November 2024 in review

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

This month’s highlights include a 3-day team meeting in San Diego, dinner at Ten 3 on top of the Sandias for my birthday, a friend’s Karaoke birthday party, Thanksgiving dinner with neighboor friends.

The theme of the month is: witch.

Activities

photography

San Diego

I went to San Diego for a 3-day team meeting in person with the Grafana Labs Professional Services team.

I joined the team as a Solutions Architect shortly after its creation. There are now ~35 people who are members of this team. It is about the size of the company Grafana Labs when I first joined 😄. Most people in the team joined in the past year, and so for about half of the people, it is the first time we see eachother in person.

We did presentations, process improvement work sessions, tech labs and workshops, and we learned a lot from one another. At this scale, it is almost like a trade convention. We had detailed spreadheets and documents to organize every aspects of the event, and many people prepared for 1 to 2 months.

I hosted a session on Common and standard tools and systems, a trivia game, and I organized a lab titled Building custom business applications on or around Grafana.

This was also the first time that I visited San Diego. It’s nice and big. The weather is very sunny, mild and humid. It doesn’t have a lot of pedestrian areas, unfortunately.

My favorite place was the current exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Balboa Park, followed by the Fine Arts museum, also in Balboa Park.

Month favorites

• 3-day team meeting in San Diego.
  • We had workshops, hands-on technical labs, presentations, discussions, team building games, social dinners.
  • We did indoors kart racing at K1-Speed.
  • I visited museums and galleries at Balboa Park.
• Published 2 blog posts I’ve been working on for the past 3-4 months.
  • How I organize my digital files in 2024
  • How I organize my notes app in 2024
• I handed off two Python programs I wrote to a customer, after working about 300-400 hours on each.
• We had friends over for dinner, Riya made Borscht.
• We had a vegan Thanksgiving dinner at our neighboor friends’ house.
• We went to see the new Wicked movie.
• For my birthday, we took the Albuquerque Sandia Tram to Ten 3 restaurant.
  • The restaurant is called Ten 3 because it’s at an elevation of 10 300 feet.
• Learning about the American constitution, and American history.

Plans for the December Holidays

• Stay at home, enjoy 2 weeks of vacation.
• Go to the movies.
• Eat at a restaurant.
• Go to the Farolito Walk on Canyon Road on Christmas Eve.