So I'm starting with my most recent event first, which was my company offsite in Denver, Colorado. We were in the Denver Tech Center area, which is about an hour south of downtown, by train or by Uber in rush hour. I took the A train from the airport and switched to light rail. I was surprised my team was so pro-public transportation. One team member came in early enough to take public transportation and his backpack to a canyon and hiked up a mountain. I took it in early and hiked around the Denver Tech Center area (not very exciting). And at least one other team member did the $10/day method. I like the cash goes to the city. That's always a plus.
I spent time on the airplane reading my "homework". The Art of Action. This is an extract. Not exactly an easy read. The overall theme of the book was good. Autonomy over micromanagement. Micromanagers thrive in the same places as authoritarians and dictators. Autonomy is good in war as well as in business. But I don't think I needed a whole book for that lesson. Our single hour of book discussion was mostly a rehash of the themes because we hadn't had a lot of time to read it, and a few exhortations to share how to change company culture to encourage a bit of esprit de corps across teams and foster more autonomy in tackling problems and innovation. Sometimes it's like there's nothing new under the sun. Those aren't groundbreaking ideas. The issue is always handling managers who do micromanage and enforce a hierarchy in all things.
During my walk, I headed up to the outdoor sculpture garden. But it turned out to be a music venue, closed, and not as interesting as I'd hoped. But I found their coffee shop and enjoyed the giraffe statutes outside the doors.
It was a whole family.
When I went to find my room, the key would only let me go to the fourth floor. I went up and down several times, finally deciding they had coded my key wrong. And then I thought...what if this is some off-by-one issue. This was some off-by-one issue.
I met up with most of my team at the local bar, seeing them all for the first time. I also saw several people from my PREVIOUS teams for the first time. I told one he wasn't shorter than I expected, because his photos clearly revealed he was 1.5 big corgis tall. But another former teammate was tall and she had a huge smile, and the combination that didn't gel with my mental picture really threw me for a moment. My old team was Panda Express and we dispersed last October. When I saw a Robot Panda beer at the liquor store at the end of the first night, I knew I needed it.
This door in my room was punking me.
We had an offsite Pinewood Derby event run by the local Scouts. Everyone built a car that weighed no more than 2.9 (hence the pipes, although I still stopped at 2.7), and winners were based on fastest, fastest team, slowest, and best decoration.
And everyone made a car. It was a lot of cars and a LOT of heats. We weren't forced to stick around. We could go find a beer.
This implies I was angling for slowest, but I didn't even come close. I think some of the ones decorated with pipe cleaners and lacking a wheel had an advantage.
The last night of the actual offsite (versus the next night when I flew out) about a dozen of us went on a beer tour in the RINO district. I saw these old pinball machines at the Bierstadt Lagerhaus where we started and went down to play a few for free. That first one is 62 years old.
Our beer at the Lagerhaus.
One of my coworkers bought a bottle of slime on the way into the brewery. And then went about putting it back in the bottle.
Harder than it looks.
Much harder. I told his boss it was a metaphor for release management.
They had a great painting in the entryway from The Big Lebowski.
We went to three more bars and had a pitcher of light/usual, dark, and specialty at each that we shared with small tasting glasses. Great Divide. O'Dell. And Ratio. However, about two to four folks weren't drinking, or weren't drinking a sample of everything, and a couple were drinking wine. So those three pitchers weren't split between too many people, and less as the evening went on. It was a LOT of beer by the time we found some food at Ratio.
I took an opportunity to slip into a photo booth between debates with HR about zone of control changes in the market.
I'm either being held up or grabbing at someone's chest in this one.
Almost Buddy Christ.
Maybe a better Buddy Christ.
My mom's face when she used to make her exasperated expression. My sister would be familiar with it - I will need to share.
This is for me because our UX group is Onyx. I'll find a need for this photo some day.
The lead on my old team used to say Huck It a lot instead of swearing. So I took this picture for the team. One of them did a search on Slack and found something like 4-6 dozen instances of him using it in a message. Now when he says it, they can respond in kind.
The last day I wasn't leaving until late on the cheap flight. A good call as it gave me a chance to hang out downtown and the evening plane was virtually empty. So I sat around Union Station people watching over coffee and my book. And found some Birria fusion ramen at Jinya ramen.
I liked it. Really liked it. But I like Tonkatsu and Black better, so I doubt I'll have it again. I missed my half of an egg :(
One more brewery. I still had a lot of time, even with the train factored in, so I sat around Wynkoop Brewing and read my book. They had a few equipment rooms you could peek into on the way to the bathroom.
The front desk staff was kind enough to take my photo with their ape sculpture.
Almost Buddy Christ.
Maybe a better Buddy Christ.
My mom's face when she used to make her exasperated expression. My sister would be familiar with it - I will need to share.
This is for me because our UX group is Onyx. I'll find a need for this photo some day.
The lead on my old team used to say Huck It a lot instead of swearing. So I took this picture for the team. One of them did a search on Slack and found something like 4-6 dozen instances of him using it in a message. Now when he says it, they can respond in kind.
The last day I wasn't leaving until late on the cheap flight. A good call as it gave me a chance to hang out downtown and the evening plane was virtually empty. So I sat around Union Station people watching over coffee and my book. And found some Birria fusion ramen at Jinya ramen.
I liked it. Really liked it. But I like Tonkatsu and Black better, so I doubt I'll have it again. I missed my half of an egg :(
One more brewery. I still had a lot of time, even with the train factored in, so I sat around Wynkoop Brewing and read my book. They had a few equipment rooms you could peek into on the way to the bathroom.
The front desk staff was kind enough to take my photo with their ape sculpture.
Good trip. Loved meeting everyone. I wish they had cycled managers between teams to generate some cross team familiarity. And the technical talks were much better than the other talks. I still have to parse all my notes and read everything they pointed me at Confluence and elsewhere. Would have been nice to come back to a quiet week, but today was definitely proof that's not going to be the case (what's that, PHP hacks and TLS hacks and CVE scans installation changes to meet modern systems, and that took all day despite being a very small part of my job? At least I'm busy.).
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