Weeknotes № 33

After last week’s conference in Toronto I went to NYC to get the most out of the transatlantic flight. The kind folks at iOSoho gave me a stage as well. After spending so long on preparing my talk (I didn’t track the time, but my guess is that it easily adds up to two weeks full-time) it was nice to give the same talk again to get some more mileage out of the preparation.

I spent the rest of my time in NYC by meeting a lot of friends, old and new. I love visiting the city, especially because of the people, the diversity and the buzz. I’ve had a lot of nice food and long walks with great people. However, in our current life situation, I think the life filled with nature, playing outside and swimming is nicer for us as a family right now (it sometimes feels like the opposite of New York). I miss things about the city, but would probably miss even more things about the countryside should we live in the city. The programmer in me wants to classify things: one should clearly be better than the other, but unfortunately, real life often doesn’t work like that. There are probably famous people who say this more eloquently, but one of the things I love about traveling is that it makes me appreciate home even more.

I haven’t really done much programming or research last week. One of the things I did realize (also throught conversations with other people) is that I really enjoy understanding (and then explaining) things at a really fundamental level. For me, the best way to do this seems to be by actually reimplementing the thing I’d like to understand. This also has been a recurring theme of Swift Talk over the years, not by accident.