The past year has been a whirlwind of change, between moving to Dublin, continuing to work remotely as an independent freelancer, establishing our life in Europe, and recently getting engaged and preparing to marry the love of my life and move to Paris.
I’m getting ready to join an exciting company on a full-time job for the first time in 4 years, and moving back to Paris for the first time since 2012.
Everything has had some sort of purpose and yes: only after looking back can I finally connect the dots and experiences that life has taken me through.
Today I’m turning 28. And the future’s never looked brighter!
For the first blogpost of 2019, allow me to start off by wishing you a Happy New Year 2019!
It’s been a couple of weeks since my last email, and the end of the year for Shana and me has been simply focused on our Winter break and on planning to move out of Dublin.
Over the first week, we left Dublin and traveled back down to the South of France to stay with my family. We spent a few days close to the seafront, meeting up with old friends in Antibes. Then we followed it with a few days in the mountains, to ski/snowboard, and celebrate Christmas all together.
Shana had only been skiing a handful of times before but she did really well and we had lots of fun taking this time to relax and appreciate our family.
She said Yes!
After the French trip, it was time to fly over to the US and spend some time with Shana’s family. This year, we hadn’t been able to make it to Thanksgiving, so it was important for us to be able to see Shana’s parents, her brother, and her sister-in-law this winter.
We had a packed week, and it’s going to take me a while to get me back to normal after all the excitement, the food, and the jet lag.
An interlude:
Shana and her brother Jason have been ice skating from a very young age, for over 20-25 years. Growing up on the ice, she competed at the highest level and even trained different teams and younger skaters. However, I had never been able to see her on the ice.
This was only my second trip over to Maryland to spend some time with Shana’s family. This time was going to be an incredibly important one: with the help of Shana’s family, I had planned to have a surprise private session at the ice rink — it was made easier by the fact that Shana’s mom is actually the director of the local ice rink.
So on Saturday December 29th 2018, after dinner, Shana, myself, her brother, Jason, and his wife, Keri, were able to skate all together. It was nothing short of amazing to see both brother and sister navigating so smoothly on the ice. Later on, I’d joke that Jason and Shana skated even better than they walked. It was a lot of fun to be introduced to something that had been such a formative part of Shana and Jason’s lives. I had seen videos of them on the ice before, but I had never witnessed it in person.
I had another surprise for Shana that evening. We had been talking about the future of our relationship, and about our aspirations in life. We were already planning to leave Dublin and we should be able to move to France together this year, going after new job opportunities and a much improved quality of life for both of us. The driving force behind these many conversations we’ve had over the past few months was our motivation to make a great life for ourselves, and build something strong together.
I had arranged to have a playlist ready to play on the speakers at the rink, and at around 10:30pm that day, I knelt down on the ice, and proposed to her. She said Yes!
Over the next couple of days, Shana and I would spend our time hanging out with her parents, her brother and sister-in-law, and her loving grandmother. We also went back to Baltimore and Philadelphia, and even spent a whole day and a half in Washington DC, staying at a hotel. As a present, Jason even invited us to see Justin Timberlake live at the Capitol One Arena, the local venue where the local NBA (🏀) team plays. Shana and I had gone there last year to see the Washington Wizards play against LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers.
Needless to say it’s been one of the most important, most meaningful, and most fun weeks of my life and I couldn’t be more grateful to be well on the way to entering another family, counting a new brother and sister (Jason & Keri), as well as having Shana’s parents into my in-laws.
What’s Next
So there it is: Shana and I are now engaged. For the rest, we’re planning to move to France around February/March and this should coincide with both of us finding new job opportunities as well. Once again, lots of changes, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.
After exploring Malaysia together, we traveled back towards the west, stopping for a week in Dubai!
Over the course of a few days, we rediscovered the old town together, as well as the Burj Khalifa — the tallest building in the world — and finished it off with an amazing safari in the Emirati desert!
Over a year after the events, I've finally finished editing the video of our World Tour.
In this video, you'll get to see our adventures in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We had a ton of delicious food, went up the crazy skybox at the KL Tower, discovered the Batu Caves surrounded with monkeys, and went around the Museum of Islamic Arts and the Bird Park in the Botanical Gardens!
“I believe it’s wrong to separate work and morality. [...] It means you should check whether the ethics and values of your employer align with your own. Especially in technology, where the impact of your work is felt by thousands or millions or even billions of people, it’s worth asking yourself more often: is the world I spend eight hours every day creating truly the world I want to live in myself?”
I’ve been a supporter of @AS_Monaco since I was 7 years old, for the past 20 years. But what Paris has been able to accomplish from a Branding and Marketing perspective is nothing but impressive!
If you’re interested in Football/Soccer Culture and want to learn more about what France’s #ParisStGermain has been able to accomplish, this is for you!
Long-time and highly respected writer-turned-VC Om Malik is leaving Facebook.
