It’s been a month since I joined GitHub in February of 2022. I’m enjoying myself a lot, but I’m also not sure if the reality has set in completely.

In 2014 I started my first tech job and remember that I went to a conference and got GitHub stickers, they were awesome and all ended up on my MacBook. Eight years later I now work at that exact company. 🚀

Onboard sessions

The first two weeks are oriented towards onboard sessions, unfortunately they were in Pacific standard time, so that meant 8PM CET. The first thing that you’ll notice is that a lot of the work you do is by using GitHub itself. There’s an onboarding repository with a project for every person that joined during your cohort. Here you can find issues with tasks that you can complete during the first days.

Last weekend I attended the Dutch Open Hackathon in the UP building (previously known as IJ-toren) in Amsterdam.
I went there as part of team 'Pi Ducks'. The team consisted of some colleagues from bol.com (where I started working in July) and a front-end designer we met through Twitter. We had a pretty broad range of skills in one team!

Going on holiday

Our working title was "Ik ga op vakantie en neem mee" which is a Dutch little memory game where everyone has to cite a list of items to bring on holiday, pick a new item and then the turn goes to the next person, who has to cite that entire thing again. N+1.

Day 6: Preikestolen

Preikestolen is one of Norway's famous touristtrapslocations, it's a hiking trail that ends at the Preikestolen (Pulpit/Preacher's Chair), a slab of rock hanging over the Lysefjord fjord. There's also the Trolltunga (Devil's Tongue) east of Bergen, which is similar just a lot smaller. But we didn't go there.

We had planned the entire day for our trip to the Preikestolen. It had been advertised as a serious achievement, and we weren't that familiar with such hikes. With a mix of GPS navigation and following the signs, we took the "backdoor road" Fv316 (instead of the main road Rv13). This led us through windy hills, small roads and sheep on either side. A far better idea than the highway. Both roads end up in the village of Lauvvik were we took the ferry to Oanes, a 10-minute trip. After the ferry ramp you make a sharp turn and go through a tunnel to the other side of the mountain. After a short while you leave the main road again and take a smaller "mountain road". Here we ended up in a tiny traffic jam; this meant it was the right location.

Day 3: Løkken and Hjørring

The next day we drove to the seaside town of Løkken, famous for its candy store and beaches. We arrived early in the afternoon and parked at a big parking lot, for beachgoers. First up; the beach of course.

This beach is also famous for its World War II bunkers part of the Atlantic Wall and we could see them in the distance. But first a little walk on the beach and visiting the pier, where the water was frantically splashing over. Something I wanted to get on camera — would have been better if I had cleaned the salt seawater afterwards.

Our road trip to Scandinavia

I've been wanting to visit Scandinavia for quite a while, I've been to many European countries (Great-Britain, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, Austria) but never to one of the nordic ones.

At a previous internship 2 co-workers of mine have been there and they were absolutely loving it, especially Norway. If you asked me in february where I'd go, I would have probably said the Garda lake in Italy. But since June all plans had changed to Norway.

Yesterday I went to the open day at ESTEC (European Space Research and Technology Centre) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. This is the ESA (European Space Agency) facility that houses most of the technology research and project development. I'm not even sure what it was anymore, but they have some rooms and utilties over there that even make NASA jealous!

However.. I wasn't just at the open day, I was actually invited for the #SocialSpace event hosted by @social4space together with these tweeps. Mostly Dutch people, but also some from Belgium, Germany, France and even Spain.