my hotel which is just a couple stops away from the TV Tower. The Tower was built by the Soviets while Berlin was divided between East and West. I got a ticket up to the observation deck, and the views were great!

This week, I am heading to Berlin for the week for the Berlin Matrix Community Summit! The event will happen on Thursday through Saturday, but I am heading there early so that I can work and have a bit of vacation before the summit.

I flew out on Saturday late afternoon on Lufthansa. There seem to be no direct flights to Berlin, so I flew through Frankfurt on the way out (and will fly via Munich on the way back).

This week, I went to Oakland to visit a friend Jack Garner, a friend from school who works at Salesforce out in San Francisco. I flew in in the evening on Tuesday to minimize the time I had to take off of work. I worked for the first two days and then we both took Friday and Monday off for a long weekend.

Today, I was in a total of five countries. Why? Well, one of the things on my bucket list was to go on the Eurostar from Paris to London under the Channel tunnel. I don’t know why it was on my bucket list; I think it was because I have always liked trains.

Anyway, I woke up early and navigated my way to Gare du Nord for my 09:00 train to London.

Today, I took a day trip to the Normandy beaches. The tour visited Omaha Beach, the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach, the D-Day museum at Arromanches (Gold Beach), and Juneau Beach.

This post has taken me a long time to write because I wanted to do justice to the topic, and capture some of my thoughts and emotions from the day.