My first job straight out of university was remote. “Great!” I thought, “I’ll have the flexibility to work whenever and wherever I want, and I won’t have to deal with people.”
Bzzzt! My first years working remotely did not go down well. I ended up feeling so isolated, that I sacrificed all of the potential benefits of remote work and left for a 9–5 office job. It stayed this way for five and a half years.
Remote working is not easy. …
Last week I attended my fourth PHPUK conference. A two-day event with 3 tracks and over 30 speakers, it’s the UK’s premier PHP event.
The Speakers
PHPUK yet again offered a great range of talks on a variety of topics from an increasingly diverse selection of speakers; old and new faces, local and international visitors of all genders, from PHP and non-PHP backgrounds, speaking on a variety of both social and technical subjects.
The Sponsors
There were some interesting sponsors at PHPUK 2017; including JetBrains, Inviqa, SamKnows, and Contentful. …
Note: this post was originally written in 2012. However, I am reposting it as a record of my adventures in Japan.
Fuelled by an unrelenting thirst for adventure, we planned to spend a night at a Japanese temple.
This kind of lodging, or shukubo, used to be more common when religious pilgrims travelled by foot, visiting as many temples as they could. These temples serve simple vegetarian dishes in accordance with Buddhist principles of non-violence — Shojin Ryouri. There are also morning prayers.
There are three sacred mountains — known as Dewa Sanzan — in Yamagata prefecture. Haguro-san, Gas-san, and Yudono-san. Originally we’d wanted to hike across all three, but unfortunately Gas-san is inaccessible in October, so we had to settle with Haguro-san. …
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