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Big Breath In. Big Breath Out. Repeat.

Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash

I’m halfway out the door already today with one full day of work left before I’m “off” for the next two weeks.

Cause grandma.

Frak.

TL;DR my mother’s mother is on home hospice. My daughter is named after her. So I’m grabbing girl twin and running to the States to introduce them and say goodbye.

I’m still… finding it… difficult to think about?

One of my earliest memories is attending my great grandmother’s funeral and seeing my mom cry.

I was thoroughly confused.

But now MY grandmother is in hospice and I am….

I’m still in shock.

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So I Ran Over to Brno And Then

Photo by Nathan Wright on Unsplash

If the flight out to Prague was surreal and delightful, the return flight was surreal and miserable.

End of January beginning of February is DevConf.CZ and FOSDEM and since both are quite close to where I live, the plan was to run out to Brno for the first event, run back home for a few days, then zoom down to Brussels for the other event.

But.

I woke up miserable on Sunday, but since I had stayed out late the night before, I just stumbled into the shower, thinking I only needed a little steam healing. But I just felt worse. And worse.

…and worse.

I took a minute to count up the symptoms. Fever. Cough. Achy skin.

“Influenza” is too wimpy a word for what I had.

I call it Zombie Death Plague.

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No Headaches, Yet, But

Shaka sign / hang loose hand gesture
Photo by Sebastián León Prado on Unsplash

When at home, we speak English, but in public, as much as possible, I try to speak Dutch which just means that I’m damn good at ordering a cup of coffee and buying my train ticket at the kiosk – when I travel the use of Dutch explodes quite a bit between the hotel / commute / airport.

When we first moved to the Netherlands seven years ago I used to get headaches because my brain would try to serve up Japanese as my second language instead of going straight to Dutch. Every time I’d try to practice, my brain would translate Dutch to Japanese to English and back again.

For about six months.

One day I woke up and the Japanese was gone.

Like, GONE gone.

Whenever I’d try to think of some common phrase, my brain gave me Dutch.

FINE.

But then we had kids and I really want them to be familiar with some Japanese, so I started re-learning via Duolingo. And also, because my partner and our three children are Swedish, I thought now would be a great time to fold in Swedish as well.

So every day I complete at least one module of all three languages within the app, never imagining there would be a situation when I used more than two languages within a short period of time.

And then.

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Passing The Torch Without Dropping The Ball

A replacement plan is a great resource, even when you’re not being replaced.

A year ago, as the role of OpenStack community manager at Red Hat was moving from one person to another, we started thinking about what needs to be in place to effectively transition a role. More generally, we started thinking about planning, and documenting, for your eventual replacement.

We’ll talk about what worked, what didn’t, and what had unexpected benefits for the larger community.

This presentation helps existing and new community managers take a hard look at their roles within their projects to delegate tasks, encourage future advocates, and facilitate the evolution of their community role.

That is the abstract from DevRelCon London 2018 – and I’m totally SQUEE that it was recorded / transcribed / published in this month’s DevRel Newsletter.

Here are my absolute favorite quotes along with some of my fav images used during the actual talk.

Continue reading “Passing The Torch Without Dropping The Ball”