4:44 AM in a hotel in Amsterdam is the best time to craft your personal newsletter for the previous week. Especially when you've had a big week. It's not quite morning and it's not quite night. It's that magical jet lagged liminal space in between wile in a foreign country. Not awake. Not asleep.
I mean, what else can you do. You can't sleep. Those amazing European breakfasts with bread, butter, sausages that aren't quite what you are used, cheeses, butter, bread, orange juice, espresso, butter, bread, butter, and cheese isn't available quite yet. You can imagine the bakers are still working beyond those noisy seagulls in the harbor.
I lay here hoping my wife isn't still broken at home. When I left home she was still broken from a dead lift Monday gone horribly wrong. You are warned about them every Sunday. But you never really think they'll go down like they did this last week. Nothing worse than a wound up wife that can't actually get up out of the chair and accomplish that insane task list of things that really don't need to be done, but also must get done for our lives to move forward.
Hoping she is better when I get back. Broken wife is not ideal.
I casually shared with a few close friends this week while chatting about APIs and the decline of the AI madness that I was leaving my startup which I had founded exactly 1 year after and helped secure $3 million in funding. It is really the only thing you can do when the vision did not include you actually contributing anything beyond helping get the funding. When you got mad amounts of expertise with open standards, governance, storytelling, and rolodex (do the kids still say that) of people in big companies that does not get tapped into...you just gotta bail. I mean you got better things to do.
All the people I told were all the same old timers like me in the corner of this conference (party) bitching that all the kids here don't realize how long we've all been doing this, and can't imagine how much work and traveling we have all done so that they could discover how cool APIs were in the hallucinatory shadows of artificial intelligence disappointment. At least we have each other. At least our talks are good. At least have stories to tell. We've seen some shit.
What the fuck is in this hors d'oeuvre anyways? Is that fish or mushroom? IDK. Are you drinking? No, I had to quit. Yeah, me too.
I hear a pigeon out the window. Or maybe a dove. What is the difference? It sounds nicer than the gulls were between 4:10 and 4:30 AM. A nicer rhythm.
I was able to make it back to my room at 10:00 PM last night after a lovely Georgian dinner with friends, despite my cell phone and watch both being dead because I left my European power strip in Paris last trip, and the piece of shit one I bought at JFK didn’t actually work. I wonder how many dumb ass Americans fall for that shit every year heading out of the country. Capitalism. I am just glad I can still navigate in old European cities without technology. The good cities just kind of have a flow to them. You just follow the energy and it will lead you where you need to go. Few American cities have that.
There is zero anxiety in this moment about what I will do next. I will focus on API discovery (apis.io) and API governance (apievangelist.com). These are the two areas I am truly an expert in. These are the two most needed areas behind the technological madness spreading around the world like the covid pandemic. This conference in Amsterdam has reinforced these feelz. Still lots of uncertainty, but also lots of confidence in what I know, what I can do, and what people need. It will come. I have another conference in Munich next month. I am curious to listen to people's stories there. I know my shit. I will be fine.
I miss my broken wife. I miss my moody Rottweiler. I am ready to get home, but I have one more day of talks. My talk yesterday was new material, so it was a lot more awkward. My talk today is old proven material so it will be easy and natural. Then I will likely wander the streets of Amsterdam looking for my last lonely dinner in the city watching people on the street before I make the journey home back to NYC.
I want a ride on my bike in Central Park with my fearles copilot. I am ready to stare at some squirrels. Especially that black one with a red tail on the east side right before the 72nd transverse. It doesn't seem like it have too many fucks to give. It is always messing with the others.
I don't have much else to say about the world out there. It is kind of comforting in Europe at the moment. I hear a lot about how folks here are thankful for Trump, because it is forcing them to wake up and see technology for what it is right now. Half the people still think technology is the solution, where the other half seem to recognize it is all the other things that matter. Like bread. Butter. Cheese. People.
OK, I am going to shower and head down to sit in that lovely awkward space in the hotel lobby and eat some delicious breakfast, drink coffee, and smile at all the sleepy awkward people.
"I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself." — James Baldwin
