The theme for this spring is travel

Man. It has been a long time since I really felt like blogging. Blogging is weird sometimes. I finds myself being VERY busy and not having the time nor energy to blog thoroughly, so i end up forfeiting an entry, when i could have easily whipped up a couple paragraphs describing whats going on. I instead find myself concentrating on twitter or something else. Its pretty cool - but not as important as my blog.

Anyway.

The last couple months and the next couple months are all about travel. Its insane. It reminds me how much i love traveling, but how much I HATE flying. I used to love flying, but recently it has only been horrible experiences. I don’t know why it is so horrible, but for some reason - I have had NOTHING but bad experiences. It makes me not want to fly any longer. I need to work on just appearing.

After speaking at the U of A in Tucson, I went on to fly to San Antonio to hang out with Rackspace for a week. It was pretty awesome. We had some problems we needed to ferret out and Rackspace was very facilitative. I have always found it so much easier to work with people once you have met them and hung out. Then - the repertoire is much more than just the mysterious phone voice that tells you things. It was awesome to meet our team, flesh out our migrations and other various upcoming projects. San Antonio is a very strange place. I am not sure what i think of it.

After San Antonio, most of the Threadless engineering team flew to Santa Clara for the 2008 MySQL Conference. As always, the conference was great. I had a nice time and was able to see a lot of my friends and talk shit about technology and how to name hosting companies (It’s Mosso like MOSS. Not like mow). A couple of highlights from the conference were meeting and hanging out with Blaine Cook; getting my picture taken by Julian Cash; and having dinner with various engineers from MySQL, Digg, Mosso and Rackspace. The conference (like all conferences i think) was best experienced through the people who were there, not the actual sessions (although there were some cool ones - memcached, IMVU, etc).

Immediately after landing in chicago from the bay, we flew to NYC for a R&D conference with Insight Venture Partners (investors in skinnyCorp/Threadless). The conference was interesting. A lot of the companies that attended with us were experiencing very different growth that we are - so a lot of the sessions were not targeted towards small development teams. It seemed that they were attempted to work how we work, but through philosophies like scrumm and agile methodologies. Interesting to talk about, but it doesn’t really fit us. We were, however, able to go to some excellent places to eat. On Monday, we went to Employees Only. And then we went to the pretentious SoHo house. I found Employees Only to be awesome. It had excellent food and quite a drink menu. We also were able to have a really great time there. It wasn’t too pretentious and the people around us didn’t mind us having fun. The SoHo House had mediocre food and a weird vibe. My NY friends mentioned something about it being frequented by bankers - but it seemed more hip than that, but that may have contributed to the weird atmosphere. Regardless of the food and atmosphere, the view was great. After dinner, we ended up at 205 for a LOT of drinks and entertaining shit talking. Great times.

That brings us to the present.

Next I am going to be going to San Antonio again to finalize some of our discussions with our team. Then Colorado for Atkins wedding, and finally to Yamanashi for Hiromi’s grandfathers final funeral (and to hang out in Japan). A lot of traveling.

With this flux of traveling, I have become a bit obsessed with tracking it in interesting ways. For instance, i have been using Tripit.com and dopplr.com to track various aspects of my trips. I have tripit.com hooked into dopplr.com so that I don’t actually have to do any work. Just email my plans to tripit and BAM - dopplr is updated. pretty cool.