By nine o’clock, when we have our daily sync meeting at work, the sun has moved far enough across the deck that there’s room in the shade for me and my computer, so that I can sit and have the meeting outside.

I wish I could do more of my work out on the deck, but it’s too bright, and the screen on my laptop is too small for proper work.

I originally made this sign for marking my locker at the tretton37 office. After ripping off the self-adhesive magnet strips, I have now pinned it to my chair at Sortera.

The older I get, the more picky I get about all kinds of things. Office chairs are definitely near the top of that list. I can deal with soft seats and hard seats and I am mostly not too bothered about the back rest, but I have very firm opinions about the armrests (no thank you), headrests (no thank you again), seat position and angle.

One of the best office chairs I’ve ever had was at ReQtest, where I sat on a large, inflatable exercise ball. Guaranteed no slouching. tretton37 had a variety of chairs so everyone could pick and choose, and when I could, I picked a saddle-style chair from Backapp.

Sortera doesn’t have anything as fancy as that, but they do have pretty good chairs. I’ve found one extra firm variety, on which it was also easy to remove the armrests and headrest. I’m not there every day, though, and sometimes the chairs move around on my WFH days. Now I’ve branded my favourite chair as mine, so I can find it again when I am in the office.

This morning we had our usual conference talk and team coding session. Then after lunch our team activity for the day was a hike – either around Monte Isola, or to the top. Both options were very tempting but, as another photographically inclined colleague pointed out, from the top you only get one kind of views, whereas the walk around the island will offer more photo opportunities.

The island is surrounded by a ring road, mostly trafficked by mopeds. The south and west coasts have small villages dotted along the road, with the hotels and restaurants clustered at the south-eastern tip. The north had fewer, and the east mostly held the industrial underbelly: ferry quays, a recycling centre, a fire station.

When we got back it was time to pack up and prepare for the trip home.

I still struggle to fully take in the reality of the historic castle that we stayed in. There’s just… a giant centuries-old, hand-woven tapestry in the dining hall. Just hanging there, for anyone to poke at.

It’s quite worn and faded, and has been painstakingly restored at some point.

A similarly aged painting hangs in a random hallway corner. I’d expect museum lighting and a label, but it gets no particular attention.

I thought at first that it might be a modern painting, done in an old style to fit in, but with the ragged canvas and flaking paint, it really isn’t.

Some of the guest rooms/apartments were ex-ballrooms, complete with painted ceilings, candelabras, fireplaces and antique furniture.

Conference day two, with Active Solution on Monte Isola and in Iseo.

The morning was dedicated to knowledge activities, just like yesterday. A talk, and then coding together in small teams. The weather was pretty fabulous again and we could sit and code outside in the garden behind the castle, without layers of sweaters. There was even a power outlet hidden in the stone wall – as if this spot was made for developers.

In the afternoon we went on a e-bike tour. All forty-plus of us. It meant a very slow pace and plenty of stopping, so that the group could gather up and cross larger roads with as little traffic disruption as possible.

The tour started in central Iseo, right where we got off the boat from Monte Isola, but soon took us out of town onto more rural lanes.

This was my first time using an e-bike. I’m not sure I like it very much. It felt strange to not have any resistance at all when pedalling – I felt that I didn’t get any proper contact with the bike, and it felt a bit unstable and unsafe. In the end I ended up turning off the electric feature on the flat, and only switched it on very briefly for going uphill, where I would normally have shifted into a lower gear. It felt good to feel the bike. I can imagine that e-bikes would be very convenient for commuting – there’s no way you’d work up a sweat, so there’s no need to shower and change when you get to the office.

More waiting – but with very pretty views and beautiful spring sunshine. Did I mention that Stockholm was barely above freezing when we left? Here it was the season for short sleeves and sun lotion.

Our destination was the Bersi Serlini vineyard.

We got a tour of the winery and a brief lecture about their history and process, learning most importantly that Franciacorta sparkling wines are definitely not prosecco.

A walk through their somewhat spooky cellars.

Afterwards there was a wine tasting, where we got to try out four different varieties of Bersi Serlini sparkling wines. They were… nice? I rarely consume any alcohol at all, and when I do drink wine then dry sparkling wine is probably the kind I am least interested in.

Afterwards we cycled back to Iseo. Had a half-hour of free time for a brief walk around.

Excellent pizza dinner at Pizzeria La Filanda. All the pizzas were served to share, and I was most happy to see that at least half of them were vegetarian, so I enjoyed this meal a lot.

Conference trip with Active Solution to Monte Isola in Italy.

tretton37 used to have annual conferences for the whole company, until everything went downhill. Active Solution isn’t going downhill so I got to go on a three-day conference trip.

Monte Isola is a pretty little island in Lake Iseo in northern Italy, an hour east of Milano. We flew to Milano, were transported by bus to Iseo on the coast of the lake, and then by boat to the island.

The island is basically a hilltop sticking out of the lake. There’s a ring of villages along the lake shore, connected by a road, and as soon as you leave the road, it’s all uphill.

We’re staying in Castello Oldofredi, an actual castle, parts of which date back to the late-medieval era.

Here’s us, listening to a talk about new features in the latest versions of .NET, in a vaulted renaissance hall.

