One year back from Europe

This time last year I had just moved back from Berlin to my hometown Weymouth after an absence of about 20 years.

January: Temporary Accomodation ¶

When I moved back I stayed in a winter holiday-let. My plan was to buy a flat in Weymouth, but that takes time. So I was to stay for 5 months in a rented flat.

I dedicated my first month to running every single day and getting to know my surroundings. Towards the end of January I got my first sports watch, the next day I returned it and ordered a Garmin instead, I carried on running every day until I realised it probably wasn’t helping my injuries.

I was injured when I returned and also decided to visit an Osteopath, she advised me to do a number of excercises and wear a sports bandage on my ankle. My injuries consisted of “sore hips” and a very strange ankle issue that had plaugued me for a year.

It’s possible that the ankle support helped, it’s also possible that it got better on it’s own. I don’t know. I stopped wearing it after 3 months. My hips are still a problem though, although I can now run longer distances.

temporary, furnished, accomodation

Feburary: An Offer ¶

My flat search revolved around finding something between 100k and 200k pounds. There were very few options in this price range, and the options that there were were pretty awful. I was reluctant to spend too much, having an existential dread of technological redundancy and wanting to pay off my mortgage as soon as possible.

Getting the mortgage was relatively easy via. the use of a no-fee mortgage advisor. The mortgage rate was about 5% however, but I figured if I could pay off my mortgage in 5 years it wouldn’t matter. If I could keep my job for 5 years that is and maintain my current position of privilege in the economy.

There was one property which I took my interest. It was the top flat in an old victorian house conversion, which had a view over Weymouth Bay. After some debating I put in an offer at the asking price and that was the only flat I looked at.

looks better in real life

March: Waiting ¶

The offer was accepted and my mortgage was ready to go, but nothing was official until the current owners could move out. So I was waiting.

The contract on my holiday let ran out and I was homeless! Or, I guess, my home was where I lay my hat and I stayed with friends and family. I stayed in Scotland, London, Portsmouth and Berlin.

While staying with family in Lee-on-Solent I attended a functional fitness session, and when I returned to Weymouth I joined a gym and went regularly until I went cycling, then I didn’t return and cancelled my membership 2 months later.

At this point I also promised to run the Portsmouth Great South Run with my cousin in October!

Lee-on-solent

April: New Job ¶

After seven wonderful years at Inviqa I had decided to move on, and I secured a new job at the end of 2022, but was happy to work through my notice period and hand-over the project I was leading. It was hard to leave a company that has been such a formative part of my life.

I started my new job on the 27th of March. It was exciting, and I dived into the new role, trying to understand what the role was. I was one of two Staff Engineers. I started by working with squads on tickets before looking at the wider picture, and trying to find ways to improve the architecture and the working enviornments, and adding lots of new emojis and channels to Slack.

working remotely in Scotland with Max and Rocket during an internet outage

No Smoking ¶

When I left Berlin I was not drinking, although I was smoking casually. I had stopped drinking alone about 6 months prior to that. When I moved back to the UK I started drinking again, and continued smoking until I stopped.

I went out to see one of my friends play in a local pub, on the way I purchased some tobacco, for the eye-watering price of £25. I got drunk, and lost it. After that I decided not to buy anymore, and haven’t smoked for the past 6 months.

My drinking has started again, although it’s been stable, and I drink no more than a litre of beer a day, usually taking a day off each week and have probably been “drunk” only a few times this year.

Sunset on the coast path up to Moonfleet

June: New Flat ¶

Finally the flat came through, I paid off the solicitors and moved in.

I’m really happy with the flat, it’s got fantastic views and two floors. The only issue is there is no parking, and there’s some damp, and the building is … old. But so far it’s been very comfortable, and for the first time in my life I feel like this is my place.

Flat after having the Sofa and Desk delivered

Cycling in Brittany ¶

I wanted to cycle to Spain but I cycled around Brittany and wrote about it extensively.

Brittany

July: Piano and Sky Gardens ¶

One of the first things I did was order a piano to replace the one I had to sell before leaving Berlin. I ordered a Clavinova, it took over a month to arrive.

The company rented out the Sky Garden in London for an event. It was great to travel up and meet the western-europeans(*) of the company and enjoy the spectacular views from the skyscraper.

looking onto the Thames from the Sky Garden

[*] the other half of the company were from eastern europe and were unable to travel due to the ongoing invasion situation.

