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Location: Stäfa, ZH, Switzerland

I am married and have 2 daughters Alise (2001) and Laeticia (2004). I share my life between family life and my passion, software engineering. My technical website: http://www.galasoft-lb.ch

22 June 2007

Crazy work weeks

The first of the craziest work weeks I ever lived is over... I don't necessarily mean crazy as in stressful, just, you know... crazy.

Last Monday, I attended Remix07 in Zurich, and spent quite some time with Scott Guthrie. It was just great to talk about WPF, Silverlight and the future. He is without any doubts one of the brightest minds I ever met (the second one who comes to my mind is Dr Jack Preger, whom I will meet again in 2 weeks time (see below)). Scott is also a very nice person, who gives a lot of care to the people he talks to, and in his presence you feel listened to, and (what's rare) understood :-)

Then on Tuesday I had a workshop at work, and on Wednesday I took the plane to Munich, to meet other people working with WPF at Siemens. I can't say too much about that meeting, but let's just say it's probably the start of a collaboration. The day was quite packed, flying out of Zurich at 7AM (which means I woke up at 5) and leaving Munich at 3PM. Won't do that every day, hell of a commute.

Thursday I worked from home, it was a little more relaxed. Finally today was my free day (I have been working 80% for 5 years, and I will resume my 100% activity beginning of July, which will be a big change for me and my family, more about this maybe in a future post).

Next week, I will be giving a WPF training to fellows developers from Switzerland and from the US. The training will take place in Zug, where I have my office, so I can sleep home. The training is the one I gave in Milano last month, and strongly inspired by the one I received in Tacoma few months ago. The training runs 3 days.

And after that, India here I come. I'll fly to Mumbai first and from there get a car to Pune, where I'll train more developers for WPF. Again, 3 days. It'll be my first time in India, and I am delightfully excited about it. What makes the stay even more special to me is that after these 3 days, I will fly to Kolkata, and visit Calcutta Rescue's projects there and meet Dr Jack again. I've been supporting these projects for (oh my god) almost 10 years now, and became president of the Swiss Foundation in charge of gathering money in Switzerland for these projects. So it is really special to my heart to be able to go there and see all with my own eyes. Expect pictures after I come back! I know that 2 days in Calcutta is really too small an amount of time, but.... I don't know when I'll go back to India, and I really don't want to miss that opportunity.

After that I'll have some holidays, I think it's going to be well needed ;-)