Travels & open source

I haven’t written on this blog in some time, and most of my posts here are very technical (more like tutorials). However, I just returned from ~6 months of travel and a lot has happened in that time that I figured it’d be fun to share. So here goes!

Leaving my job

I had a pretty fun job as an engineering lead/principal with a really awesome team alongside me. It gave me many opportunities to mentor people in the areas I love, and introduce so many engineers to things I care about a lot (like web components and web standards).

However, I’ve always loved travelling and had an itch in my brain for a long time now, wanting to head in some random direction for a few months and see more of the world.

In the end, I decided I’ve learnt what I can learn at my job, making now the perfect time to finally go do that!

Travelling

I’m already pretty well travelled and have done countless solo trips over many years. Combine that with the fact I’m happy without much of a plan, I pretty much had to choose a direction and head that way.

I decided on a few things:

• Aim to head East until I’m back home (i.e. go all the way around)
• Spend half of the trip exploring, half of it meeting up with friends I haven’t seen in a while
• Start with a Europe trip, somehow reach Vietnam, and figure the rest out from there

It is worth noting that I did actually come back to the UK for a week after the Europe portion of the trip (for arctangent festival!).

I planned most of my travel days only a day or two before, but I did have a shortlist of cities I wanted to try reach for the second half of my trip (since I wanted to meet up with specific people).

In the end, these are the countries I visited:

• Belgium
• Germany
• Austria
• Hungary (where I finally got to hang out with @patak.dev!)
• Czech Republic
• Poland
• Vietnam
• Japan
• Singapore
• Philippines
• Australia
• New Zealand
• USA (including good catch ups with @marcushellberg.dev and a few of the @lit.dev team)
• Canada

From Canada, I also did a small detour to Germany to see some friends I made in Vietnam and visit some Christmas markets. Great fun!

Overall, good trip. Made a lot of new friends, visited a few old friends, and saw a lot of really awesome places.

Open source

One of the perks of having no job (for now) is that I have a bunch more time to spend on my open source efforts!

This came at the ideal time, as we’d just launched the e18e community. Being able to spend more time on that, especially during the growing phase, has been super nice.

I’ve been able to work with so many like-minded people on all sorts of performance improvements across the ecosystem. Not only cleanups, but deep dives into CPU and memory profiles and much more.

We can’t forget, though, that I maintain and contribute to a whole bunch of projects already. So I’ve basically been splitting my time between those (e.g. chai, tinylibs, chokidar) and e18e.

This has been quite a lot of work but so much fun at the same time. Focusing on the things I care about and providing a whole bunch of useful things for the community.

What’s next?

I’ll be focusing a lot on e18e still, trying to help grow the community and have a larger effect on the performance of the tools and web apps we all use.

I have no idea what work I will end up in next, but I’ll always manage to cut a chunk of time out for my OSS efforts.

Of course, I’ll probably also end up travelling again now that I’ve got the bug!