I took a one week trip to Seattle for work on what would have been London, Week 43. This was a serendipitous set of meetings / internal conferences for work. My larger team was meeting for an offsite in Seattle, and my role was having everyone of that role meet in Seattle on the same week. I chose to do the role based meeting on Wednesday, which was the only day of overlap.

Monday I headed to the airport around noon, and got some nice chill time in the Virgin lounge before the flight. I had some people from both groups on the flight with me, but we just did our own things while on the plane. I took a downgrade for some nice Delta credits, which wasn’t a big deal since I was planning on staying up the whole flight anyway. On the way back I plan to sleep so that I can wake up at 7am when the plane lands and try to just start going about my day.

The first day of the offsite was fun, with presentations in the morning and a high ropes course in the afternoon. I really enjoyed the ropes course and was able to make my way through most of it. We had a nice dinner and I got to chat with a lot of the US team that I hadn’t seen in a long while.

Wednesday I went to the summit for my role, and had a great time chatting with everyone, trying demos, and meeting up with more US people I hadn’t seen in a long time. The conversations were some of the most intellectually stimulating I’d had in a very long time. Everyone in my role is a tinkerer and hearing about their work and the ways they get things to work is amazing.

The second day of the summit I gave my talk on AI and showed off some demos, like Story Machine. I had a great time at the conference, though I called it a night really early as I was amazingly tired.

We had a pretty chill Friday and then headed to the airport. A few of us were on the same flight back. I slept for most of the trip.