Monthly #18

June was a hella busy month with most of my time spent away from home.

🇦🇺 Code 2025. I've been a big fan of the conferences that Web Directions run in Australia for some time. My first ever conference talk was online during code at Code 2022. This year, I had the opportunity to travel to Melbourne and speak IRL at Code and Code Leaders. My talk had two areas of focus:

1. Introduce the idea of web sustainability to a new audience in Australia.
2. Promote the work we've been doing on our Grid-aware Websites project to an audience of frontend developers.

The conference was great on its own, and included some wonderfully technical and thought provoking talks from folks like Maia Miller, Kritiketan Sharma, Siobhan Willoughby, Stephanie Eckles, Geoffrey Huntley, David Bell, and others. I enjoyed meeting the other speakers, but also the other folks who came up to me over the two days and asked about Grid-aware Websites, the Green Web Foundation, or just about life in Taiwan.

🤗 Meeting family and friends. The trip to Melbourne also gave me a chance to catch up with my cousin who has been living for some time now. We couldn't remember when the last time we saw each other was, but I reckon it was around a decade (give or take a year). Turns out he works for a company that has headquarters in Taiwan, so hopefully there's a chance for us to meet up there too in the near future.

The end of the month saw me traveling to Europe for our annual Green Web Foundation team days. We were meeting in Munich this time, so I took the chance to arrive on the continent a few day earlier and head down to Zurich for a few days. There, I caught up with another two friends from Taiwan who live there now. They'd recently had their first child, and it was awesome to spend time with their young family for a few jetlagged days.

🇨🇭 Switzerland, unlocked. While in Switzerland, I managed to get in a heap of activity to keep me awake. Being there in the summer gave me the chance to get up into the mountains and do some hiking. My friend Christian and I did the Stoos ridge hike together, which was a moderate 3 hour effort. On Sunday, having been warned that most shops will be closed, I took a train to Lucern and went up Mount Pilatus where I spent a solid couple of hours walking around the top of the mountain. I think I managed to get through 3 rolls of film over the two hikes, so I'm looking forwards to getting those developed now that I'm home.

These are my current Start, stop, continue items for 2025.

• Tracking habits daily: 😔 Nope.
• Carrying a water bottle with me: 😄 Yes! Melbourne was a bit of a let down in terms of water refill points, but I found plenty around Zurich.
• Drinking a glass of water first thing in the morning: 😔 Nope.
• Making a weekly "Links & Listens" list: 😔 Nope. But I made a links page ... I've still not updated it.
• Cooking more regularly: 😔 Nope.

• Reaching for sugary (fizzy) drinks: 😔 Nope. I defaulted to fizzy when eating out during my travels.
• Not waiting for things to be perfect before releasing them: 😄 Yes! I've been shipping a lot of alpha builds for our Grid-aware Websites project.

• Trying to get Touch into more local schools in Taiwan: 😔 Nope. Got to pick this up in August.
• Getting in a 20-30 minute walk during the day: 😄 Yes!