Today I once again am venturing across the pond for a work retreat. This time, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I’ll get there mid-day Saturday and I’ll spend the afternoon and all of Sunday sightseeing before meeting up with coworkers on Monday for a week of in-person work!

My dad kindly took me to the airport this morning. Security was pretty crowded, but I have TSA precheck which makes it so I don’t have to take everything out of my bag and take off my shoes. I got to the airport in plenty of time, and I had brunch at Panda Express before heading over to my gate.

For the first time since 2020, FOSDEM was held in-person in Brussels. FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of open source enthusiasts in the world every year. My employer, Beeper, funded my flight, and I decided to attend. It was a great experience! I learned a lot and have a long to-do list of projects to try out. I also really enjoyed interacting with the Matrix community and reconnect with many of the people who I’d met at the Matrix Community Summit in Berlin last year and meet a bunch new people as well.

During my time in Brussels for FOSDEM, I took the chance to do a bit of sightseeing. Here are some pictures of what I saw.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be travelling to Brussels at the end of the month to attend FOSDEM, one of the largest open source conferences in the world!

I arrive on 1 February, and I fly back on the 6th. My flight is being funded by Beeper, and I’ll be attending the Matrix Community Meetup at HSBXL and then the conference itself.

This year was a good year. I’m going to list a few things that I’m thankful for, in no particular order.

I’m thankful for…

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.