July, For Me

Main Highlights

Online

• 📝 On the blog, I wrote a post about leaving my job as a DevOps Engineer to build communities full-time and my learnings from remote working life.
• 🎙 On the podcast, I published an episode with Sonia and Pratiksha about how we deal with Imposter Syndrome. 🎧

Career / Learning

• 🎉 I officially joined Gitpod as a Senior Community Engineer! This has been something that I’ve kept quiet about for a few months, so it was great to finally talk openly about it and to onboard officially as a Gitpodder. So far, I’m enjoying every minute of it, learning lots and can’t wait to see how Gitpod grows over time.
• 💻 I also set up my PolyWork profile!

Personal

• ☀️ The UK finally had summer weather this month which helped keep my spirits high at least. Although there were geniunely times where I thought that I was going to melt from the heat!
• 💇🏻‍♀️ I cut my hair wrong, cried about it then got the hairdressers to fix it 😂 Not my finest hour!
• 🎂 Celebrated my younger brother, Clark’s birthday (they grow up so fast)
• ⚽️ I briefly really got into football for the EUROs, it did not come home
• 🌻 I tried growing sunflowers this year, and I managed to get quite far in the growth process. Unfortunately, the direct sun looks like it has burned my sunflowers. 🥲 I’m still holding out for a recovery, but we’ll see!
• 💬 I’ve continued on with my therapy which I have found to be very beneficial 😊
• 💪🏼 I switched things up a bit this month and for the first two weeks of July, I solely did Apple Fitness+ workouts. It was nice following an instructor through a workout for a change!
• 🏃🏻‍♀️ My weekly runs continue… It’s weird writing that because I never thought I’d keep this habit up, but here we are!
• 👁 I had my first LASIK consultation – no more glasses journey continues…

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Things that made me happy

I’ve been quite open about my experiences at work since starting my first ever tech job. This is no exception! When I say that Gitpod has given me a wonderful onboarding experience and probably the best that I’ve ever had in my career so far, I’m not joking. Gitpod already has made me feel more at home in a week than I’ve felt in my years or months elsewhere. I guess that’s when you know you’re in the right place!

Thank you to my fellow Gitpodders for making this easily the best decision I’ve ever made. Also, Geoff for the :pawlean: emoji that is all over our Slack now. 😂

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July in Photos

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July Favourites

• 🍚 Lions Prep and Hello Fresh has been a favourite delivery food service for us recently!
• 📺 Never Have I Ever Season 2, Loki
• 🎬 Black Widow, ‘Hello, Love, Goodbye‘ 🇵🇭
• 📚 One Minute Manager
• 🧊 WooZoo by Ohyama fan is the best fan out there. Hands down. 😂 Saved me so many times on hot days this month!
• 🏋🏻‍♀️ I got two new sports bras (do you remember the “no new sports stuff” rule in January? No? Me neither…) They’re both from Nike because I loved seeing them on Apple Fitness Plus trainers 😂 I could talk about sports bras for days, but I will leave it at: I forgot how reliable, strong and high quality sports bras are from Nike!

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Quote of the Month

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Next month, my intentions are to…

• 🌿 Take better care of myself by setting better work/life boundaries. Some of you may know that I’m a workaholic (I hate saying it, but it’s true 😬) and I find it difficult to switch off especially when I’m really into what I’m doing and love what I do. I’m very much there right now at work, so I’m going to make sure that I proritise my health!
• 🍋 Enjoy as much of the summer left as possible – go outside more! More offline adventures! As usual, the summer months just fly past and then we’re back to my least favourite time of year: the darker months.