August 2022: dropping in and out

Another late recap. I’m writing this from my phone on a train to Hamburg to celebrate a friend’s birthday, so this might end up being more like a list.

First things first, I can now announce here that I’ve quit my job at Klarna. I’ll write more about it when the time comes, but I’ll be starting a new job at AMBOSS in November!

Despite being happy with my decision, I must say the first of my three months notice period has already been one of mourning because I really like the people that I work with and the progress and impact I’ve been making is quite palpable.

This past month also brought a growing awareness of how much progress I’ve made in this career in the past three years and the realization that I’m being treated as a more senior engineer than I thought I would be at this point. It’s been an amazing journey to be in!

One scary thing I did in August: I hit the skate park with my inline skates for the first time! I joined a drop-in workshop and even went into the small bowl at Park am Gleisdreieck! But I also fell and broke my glasses, so it might take me some time to try that again…

One unexpected thing that happened: after three years of mildly judging people who use light themes in their editors, I tried it out this month because no dark theme had enough contrast for VSCode’s new merge conflict feature and actually liked it and have been using it ever since. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Two things that made me proud:

• Picking up my final pieces from the pottery class. Still impressed that I’ve done such nice pieces with my own hands!
• Getting the company HR to change a link in their service desk from “Maternity/Paternity Leave Questions” (with an icon of a person wearing a dress next to a baby trolley) to “Parental Leave Questions” (with just a baby trolley icon) – it always blows my mind how easy it is to be gender neutral in English, but still takes so much effort for people to be aware of it.

Two podcasts I’ve been listening to:

• Lingthusiasm: speaking of language, I’ve had this on my list since I read Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet a couple of years ago. I started from the beginning and really liked the episode on pronouns and finding out that singular “they” has been used as a pronoun for undetermined subjects since the 1700s!
• Upstream: recommended by Harry in July, this is an amazing podcast on economics from an anti-capitalist perspective. I just couldn’t stop listening! Particularly liked the two-part series on worker’s cooperatives and the episode about the “sharing” economy.

One interesting thing I watched: these two videos on Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po neighborhood (part one, part two), recommended by Winnie Lim on Twitter. I honestly found the guy presenting it quite annoying but it was totally worth it for the local heritage stories at the end of each episode.

And that was it for this recap! It’s been a great summer and I’m already missing the warmth and having light out until late in the evening, but I’m looking forward to what’s coming next! See you soon!

Written on a Friday in September, 2022