October 2024 in review

This is the twenty-fourth post in my Month in review series.

Fall activities in Santa Fe, plus two trips on East and West coasts.

The theme of the month is: orange-yellow.

Activities

Photography

San Francisco

I had the privilege of visiting the offices of a customer in San Francisco to deliver a Prometheus and PromQL training workshop.

Salem

Riya and I spent the Halloween week in Salem, MA, the Witch City.

It turns out that, after doing our research, there were no witches in Salem. It was a stressed out community of 16th century colonial American Christians who tragically acted out against each other. Today, the commonly accepted spiritual meaning from this is that triggering stimuli over a background of fear has lead to self-justifying and socially accepted violence. There is now a memorial, Proctor Hill Memorial, commemorating those 19 victims who were murdered by their peers.

Essex street is a barely 1 km stretch of street in Salem which hosts a 1 month long Halloween, witchcraft and magik themed party, culminating in a one Halloween Night super-party. On Halloween Night, the party spans multiple street squares, and Essex street becaumes as alive, dense and noisy as Times Square at night in NYC.

Months favorites

• At work, I am learning how to conduct user reasearch.
  • I learned about the Jobs-to-be-Done method for defining design goals and success criteria for an application software product. Really important stuff for me and my customer project right now. https://openpracticelibrary.com/practice/jobs-to-be-done/
• Santa Fe Spirits of New Mexico at El Rancho De Las Golondrinas.
• Work trip to San Francisco.
  • The office building was majestic and the interior was super comfortable and functional.
  • I was delivering a hand-on Prometheus and PromQL workshop to ~30 software engineers.
  • The audience was engaged and had really good questions. I really enjoyed this job.
• Vacation trip to Salem, Massachussets.
  • Learned about some USA geography, I never went to Boston or Massachussets.
  • Tens of fun themed stores, hundreds of people in disguises.
  • Learned the history of the Salem witch trials and some american colonial-era history.
  • Lots of walking in beautiful and fascinating townish landscapes.