After the talk, we had collaborative coding sessions. Most teams opted to sit out on the terrace. Quite a difference to the +3°C and light snow we left behind us in Stockholm.

Afterwards there was more enjoying of the spring sun.

For me, being so new to the company, the biggest benefit of the trip was to get to know the people. I make a point to go to the office once a week, but it tends to be the same faces there every week. Now I could put faces to the names I’ve seen, talk to the people I’ve seen only at a distance, and meet people from the other offices as well.

Ingrid works part-time at Spånga Konditori on weekends, and often brings home leftover bread and pastries that would otherwise be thrown out. Buns that are too lopsided, pastries that look uneven, various things that are just too old to sell.

Almost every time, she brings home a loaf of sourdough bread. The darker kinds of bread, the bakery sells at half price the day after. But the light sourdough bread they don’t think is good enough even at half price, so all that’s left over at the end of the day gets thrown out.

She doesn’t bring it home for us to eat, because there’s no way we would be able to eat that much! I’d get bored of the bread well before it’s gone. It’s good, but this kind of light bread is a bit too bland for my taste.

No, she brings it to me so that I can take it with me to work. I used to do it at tretton37, and now I do it at Sortera. The folks at the Sortera office are getting used to having nearly-fresh sourdough bread for lunch on Mondays. I tend to plan my own lunch around it as well – maybe a soup or a lighter stew – and together we eat all or nearly all of it.

Today I brought a loaf with me to Active Solution. And discovered that the people at this office have very different meal habits. Many go out to eat lunch at a restaurant; lunch boxes are far less common here, so they don’t even sit in the kitchen for lunch, and then of course have less opportunity to eat the bread.

Probably as a result of the above, there’s also much less of a culture of shared stuff in the fridge. I’m so used from all previous offices that there would always be at least, like, butter, cheese and ketchup in the fridge. Here I had to go out and buy a package of butter.

At the end of the day, three quarters of the loaf was still there and came home with me again. Over half of what did get eaten, I ate myself. I think I’ll be making bread pudding of the rest tomorrow.

Just… interesting to see how such a basic thing as bread and butter can work differently in different places.

The IT team at Sortera moved from floor 3 down to a new section of floor 2. Sortera used to rent half of floor 2 and a part of floor 3. The tenant occupying the other half of floor 2 moved out some months ago, and Sortera is now taking over. Our team is getting much more daylight, access to more meeting rooms, new furniture, and hopefully better ventilation and temperature control. (Our old space managed to be cold and stuffy at the same time.)

And, last but not least, closer contact with the rest of Sortera. Sitting as we were in a cul-de-sac corner of the office, on a separate floor from most everyone, we were rather cut off from the rest of the company and only saw them when we went downstairs for lunch. Now we’ve actually got people walking past and saying hi.

I’m still clinging to the tretton37 backpack. Now that I’m working for another consultancy, it would be too weird to keep using tretton37-branded gear… so I anonymized it. The logo was only glued on, and after more than seven years, easy to rip off. There’s just this vague outline left. Symbolic, isn’t it?

Last Friday, tretton37 went into bankruptcy. Early last week they lost their company tax approval, and three days later they were declared bankrupt. Sad, but not the least bit surprising.

I had been hoping that they’d limp along past the January payday and I’d get my full final salary payment (accrued vacation days and flex hours) but no. Luckily the state salary guarantee will take care of about 80% of what I’m owed. I’ll only be losing the value of six saved vacation days from last year, and sixteen flex hours which were more than 3 months old.

Could have been much worse. If I hadn’t quit when I did, I’d be unemployed and frantically looking for work.

My desk used to be my home office, for everything from reading, to blogging, maintaining my to-do lists, paying the bills, to piling up books and magazines that I hoped to get around to.

Then covid came, and all of us switched to working from home all of the time, and my desk also become my WFH desk. I got properly equipped with a large monitor etc, which was a necessity for productivity but made my desk quite cramped. Plus, when I spent all day at the desk, working, it became strongly associated with work in my mind, and I didn’t like the feeling of going back there after dinner. My blogging and online reading migrated to the sofa; home admin got squeezed into a small corner of the desk, battling for space against all the work equipment.

Now I have inherited Eric’s work nook, which gives me the luxury of separating my home office from my work-from-home office. The desk in the bedroom is for private stuff; the desk under the chair is for work. Both activities get more space, and they don’t get mixed up with each other. And my back and hiops will be happier about spending less time in the sofa.

I needed a chair for the work nook, so I went to Blocket. Black chair, black chair, gray chair, black chair… boring, boring, boring… red! And the seller thought the red colour to be a potential problem. “Säljer en riktigt skön stol, som i färgen kanske inte är alla i smaken, men den är fantastisk på alla sätt o vis!” – “Selling a very comfy chair that might not be to everybody’s taste when it comes to colour, but it’s fantastic in all ways!” I’m glad that I like colour when everybody’s tastes lean towards black. This chair had been for sale for a month and a half, and nobody wanted it. It’s an RH Logic chair that cost around 15 000 SEK when new, and I got it for 600 – because the fabric is red and, to be fair, slightly faded along the front edge. Such a beauty, and such a great deal.