I spent the first week of my trip at a Beeper company retreat in Ericeira, Portugal: a town about an hour northwest of Lisbon. We were staying at an event venue called Alma do Paço. The goal of all of the work retreats is to allow the team to have a week of focused collaboration. We tried to take advantage of having all of the teams together by working on some cross-team projects. We also try to have whole-team meetings such as retrospectives, planning and brainstorming discussions, and other meetings. The retreats are also our main opportunity to meet coworkers in-person and are great times to build relationships. I find that meeting people in person is extremely helpful for making the online interactions feel personal.

Today I ventured across the Atlantic for the first time since 2019. The reason: a work retreat in Ericeira, Portugal, a small town about 40 minutes from Lisbon. My flight path was from DEN -> IAD (Washington Dulles) -> LIS.

Both flights were uneventful, though slightly turbulent at times. The service from Denver to Dulles left at 15:30, and I had a red-eye flight leaving around 22:20 out of Dulles. The gate process at Dulles was highly inefficient, and it took way too long to board and get everyone’s carry-on bags onboard. They had this facial recognition system that had about a 50% success rate, and the gate agents still took and verified everyone’s passport and boarding pass, so I don’t really get why they had it. The only nice thing about the process was that it was so slow at the gate that it made the trickle of people on the jet-bridge and getting onto the plane so low that it was chill getting on the plane. We ended up leaving about 20 minutes late, but luckily the jet stream helped us out and we arrived in Lisbon about 20 minutes earlier than expected.

For the last five years, the Mines Computer Science Department has hosted a High School Programming Competition (HSPC) modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I wrote about the 2019, 2020, and 2021 competitions on this blog. This year, I wrote three of the problems and helped Colin Siles with organizing the competition.

For the first time since the 2019 competition, this year’s HSPC featured in-person teams. There was also a remote option to increase the reach of the competition. Like the past two competitions, we allowed contestants to access the internet. The problems from every year are new and written by Mines students and some Mines alum specifically for the competition.

A couple weeks ago, my company had our week-long 2022 Q1 work retreat in Playa del Carmen, Mexico (about an hour south of Cancun). As with the previous work trip, the purpose of the retreat was for us to get to work together in person and to bond as a team. I got to see many of the people who were in Montreal again, and got to meet some of the new team members who have joined the company since September.

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. Last year, 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.

This morning, I woke up at around 04:30 in order to head to the airport. Ian is on the same flight to Denver as I am (he then continues on to Salt Lake City), and Caroline’s flight leaves at about the same time as our flight, so we all got an Uber together.

We got to the airport around 5:30, and going through security was really quick. In many places (including Montreal) you go through US Customs before departing. It’s kinda a strange system, but it’s nice because you can walk out of the plane at your destination in the states and don’t have to worry about customs. When we got to customs, it wasn’t even opened yet. I guess we could have had another few minutes of sleep!

As I mentioned in my previous post, the main reason for my travel was a work retreat with Beeper in Montreal. The purpose of the retreat was for all of us to get to work together in person. For most of us (myself included), it was the first time meeting anyone else on the team in person. In fact, the closest person to me in the company lives in Provo, Utah.

This morning, I met up with Sam, Jo, and Robby and we went to breakfast together at a café. Then, we headed over to the building museum which opened at 11:00. The museum is not part of the Smithsonian, but it was very well done. It is located in a vast building that used to be an administrative office for the Pension Bureau.

I woke up this morning around 08:30 with the plan to meet up with Sam, Jo, and Robby at the Air and Space Museum when it opened at 10:00. However, since Robby had gotten in so late, and had flown into Dulles (which is a long way away from DC), they were pretty slow getting up this morning.

I decided to go over alone and start looking at the exhibits. On my way, I came across a 9/11 display on the mall. There were flags representing all the people who lost their lives on that terrible day.

Next week, Beeper is having a company retreat in Montreal, Canada. Since I haven’t really done any sort of leisure travel that requires air travel since the pandemic began, I decided to tack on a weekend getaway to the east coast. I decided to meet up with a few fellow Mines graduates to hang out in DC for the weekend.