“I don’t need [Facebook] and don’t miss it. (...) I left because it was making me someone I am not — someone who lives life through the eyes of others. There is a hard edge in Facebook life. People are always fronting — putting their best life forward. Just like startup life these days.”
I’ve been thinking about this for years, but while I wish I could go through with it, being an expat and living in an international relationship where both my partner’s family & friends, as well as my own, are thousands of miles away, it is near impossible to keep in touch with the Big Blue.
It’s not from lack of trying, using emails, or setting up a /now page. But the truth is that the family members and the ‘normals’ of this world (as opposed to tech-savvy or tech workers) are simply too unlikely to move away and too dependent on the platform and its services.
From the newsfeed, to Instagram, to WhatsApp and Messenger’s dominance, it’s very hard to change someone’s daily habit(s) when they’ve never given too much thought or consideration about the services and platforms that power their day-to-day.
From cries about “ethics in journalism” to “fake news,” journalists have been increasingly targeted by people acting in bad faith who do not care about the work they do, the challenges they face, or the actual context of their statements.
Online trolls and harassers want us, the Times, and other newsrooms to waste our time by debating their malicious agenda. They take tweets and other statements out of context because they want to disrupt us and harm individual reporters. The strategy is to divide and conquer by forcing newsrooms to disavow their colleagues one at a time. This is not a good-faith conversation; it’s intimidation
This Vlog has been overdue for about 10 months — SORRY!
However, this is a good review of my trip to Bali last August. Bali is a place I had always heard of but never visited. I've had some crazy experiences that I never thought would happen, like going to see a local football game of the Bali United Football Club or being hosted by my driver's family. All in all a very unique and utterly beautiful place!
“I'd rather enjoy myself creating stuff for a smaller, more forgiving and more engaged audience, than exhaust myself competing for an ever-bigger audience. That, after all, was the idea behind working part time, and staying self-employed, rather than continuing to crawl my way up the corporate ladder”
We’re trained from an early age to associate the word “luxury” with the spending of money; with gilded extravagance and overconsumption.
But the world, life, is full of tiny luxuries: indulgences of the sort that are easy to overlook if you’re not seeking them out and paying close attention.
Like Casey Newton mentioned in his amazing newsletter: “The Interface”, the interview of Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel at this year’s Code Conference is well worth watching!
[Spiegel is] his company’s most effective salesman by far.
> “We are less than 365 days away from John Wick 3, the third installment of the Why the Fuck Did You Kill His Dog? franchise that’s revitalized the career of Keanu Reeves and introduced mainstream American audiences to the hyperkinetic brilliance of Hong Kong–style martial arts, plus dudes in bespoke suits wielding two pistols at once.”
If you’re in the US, you should really support and have a look at Within
Personally, I’d love to support these amazing women, but I can’t justify $30 shipping fees on top of a $40 project backing. However, I’m happy to share the word to support this amazing project!
ICYMI, the latest episode of The Verge’s Vergecast Podcast is incredibly thoughtful.
Over the hour-long episode, it sums up a lot of my own interrogations, fears and doubt about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and the ethics behind these emerging technologies that haven’t matured and for which no one has a blueprint yet.
These are things that have been on my mind for the past few years, and especially this past week with the Google Duplex news (aka a Robot Assistant pretends to be human and schedules stuff for you.)
”Today many crypto investors are drunk with greed. They believe the Big Lie that this is a democracy where they can now get rich like all the venture capitalists, because they hear it wherever they go to read about investing in crypto.”
(This book was recommended by a heavy-reading couple of friends — thanks a ton Daniel & Kim!)
Looking back in the past few years, the Syrian Crisis and related forced migrations might have been one of the biggest and most important stories of the decade.
This is the background for Mohsin Hamid’s book “Exit West”. Despite the several surrealistic elements, it is a book that looks at the present and tries to paint a difficult if optimistic snapshot of what the world is, and what it may turn out to be.
Through the perspective of two young lovers (and countless other migrants around the world), we are transported throughout the globe, left to reflect upon man-made crisis and how to deal with influx of migrants in the most humane way possible.
This book does a lot in terms of empathy towards people facing difficult conflicts, and although the plot tends to accelerate or jump ahead of time quite a bit towards the end, it does so as a way to push you deeper into its character’s’ story.
I really enjoyed this book and it’s been a while since something hit me in the feels the way “Exit West” did.
With Shana being away this week, I’m treating myself by going to the movie. As it happens, our local indie cinema is showing Road-themed movies in their mobile cinema truck this week.
Last week, I was in London for a client project — we were exhibiting at Blockchain Expo.
During the expo, we had the chance to explain our product to Forbes contributor Jason Bloomberg. He just published an article about a crop of startups disrupting industries using blockchain technology —including Varanida, my recent client.
Today’s digital advertising world centers on complex bidding processes...
