Brain Overload!

The moral of today’s story - be careful what you wish for.

This is my brain

During the normal course of my life, it’s filled with Stuff.

Early in November, 10gen ordered me to go to New York to learn about MongoDB (Oh No! My Life Is So Hard!). I was looking forward to shopping and taking photos of the devastation wrought by Sandy, but actually I spent the whole time drinking from the firehose of MongoDB information provided by my ridiculously smart, ridiculously well-informed colleagues.

(I didn’t even buy shoes! But I did buy a new winter coat, so there is some balance in the world).

24 hours after landing back in in London, I was on a train on my way to Antwerp for Devoxx. There, I did three talks, including a new talk on Agile, co-presented with a colleague from LMAX (a teeny snippet of which can be seen in the video on the Devoxx home page). Running from thing to thing, helping out at the 10gen stand and meeting new people and those I count as friends kept me pretty busy (did I mention My Life Is So Hard?).

…and now I’m at Skillsmatter Scala Exchange, writing a blog post instead of listening to the talks. Because I’ve got no more space in my brain for anything, let alone a new language I haven’t studied at all (don’t tell anyone).

Fortunately I’m not travelling again for the rest of the year, so I’m hoping to start doing some Actual Code some time soon. I have one last conference, the LJC Open Conference this Saturday, which fortunately is on home ground. If I can get away with it, I’ll go and watch other people talk rather than perform myself. For any LJC guys reading, you can submit talks in advance, or suggest topics you want to see.

(This blog post was brought to you by a person who had an iPad, a stylus, and a desire to procrastinate against doing important stuff like reporting her stolen bike to the insurance company)