No livestream scheduled. I know BEAM Radio released an episode where we spoke to some good folks about their events. I've published a thing on Raspberry Pis over on Underjord.io, I might have mentioned that last week. As you might gather I don't have my previous newsletter for reference.

In Transit

I'm on a train. This is written on a wednesday. Things are strange in that way.

The train will take me to Copenhagen, technically in another country but also one of the reasonable airports to hit from where I live. I'm going to London for a client meeting thing. It is an unusual trip and I measured whether I would go quite carefully. I'm fully vaccinated so that limits the risk. I don't particularly want to focus on pandemics and decision-making so I'll leave it a that and focus on the travel aspect.

Now I'm not super nervous about flights and travel. I like to imagine I'm fairly average levels of anxious about these things. I don't like the time leading up to being aboard the vessel because it is a time ripe with the potential for excruciating screw-ups. I've almost missed a plane by sheer stupidity once and that still haunts me a bit. Until I'm through processing and in transit I find the whole thing with travel mostly burdensome.

I'm pretty good at killing time during layovers or long journeys. I'm not a fan of the parts where I have to be paying attention and engaged because it is all admin, bureaucracy and to a large extent dumb. Bonus, pandemic adds more hoops to jump through. I respect those hoops but that's decidedly not appealing.

But yeah, not all that nervous, just a background-radiation of risk-awareness and mild annoyance. Typically. I've never flown so frequently as to establish a tight routine or anything. I still go to the airport with a few hours of margin.

This time I can add that I'm incredibly out of practice so there is some additional fretting.

Overall, I'm sure it'll be fine. I'm curious to see how the client event is, looking forward to meeting some new people in person. Doing some novel things, a new hotel, a new restaurant, some kind of conference-place. All of that has a certain shine to it as novel experiences have been few and far between recently.

It feels good to do something unusual. Scratch the brain a bit.

I think this will also be the first time I've spent more than one night away from my family since the birth of my daughter. This is one of the many weirdnesses of the pandemic. I don't know how that will feel, I'm curious to find out though. Parenthood has definitely made me more emotional in certain ways.

I didn't travel a ton before either. It happened but not that often. The pandemic has overlapped quite closely with my increasing engagement in the Elixir community, increasing writing for the public, my more focused approach to consulting. All of these increase the amount I would like to travel for certain things. But that hasn't been an option.

I have been at ElixirConf EU in Prague and Code BEAM STO (Stockholm) and then that went out the window as the world pressed pause. I expect that if we see things truly clear up I'll likely make a few trips to the US to hit conferences there and I look forward to it. Because I've made a ton of friends and acquaintances that I want to meet. There are things I want to do both here in Europe and in the US.

That's a lot of what I've missed of travel. Not the transportation, not the transit itself, though that provides some healthy boredom and time for reading. Rather the possibility of meeting new people, making new experiences, something I find much easier away from home. This trip should be a small taste of that.

I don't really miss having an office life. I mostly miss being out and about in the world.

Take care everyone, thanks for reading. I appreciate it.

If you want you can reach me via lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

- Lars Wikman