(…)
The current system, however, faces several challenges. Ad fraud in its various forms plagues the industry. Ad blockers challenge ads’ value proposition. And intermediaries take a large cut for their troubles.Varanida hopes to disrupt this status quo with its blockchain-based decentralized advertising marketplace.
There’s quite a lot of information on the original post, so have a read and get in touch with Varanida if you’d like to get involved with the company, the product, or the community.
It started like any other week, in our Dublin apartment. I coordinated with my clients, checked on the advancement of our different projects, and worked my way through a couple of things on Monday.
On Tuesday, early in the morning, Shana left to go on a business trip to the US. And just a couple of hours later, it was my turn to pack my bags and leave for the airport: after 14 months, I was going back to London for a little bit.
I’ve spent the past week in London, attending a conference where one of the teams I work with was exhibiting on the show floor. We’ve spent 72 long, exciting and tiring hours in networking events, meetups, and at the conference.
And on Friday, while my colleagues were heading back to France, I was checking out of my hotel and crossing London to go from the rich Kensington area over to trendy Shoreditch neighbourhood.
It took a long tube ride on the Circle line to get me to the other side. I checked in to my room, and quickly left to pick up some lunch outside. After a quick look on Foursquare, I found a salad bar nearby, and ended up taking my lunch to go. I sat in the sun, surrounded by local tech workers discussing their projects, their days, listening to different accents and stories.
It was a beautiful sunny day, with temperatures getting over 27 degrees. The British man next to me commented on how his neck was going to burn, which made me chuckle. A plane flew by, above, in the clear blue sky. And in the background, one could see the high shining skyscrapers reflecting the sunlight on our little plaza.
After lunch, I went back to the hotel room where I’d stay until the evening: lots of work to catch up on.
Unfortunately I had planned to meetup with an acquaintance in town, but things fell through. I was on my own and when dinner-time came, I decided to walk over to Boxpark, the container park I already went to last year. I found myself eating a lovely vegan Indian curry, surrounded by hip Londoners getting ready for an exciting warm Friday night.
On my way out, I walked back and tried to take in the scenery, the evening lights, and the sheer joy of people enjoying drinks outside of pubs, giving the whole atmosphere a very summery atmosphere.
On Saturday, my friends Daniel and Kim invited me over for brunch with some of their friends, further north in the Shoreditch area. I met Daniel last year when he was kind enough to give me a tour of the Monocle office and studios.
I left the hotel early and, knowing that I had about 30mn to walk, I took my time to enjoy the great sunny day ahead of me. I discovered new areas, walking from Brick Lane over to the northern side, where I found a beautiful canal that I didn’t know existed.
I walked around different markets, places that I can’t wait to show to Shana. I also found plenty of cute and quirky shops, restaurants, bars and a surprising amount of Vietnamese Phó spots — I suspect that it’s trending in London, considering there a few of them in a row.
The hour-long walk was a great opportunity to catch up on my never ending list of podcasts.
I arrived at my friends apartment and discovered a lovely and well decorated place, in a friendly residential neighborhood, overlooking a nice park. Looking down, we could see that a lot of families and groups of friends were outside, making the most of the heatwave.
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For brunch, Kim and Dani started us with some salmon & avocado toasts with wasabi mayonnaise - a truly delicious treat. We then enjoyed an egg served alongside potatoes, mushrooms and potatoes with some fresh herbs and spices. We had some prosecco alongside our meal, and better yet, a really fun vibe filled with interesting conversations. Over several hours that felt like minutes, we talked about Europe, Asia, the US, culture, traveling, our family stories about immigration, modern multicultural relationships, and shared recommendations of books/movies/tv shows for the others to discover.
I ended up coming back around 7pm back at the hotel, getting ready to hop on the plane tomorrow morning. I’m not going to like this 6am wake up call to go to the airport, but it’s been a great couple of days in the city and I already can’t wait to go back — hopefully later this year, with Shana.
In France, business-related publishers refer to Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon as a single group. And because the french love acronyms, they called it 'GAFA's.
Beyond the sheer horror of the acronym, I don't think it's fair to associate these companies together.
Apple makes money off products
Facebook makes money off ads (i.e. off the user)
Amazon harvests a lot of data but offers products/services (B2C/B2B)
Google (similarly to both FB and Amazon) has B2B/B2C components in addition to the ads.
The truth is we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer. If our customer was our product, we could make a ton of money. We’ve elected not to do that. Because we don’t ... our products are iPhones and iPads and Macs and HomePods and the Watch, etc., and if we can convince you to buy one, we’ll make a little bit of money, right? But you are not our product.
I really don’t like this acronym. These companies couldn’t be more different.
It’s April. Looking back on the beginning of the year, I’ve been going non stop, moving from the French Riviera over to Dublin, finding ourselves a flat, working on two new fast-paced projects, and planning the rest of the year.
Tonight’s therapy comes from well… the Therapy EP by the always soothing Vancouver Sleep Clinic!
