Personal

I just checked and it’s been exactly 1,594 days since I last posted on this blog. That’s 4 years, 4 months, and 12 days. This was, as is often the case with these, not planned. When I last wrote something here, I was working in a team set up as an R&D lab. Work felt quite fun and exciting and writing about it felt natural.

I then changed to jobs to a startup where things felt a tad different. It was a weird time for me: I met some great people there, people I still talk to and call friends. We put together a small team where I got to do some of the most fun work. Some of the people in that team I still talk to every single day. We’re still trying to put the group back together in some form in another company. And yet, my time in that company, outside that small team, made me feel quite small and inadequate. Writing about it did not feel natural.

I then joined HashiCorp, a company I’ve admired for years. I won’t go as far as saying this was a dream of mine, but when I got the offer, it sort of felt like it. I’ve been here for about two and a half years now and I’ve met some extremely brilliant people, and a few that I can call friends. I should have written about it. I wish I had. But by this time, the writing habit was already gone and life does what life does.

What else happened over the last few? Well, we became Canadian citizens. That was a blast, even if pandemic-style remove ceremony was a bit awkward.

We bought a house and got a new dog, Loki. He’s an English Cocker Spaniel, as would be expected of us, as he’s our 5th —

All in all, I can’t complain. On the other hand, I am getting older, which sucks, let me tell you that.

Anyway, I’d like to get back to writing a bit, I used to enjoy it quite a bit. We’ll see. Hopefully it won’t be another four years until the next post.

Update: the licence plate application has since been refused. The reason given is that they don’t allow offensive messages. All I can think of is that they misread it as being “GOP HER,” which doesn’t mean anything but they may have assumed it was some code, new slang or something.

I live in Quebec and only recently the province opened registrations for personalized license plates. At first I didn’t even consider it, but this morning I impulse-bought one:

This will of course be a homage to my favourite mascot, Go’s.

My adopted country is celebrating its 150th anniversary today. I want to say that I feel privileged to be here for it. This is where my family and I decided to make our home.

Happy birthday, bonne fête, Canada! Merci de tout! 🇨🇦

A few months back I decided to try and burst out of my bubble. I then decided to follow some public figures from all sides on Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook this is particularly weird because you’re forced to like the page. So it tells the world “Roberto likes Mrs. Public-Figure”, which is sometimes undesirable.

Still, I wanted to see what both sides of the political spectrum were saying. Also, I consider myself a centrist so I expected to agree with everyone on at least something.

Anyway, my town suffered a terrorist attack a couple of days ago and as soon as the identity of the suspect became known, the media started drawing conclusions based on who he “liked” on Facebook. That got me thinking: someone will eventually go through my social media and conclude I believe in X because I “like” Y on FB, even though I may only “like” Y because I want to be informed and not because I necessarily agree with them.

There are also reports that US Border agents now require people to provide social network credentials so that their political leanings can be attested. Regardless on my personal opinions about this, the fact is that someone with access to my FB account can quickly draw the conclusion that I lean this or that way because of the pages I like, even though I liked them only to be informed.

I then realized that it’s time to give up on my bubble-bursting experiment. I “unliked” pretty much every public figure on Facebook.

So this is me today.

Years ago, my wife and I had a friends couple we worked with for some years. Someday they stopped talking to us. They refused to answer our calls or answer our emails. They never accepted out friend requests on Facebook.

We never knew why.

This happened over 10 years ago so naturally life moved on. From time to time, it happens that I see something from them on Facebook seen as we have a lot of friends in common, but neither of us acknowledges the present of the other.

I recently joined a Slack team and to my (and I’m sure his) surprise, my former-friend was there as well. Over the course of the next few weeks, we’d be talking in the same channel to other people but again, never directly to each other. I wanted to but I knew he was mad at me for something and I didn’t want to force it. What I did try doing was to engage in the channel as if nothing ever happened, just like everyone else.

But it was unconfortable. There was always that elephant in the room. So last Thursday I send him a message in private. I told him I never knew what I had done but that I apologized for whatever it was. I told him that he didn’t have to forgive me but I would really appreciate knowing what it was.

But he wouldn’t answer. So today I decided that there was no point in making two people uncomfortable all the time and I left the channel.

In the end, it’s no big deal. As I said, this was something that happened (whatever it was) over 10 years ago. But it makes me sad that I’ll never know what I did wrong.

(Image CC-BY-SA by Wikimedia Commons)