In the morning my colleague and I visited Urb-it’s delivery hub behind Waterloo station. Scruffy neighbourhood, but a shiny, tidy, well-organized hub on the inside, with snazzy-looking Urb-it-branded e-cargo bikes and trikes.

Later on we had more meetings, and then ate lunch at Borough Market – prize-winning fish’n’chips. Quite nostalgic.

Also it was super weird to travel around London with people who pronounce Westminster as “West Minster” and Southwark as rhyming with “fork”. Good thing we didn’t have a reason to even mention Leicester Square.

A full day of meeting people and presentations and presenting and other conference activities, including building a spaghetti tower. Which collapsed before the one-minute mark and therefore got disqualified.

13|37 turns 13.

I visited the 13|37 Borlänge office today (and will be staying until tomorrow) to hold my multi-tenancy talk again. I did it live in Stockholm twice when it was fresh, and streamed it once during the quarantine years – you can watch it on YouTube if you’re interested. It’s a few years old but the content hasn’t aged at all; the architectural questions and choices are all still valid, and even the code examples are still fresh. The audience seemed to agree, because the feedback this evening was almost embarrassingly complimentary.

The dev team at Urb-it celebrates major achievements with cake, and also mourns major losses (due to people leaving the team) with cake. Cake goes fell with all kinds of feelings.

Sometimes I test stuff at work by making things up. Right now at Urb-it, this means pretending to deliver imaginary parcels to made-up addresses, and taking proof-of-delivery photos. Or pretending to fail at delivering them and making up reasons for why I failed.

At my previous assignment at a specialist insurance company, I was making up details insurance cases for mobile phones – imaginary scenarios detailing exactly how my imaginary phone happened to get run over by a car, or damaged by water, or stolen.

I could just do the minimum necessary – always use the same options, or always point my phone’s camera at whatever is in front of me – but after 20 rounds or so it gets rather boring. It’s more fun to have fun with it. So I take photos of random objects around my home office.

After yesterday’s knowledge day, we had an activity day today. We started with a team treasure hunt, with very varied tasks – obscure facts about Slovenia, themed photo challenges (a photo of a license plate with “13” in it; a photo of a stranger wearing something 13|37-branded) and teamed photo challenges (at least 8 people of the team jumping and actually in the air at the same time), visiting odd spots of the city and solving maths puzzles.

I was all peopled out after yesterday so I went off on my own and bagged a few of the far-off walking challenges for our team. It was rainy and sweaty. Especially walking up the castle hill afterwards to rejoin my team. I barely took any photos, both because the rain made it difficult and because I had a tight deadline to meet.

For the afternoon we had a choice between a city tour, a boat tour on the river (which was cancelled for safety reasons due to the rain and flooding), a culinary tour (which I assumed would involve lots of meat and wine) and a hike. Even though we spent a full day walking around Ljubljana just a month ago, I guessed that the city tour would show me new sides of the city, so that’s what I went for.

Our group had barely left the castle when our guide showed us the first hidden detail. Ljubljana was built near the site of an abandoned Roman settlement, and they reused chunks of the old ruins to build the castle. A stone is a stone!

Having walked down to the bottom of the castle hill, the guide took us on a tour of the air raid shelters under the hill. Fully maintained still, and ready to be used at 24 hours’ notice, he told us – and actually used for real during the Ten-Day War with Yugoslavia in 1991.

Along one of the main shopping streets, our guide showed us the narrow ventilation corridors between the medieval houses. The buildings all back up onto the hill, and the corridors help air out the moisture. Most of them were either bricked up or shut behind gates, but at least one was open. The far end was narrow enough that I could barely turn around.

The guide also pointed out that all the medieval houses are exactly three windows wide. Apparently this was a rule in medieval times. I walked down this street last time I was here, and paid attention to the views, but never noticed this detail – nor the ventilation corridors.

The river, when we passed it, was seriously flooded and I totally understand why the boat tour had to be cancelled.

This lovely little street with all its greenery and flowers was as beautiful today as it was in August.

Naturally Ljubljana’s city architect Jože Plečnik was a recurring topic during our tour. I learned, among other things, that he was heavily inspired by classical Roman and Greek architecture and really, really loved pillars. An ongoing joke during our tour was that if you see any pillars anywhere, then Plečnik was probably the one who put them there. And indeed we saw pillars in the oddest of places – such as “on the outside of a wall, three meters above ground”. Go figure.

The grounds of the Ljubljana Festival, inhabiting what used to be a monastery, were my favourite place in the city. The juxtaposition of baroque statues of saints with Soviet imagery of red five-pointed stars, hammers and pickaxes, is pretty unique.

Towards the end of our tour the rain had more or less let up. I had come prepared for a lot more rain than we actually got (a pair of rubber boots took up a quarter of the space in my baggage) so I was dry and toasty all the way. But drier weather made photography easier.

We capped off the day with a gala dinner in the hotel’s grand hall. More festive and glamorous than most events in the software industry! I quite enjoyed dressing up for once.

Knowabunga knowledge day, with talks and workshops and such. One about the API Gateway pattern, and one about the Tailwind CSS framework, and one about business people taking over Scrum from developers and making it theirs, and some more.

The 13|37 Ljubljana office has some cool decorations.

Did you know that you can still by 3.5-inch floppy disks?

We’re off to our used-to-be-annual-but-pandemic-you-know company conference, in Ljubljana this year to celebrate the completion of their snazzy new office.

The company has grown since the last Knowabunga three and a half years ago. This time there are so many of us that the easiest and most economic mode of transportation was a chartered flight. Which we filled, and overflowed, so some people still had to fly regular.

Ljubljana was hit by rain and thunderstorms so our flight was late landing and we got to our hotel around midnight. (I gather that it was actually difficult to find a hotel that could accommodate us all, that wasn’t some convention centre monstrosity.) We had lovely foggy views of Ljubljana castle through the rain from our hotel room balcony. Meanwhile there were water leaks in the hotel stairwells due to several days of relentless rain.

My work laptop is starting to show its age. I got it after the house was burgled, in early 2018, so it’s almost 5 years old. The battery is becoming unreliable, and after the last round of Windows updates, some parts of the dock stopped working. Which is bizarre, to my mind – the dock is a box which translates signals from many cables into one, and its functionality should have nothing whatsoever to do with the OS version of the computer listening to its signals, but it is what it is.

I put in a request for a new computer, and today I picked up my replacement laptop at the 13|37 office. And then realized I’d have to bring it home somehow. It came in an ordinary cardboard shipping box, and at first I thought I’d just tuck the box under my arm. Then I realized that I’d surely be tempted to put it down at some point during all the standing and waiting of my commute, and last time I did that with an extra piece of luggage that I don’t usually have to keep track of, I forgot it on the train… It would be quite unfortunate to lose my computer on the first day. So I repacked my backpack until I could fit both my usual equipment and the new stuff inside. Had to leave some other things in the office, but I managed to fit all the essentials.

Walking around with it in public was uncomfortable for body and mind, given that its contents weighed a tonne and were worth about 40,000 SEK or thereabouts. I imagined walking around with 40,000 SEK of cash on me, and kept anxiously hugging the backpack to myself when I sat on the train. It was a relief to get home and put down the weight, literal and figurative.