Mrs Maupin

Wednesday started off bad and while things didn’t go downhill, I was struggling all day. F*cking jet lag hit me hard, for some reason two days late.

I set two alarms and figured that after all the sleep I’d had on Monday and Tuesday that I shouldn’t have any trouble with getting up once the sun was up. I woke up to the sound of housekeeping knocking on my door. Checked my watch, saw that it was something like 9:24 and said “SHIT!” and jumped out of bed. I knew our morning was supposed to start at 9:00, but I thought our talk, the talk that I was doing with Kim and my manager Irene, was going to be at 10:30. Still, I threw on clothes (which I’d thankfully laid out the night before), brushed my teeth, texted them that I was on my way, and zoomed downstairs. Irene was in the hallway and flagged me down to let me know which room we were in. By this point I was maybe nine or ten minutes late for my own presentation, which actually started at 9:30 (FML). The good news is we’d been having AV issues, so they hadn’t really been waiting long, the bad news is we only had four people in our audience. They were really interested in documentation though, but it was still a much smaller audience than we’d hoped for. We were scheduled against a panel on doing Code reviews with AI, and two on some of our newer technologies.

Despite the small audience, I do feel like our talk went well. We had good questions, and the guys in the room were genuinely interested in documentation and the skills and workflows that we (meaning Kim) has been developing to help AI craft our documentation. I don’t know if it was because we started late or because we'd added a demo or because we had so many questions, but we used up almost the whole hour and only wrapped up a few minutes before our time slot ended.

Then we had the morning tea break, and much to my disappointment they did not have the little ham and cheese bagels they’d had the day before. Both of the tiny sandwich options were unappealing to me. I had two donut holes, ran up to my room to drop off my laptop because I didn’t need it for the rest of the day, grabbed some of my emergency snacks and headed back down for the next panel.

The Past, Present, and Future of [my team’s product] was about, yes, the product team that I support. And I know most of what they were going to say, but it’s always nice to have what you know distilled down into a well organized presentation. Plus, I usually learn something, or manage to put some more puzzle pieces together after these things, and I did time time too.

Then I went to Building an Entire Project with Agentic Coding and Bob, which was given by a guy I met at last year’s DB offsite. He was talking about his Agent which he calls Bob (and not because of Bob the Builder, but because his gaming character is Bob the Pirate), He talked about how he’s burning millions of tokens ($$$) playing around with AI since for the time being we’ve been given an unlimited budget to learn how to use AI. Our Director has already told us that’s probably going to start getting reined in next year, so enjoy it while we can I guess? Most of the engineers have considered it a huge employee benefit, because if they ever leave the company, they’ll have mad AI skillz to take with them.

At 1:00 I finally got to eat something. I have to say, the food at this conference has been quite good, if a little heavy on the seafood. They’ve had plenty of things for the vegetarians/vegans to eat, the lunch buffet starts out with an entire table of assorted salads. Then there’s a beef or fish option for hot food, and a pasta option. Likewise the breakfasts have been a huge buffet as well. I don’t know what they had today, but Tuesday I could have had a full English fry up if I’d wanted (eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes, and potatoes). The hobbit in me appreciates mushrooms with breakfast. =D

After lunch, my final panel of the day was a woman from the Voice of the Customers team talking about What are our Users Actually Saying About the Databases Department? In the past they’d only collected and analyzed data from formal Voice of the Customers calls, but now they’ve started scraping content from support tickets, transcripts of customer calls, GitHub, and social media like Slack, Twitter, and Reddit. She talked about how the various sources target different audiences, but if they’re all saying the same thing, that’s much richer data than we were getting from just the VoC calls.

Unfortunately what we heard is that my team/product’s users are pretty unhappy with us. Not something we didn’t already know, but it was pretty stark when three or four out of five bullets on EVERY slide listed our product as something users were unhappy with. But that’s the whole reason why we’re doing most of what the team is working on right now. And I will give the presenter credit, she knew that she was going to be delivering some heavy news and she’d taken the time to look at the roadmap and follow up her data with slides that showed “things you’re already working on that will address this” and “things on the roadmap that you might consider moving up the priority list”. Which I thought was super helpful. I need to grab a copy of her slides from the shared drive, because I saw a couple of pain points where I can try to update the documentation to hopefully help remove user confusion about configuration and users not understanding how features are supposed to work.

I was really feeling exhausted by this point. Like, can’t keep my eyes open, I could fall asleep on my feet exhausted. But instead of an afternoon break, we were supposed to have a scavenger hunt, and they weren’t telling us where dinner was going to be until the end of the scavenger hunt. Seriously?!?!?! You’re going to hold my dinner hostage unless I participate in running around Lisbon solving puzzles and taking selfies with monuments? I was so tired that I was ready to forgo dinner in order to get a nap. I did show up to the “activity briefing” just to locate my team and tell them not to wait for me, I was going to skip the hunt.

I originally planned to meet up with folks at the restaurant, and texted the Executive Assistant to beg for secret location. Turns out it was a 30 - 40 minute walk away. But that was a moot point by the time I woke up, dinner had already started. So I ordered room service, for maybe the first? Second? Time in my life. I am not a fancy room service girl. But the chicken Caesar salad was delicious, and just about the amount of food I wanted at that point. I’ve been trying to eat way more veggies and avoid desserts because OMG, I am feeling my weight right now. I am too heavy, my jeans are too tight, and moving around in my body is just not comfortable right now. I just started tracking what I eat and trying to cut down portion sizes again. At this point I’ve lost 3 pounds, but I don’t really know if that’s legit weight loss or just being a little dehydrated. But I am also definitely getting more movement in this week than I usually do.

Despite napping all day Monday, I had no trouble falling asleep Monday night. ( moar bloody TIMI )

Breakfast was available from 6:00 to 10:00, but we had our Welcome at 9:00. So I was out of bed around 7:30, had a blissfully hot shower with the biggest bath sheet I have ever had (I LOVE THIS BATHROOM) and then headed downstairs. I made friends with a stranger wearing a company t-shirt in the elevator, and we sat together at breakfast, and were soon joined by someone from my team and someone from his team.

Breakfast was on the second floor, and so is the big conference room we used today. All of the talks today were about AI, in one way or another, starting with the Keynote and then:
* What does AI mean for our Customers?
* What does AI mean for us at [company name]?
* What does AI mean to you?
* What do we learn from incidents?

Then we had a round of lightning talks (5 min max), which were on a range of topics.

During the free time before dinner I worked with my work BFF and my manager to finish our slides for our talk on Wednesday. Another teammate, not appearing at this conference, had some strong opinions about what we should talk about. But since she’s not here, we mostly decided to override some of her suggestions. We have a 30 minute time slot, and she thought that 10 - 15 slides was too many. We ended up with 16 slides, and when we did our walk through after dinner we were done in about ten minutes. Guess we have plenty of time for a demo of one of our new docs AI workflows then!

Dinner was about a 30 minute walk away, and I am in NO shape to be walking up and down hills for 30 minutes. The three of us took an Uber, and now that I saw how hilly things are, I am super happy that we did. It only cost about 5 euros, worth every penny. We Ubered back from dinner too.

We had assigned seating at dinner, because our VP wanted to make sure that we made new friends. Oddly enough, I was seated with three other people from my team and two people that I spent a lot of time talking to at the last offsite, so not sure how well I did at making new friends this time around. =P Kim told me that my two teammates at her table sang my praises, which is nice to hear. =D