talumin

I survived another year at SCaLE in Pasadena, and made it home again where its technically tshirt weather despite the snow lining the highway. My Leaf made it there and back again with 29% battery left, so that was a relief, I've never driven anywhere near that far at once before. Also I did not fall asleep and crash! It helped that my rock climbing gym is almost exactly halfway there so I stopped there as a driving break.

I went to so many restaurants in Pasadena! I'm quite proud of my success on that. I think my favorite this year was Mr Mushroom -- fantastic burgers, even with the sweet pickles (whyyy).

I saw some coworkers, current and former, a couple times. It was good, and it was awkward. I'm really not a hallway track, hang around and talk, sort of person, with anyone. (Probably not a coincidence that the best interaction was in a panel room before a talk, and not in a hallway.) But also, I want to do better at preparing in advance things to talk about -- it often feels like my mind puts everything off limits for sharing, unless I do a deliberate mental inventory and flag specific things as safe talking points.

The most common themes, in the talks I went to, were "AI is like an overenthusiastic book-smart intern" and data lake houses (like a data lake and a data warehouse but better). A lot of general industry insecurity -- the job board seemed almost entirely folks looking for work, with very few posts about open positions. (Percona is hiring, but everyone knows DBAs are a strange sort.)

Later this year PyCon the Python con is in Long Beach, and I don't much work with Python these days but a programming con sounds fun, probably. Monitorama is coming back sometime soon, also. Dunno if dates will conflict, or what work will pay for, will need to figure that out.