Time for another update

I continue to struggle to find a good rhythm post-summer. On the one hand I’m enjoying the signs of autumn, on the other though it’s hard not to slip into a bit of malaise.

• the best news is that we’ve found a good solution for someone to look after our son two afternoons a week, which makes life much more straight-forward. She’s Austrian, so we’ll have to work out how to fix his accent later, but so far it’s working great. (Keine Angst liebe österreichische Leser - ein kleiner Witz darf auch mal sein).

• All of us, parents and child, continue the adjustment process of “going to school” every day. I can’t help but think there is a logic to every other northern European country’s decision to stat schooling at a later age. 

• I must admit I was a bit disappointed that Scotland didn’t vote for independence, but then again, given that I’ve only been there twice in my life, it’s probably better that they made their own choice.

• had an enjoyable evening at #geomob, especially the post-event pub discussions.

• going back and forth on whether to get out of bitcoin or stay in.

• followed the election in Thüringen. Huge congrats to my ex-flatmate Roberto who has made it into state parliament for the Greens! Hopefully we’ll someday get the CDU-Grün Koalition I’ve wanted for years (note nur CDU nicht CDU/CSU). 

• enjoyable evening at #futurepub, hope to cover that in a separate post. 

• spoke at #LondonAPI (my slides) and #APIconUK (slides). Interesting because I had two talks to give about roughly the same topic but one was only 5 minutes, the other was 50. My main conclusion from these two API events is that it’s a very diverse group of people using APIs for all kinds of different things. Not clear that a shared forum to discuss is nearly as useful as it is for more niche topics. At APIconUK the best session I attended was about smart cities. Triggered a lot of different ideas, though most of them very fuzzy and unclear at this point. 

• Came across this post on HackerNews about a guy in my old hometown of Munich trying (and eventually failing) to use software to help him find a place to live. That generated a good discussion, which confirmed to me my long held impression that when supply and demand are fundamentally out of whack it’s hard to add more than superficial value. That’s frustrating as I’ve sent almost a decade now trying to build a service to improve things.

• encouraged to see my friends at Inkling rebrand as Showroom. 

Other than all that, and the reality of day to day work, I’m not sure where the time goes, the days pass in bit of a blur. I need to find some new books to read and things to get excited for, to include exercise which I’m struggling to get to. 

This Sunday I’m back to Bilbao, albeit just for one night for a meeting on Monday. If nothing else, that promises good food.

And that’s it for this round of week notes.