Today is Wednesday and today is my talk on “DevOps and Snowflakes” at SpiceWorld London. I was really, really tired getting up this morning as it was so late when I finally got back to the hotel last night and it was a long, exhausting walk to get myself there.
Getting on the tube this morning way awful. Partially because I had a heavily loaded backpack since I had to clear out of the hotel this morning but also because it was rush hour and I had to wait for three trains before there was one that I could get on.
Finally got the conference with time to grab coffee and relax in the lounge for a little bit before heading to my conference room to speak. Then I did my hour long talk which I feel went decently well. I always get good feedback because people don’t want to say that they did not enjoy it so it is very hard to know if you have actually done a good job or not. But it felt decent. Not my best, but okay.
From there there was very little time to spend at the conference. I was there for maybe another half an hour, which was unfortunate, before heading out to go to my London office for a good portion of the day. Fortunately the London office is directly next to Liverpool Street Station so after putting in a few hours there I was able to walk right across the street, get immediately onto the Stansted Express and was back at the airport in no time.
Because I had allowed a lot of buffer time in getting to the airport and everything went so smoothly that I was at the airport early enough to stop and get coffee and a felafel burger while waiting for the gate to be announced. The food was excellent and was at a quirky little restaurant called Giraffe.
The flight home was fine. No issues. I almost had a problem because, again, American passport holders have a special requirement that I did not know about and I was supposed to have gotten cleared to fly at the baggage desk even though I had no baggage. This was a RyanAir policy, not an airport or security policy. Really just a way to have an excuse to not let people fly. RyanAir really makes Americans feel seriously unwanted. Which, I assume, is actually the case as few places in the world like America so having policies that single us out or group us with less desirable groups is understandable. But thankfully the RyanAir crew were nice and only scolded me and showed me what I had done wrong and allowed me to fly anyway.
I landed in Malaga after dark. It was a long walk back to the car and a very long drive back to Cáñar at night. Very glad to be back home in Spain. Time for bed.