I woke up to a cheery email today telling me that a quarter of my stock options had vested. That means I’ve been with LaunchDarkly a whole year! (there are worse anniversary notes to get).
And what a year it’s been. I thought about doing a photo essay of all the conferences I went to in the last year, but there have literally been 36 this year, and I had speaking slots at all but 5, and of those 5, I ran open spaces at 3. Too many pictures!
I went to 3 other countries – Australia, Santo Domingo, and Canada. I made platinum status on my airline, missed my kid’s 13th birthday and every single concert, and wore out a TravelPro suitcase. I made a bunch of new friends and acquaintances, and got to know others better, and worked my ass off to learn a new career.
When I started, I had exactly one day in the office to get my new laptop, meet my new co-workers, and have an enthusiastic and influential conversation about stickers. Then it was off to Kansas City Developer Conference, my first official conference as an official Developer Advocate.
Let’s just say I was glad for my thorough interview prep!
You can see that my sticker conversation ended well. This is Velocity New York, I think.
I made it back to Oakland for LISA and the office Halloween party
I celebrated company milestones, even if I wasn’t always in the office for the official parties. I ate this bread pudding in New Orleans at RubyConf. It was delicious.
I sewed a bag for the sticker collection I tote with me to conferences. The inside fabric was an in-office thank-you gift, and the fastener is one I got in the Garment District of New York
I met this sleepy lion when I was in Sydney to visit Atlassian. It was my first customer on-site and it was kind of mind-boggling. They had so many great ideas for new features and ways to work with our product.
There was a caricaturist at Index San Francisco. I’m pleased that I happened to be wearing this jacket that I made.
This was a sketchy diagram I took a picture of and sent to our awesome product/graphic person, Melissa. She’s the one who does all our striking stickers and visual look and feel. This ended up as a slide in my Waffle House talk.
Here is my glamorous life. I took a nap in the office before a redeye flight home. This is the old office, which we have now outgrown, but the view was amazing. I am wearing technology socks, but I can’t remember right now whose.
The key to never feeling bad about putting stickers on your work laptop is to first cover said laptop with a clear case. It gives you a little bit of ablative impact resistance, and when you change computers, you can keep the case for your wall!
I’m proud of the work I did, and in the next post, I’ll talk a little bit about what I think is happening.