August: Redundancy ¶

I started the day like any other, but when the day was over I was unemployed. They paid me for a month after that, but for the first time in my life I had been “let go” along with the entire team.

It was quietly devastating, perhaps the hardest part was leaving all the people I had gotten to know over the 7 months, I don’t find it easy to meet people, so as much as it was sad to see all my professional efforts wasted, it was leaving the people that hurt.

On the positive side I could, for the first time, openly look for a job without pissing anybody off. I was free and I could buy a new laptop.

no job, no laptop so I purchased my first (and hopefully only) Framework laptop

September: Searching ¶

On the other side my job was INSANELY STRESSFUL. I had become a firefighter and was supporting an AWS migration, while most interactions were good, there were some stressful interpersonal relations also. The company was investing more and more in feature development and driving full speed ahead.

A week afterwards I was still waking in the morning with my mind churning problems that no longer concerned me.

I started looking for jobs, applying all over the place, and got many invitations and recommendations, and pointers, and recruiters, etc. Finally there were not so many options.

I failed a take-home test, which was gutting. I had assumed it was a formality and time boxed it to one hour, putting just enough detail in to show that I knew what I was doing, I missed a division-by-zero bug and didn’t deliver one of the specifications and that was it. They dropped me. And I was absolutely gutted. I absolutely did not expect it.

Finally I accepted a good looking contract and decided to start my own compamny DTL Software LTD.

my high resolution company logo

October: Running Events ¶

As promised in March I ran the Great South Run (10 miles) with my cousin and her friend. I managed to beat my target time, the very next week I ran the Weymouth 10, getting a slightly worse time but not feeling bad about it due to the presence of two hills on the course.

Me with pain face coming into the final 100m of the Weymouth 10

Fight Club ¶

I had now been in Weymouth for almost a year, but socially I had not made much progress. The other thing I had not made much progress on was my running. Despite running regularly, and doing the ParkRun every single Saturday at a very uncomfortable pace I had not improved significantly.

In the late 80s my Dad was one of the founding members of a local running club (he was club champion in ‘88, ‘89 and ‘90). It turns out that 37 years later it’s still going and has a large membership.

I joined the Tuesday training session, and a month later joined the Thursday speed session too.

It’s been good to get out and have the opportunity to meet people, even if I’m one of the strange social introverts while somehow managing to appear as an extrovert at work. I find it hard to “act normally” and “make friends” (what the fuck do people talk about anyway?) but I it’s happening slowly.

The training sessions have been great fun and the speed sessions exhausting, I hope it can improve my ParkRun time from around 22:00 minutes to 21:00 this year with the ultimate aim being to break 20 minutes!

November: PHP-TUI ¶

The contract didn’t start immediately and I had plenty of time.

What could I work on? Why should I work at all?

Programming is my hobby I guess, I do it in my spare time. So having all this time off left me with a rare opportunity to fix one of the two projects that I maintain: Phapctor and PHPBench. Instead I decided to spend months porting Ratatui to PHP.

It was very cool, and other people that it was very cool too. Which made me feel like I didn’t waste my time.

PHP-TUI lnogo

I travelled and stayed overnight in Bristol in order to give a 15 minutes talk at PHPSW about PHP-TUI and hopefully drink some beer. Just before the talk was informed of some very heavy family news - not everything was great.

As I was now self-employed, and reasoning that it would be good publicity in addition to the main benefit of meeting people and getting drink I submitted talks to 4 conferences, including one about PHP-TUI.

Hair Cut ¶

I cut my Covid hair off. There’s a photo, but I’ll spare you and just say that it was very long, now it’s very short.

Instead here’s a photo of my tragically underused recording studio, some drawers I found on the street, my Megadeth songbook (also tragically underused) and my matress:

Recording Studio

December: Back to work ¶

After some wrangling with the contract, I started it.

The position is mainly programming, which is a shift from my leadership involvement in my last two jobs. So I’m in many fewer meetings and have been working mainly in isolation so far. But it’s interesting, and importantly, it’s not stressful.

Hopefully Janurary will bring in my first pay day in some months and I can finally buy the last remaining house essential…

… a bed 😴

And then… ¶

It’s been an unsually eventful year for me. Losing my job makes me realise how much I had taken my employment for granted, but it has also been good to break free and become (hopefully) more self-directed. I’m looking forward to what the next year may bring.