GoDays 2019 in Berlin

This week we went to the GoDays in Berlin, a technical conference dedicated to Golang and the Gopher.

The conference had two tracks, full with great technical talks around developing in Go and running Go in public clouds or on Kubernetes; the keynote was delivered by Natalie Pistunovich (Fraudster) on The Importance of Beginners.

The organizer (Loovent) provided a great location with Factory Goerlitzer Park and went to great length to make sure that there was good food and ample opportunities for networking.

Highly recommended for 2020!

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International Holocaust Remembrance Day

74 years ago, the German concentration camp at Oswiecim (Auschwitz) was liberated by the advancing Red Army, and the surviving prisoners freed.

Today we commemorate this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, lest we forget.

Never again!

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Photo: ZDFheute / Reuters (via Twitter)

Ford Kuga

This week’s car is a Ford Kuga ST-Line 4×4 EcoBoost (Ford Escape in the US); it’s a 4.5m by 2m behemoth and weighs almost 2 tons.

Clearly designed for suburbia, it’s not fun to drive in the inner city due to it’s long turns and poor maneuverability, and even less fun to park, as it’s wider and longer than most regular parking spaces. The interior though is very comfortable, with a high entry, very spacious seats and all assistance systems you could possibly think of.

It’s definitely a car that you can drive well into your 70s.

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Muy Lento

After their stellar concert in Valencia and the end of the Tu y Yo tour, Adexe y Nau have released a new song on YouTube, Muy Lento.

What a great song! I had it on repeat from the day it was released (1/18) and it’s going strong to reach its first million views soon.

If you haven’t yet, give it a listen!

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Valencia

Over the weekend I spent time in Valencia, at the Mediterranean Sea, to attend a concert, but this will be a separate entry.

I was totally surprised at what great a city Valencia is! As a tourist and business traveler I have spent considerable time in Barcelona and Madrid, but never really in any other Spanish or Catalan city; this is definitely something that I’ll need to change in the future.

The Arts and Sciences complex in the old river bed of River Turia is an astonishing piece of architecture and the nearby opera has a first class auditorium; all waiting to be explored in more detail.

From the weekend I still have an image of the wonderful true blue sky in my heart and will definitely come back!

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Shoplifters

The year is still very young, but it already has a new favorite movie, Shoplifters.

Shoplifters is a 2018 Japanese movie, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, that won the Palme d’Or at last years’ festival in Cannes.

In a nutshell, the file is about families, adopted and real, and the bond that forges – great cinematography and even better storyline.

Highly recommended and definitely a must-see!

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Best wishes for the coming year 2019!

All of us may not be related to each other by blood.

Nevertheless, because we have a similar cause, similar aspirations and wishes, we are bound by that.

We are bound by what we practice, by what we aspire to.

Therefore, we are all another family for each other.

Thaye Dorje, His Holiness the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa (via EMail, from Dhagpo Kagyu Ling)

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Holiday Season

The first days of the 2018 Holiday season are over, tomorrow is a normal day and even though most people are still off work, shops will re-open.

There’s still a lot of time until Three Kings (January 6), when most people will return to work and everyday life commences – time for friends and family, time to reflect, to rest and to regroup, and time to check on last year’s resolution (that’ll be a separate blog post / video though).

The coming days for me will be full of work, winding my freelance consulting business down, as I will return to being an employee on January 1st; I’ll stay with the same consultancy though, so it’s more of a legal and status change than an actual change of workplace.

In December there were a huge number of YouTubers who did Vlogmas – to name a few, celebrities like Johnny Orlando or my favorite LGBTQ+ activist, Jackson Bird (if you haven’t watched his TED Talk or any of his videos on what being trans actually means, do that now!) – it was a real joy to watch the stories unfold as December progressed.

Thanks a lot to all the creators that went out of their way to produce daily content for us – deeply appreciated!

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Pre-Holidays Movie Spree

In the week before the holidays I went on a movie spree – the past weeks had been quite intense and I didn’t find any time, so as the year’s winding down, it was time to catch up.

I got to see:

  • Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse,
  • Aquaman,
  • Mary Poppins Returns and
  • Bumblebee.

Mary Poppins Returns is a great remake of the original, musical style, with singing leeries doing parkour; might be boring for kids under the age of 50.

Aquaman is solid action fare, but not something really new.

Bumblebee is a great prequel to the Transformers series, with B-127 as a cute beetle saving the world and setting the stage for the series.

Spiderman though was something entirely different – completely new universes, complete new set of characters, including a spider-pig named Peter Porker; I’m looking forward to more of Miles’ adventures on the big screen!

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