October, For Me

Um, how did we get to just 2 months left until 2022? I can already hear Christmas songs in my head as I write this 😳 I feel like I’m still trying to process March 2021…

Anyway, happy Halloween! I hope you all had a good month. 👻

Main Highlights

Online

• 📝 On the blog, I shared a photo blog on our trip to the Canary Islands and all about my LASIK surgery.
• ⚠️ I’m phasing out “favourites” of the month and merging it into highlights, because they overlap.

Career & Learning

• 🧡 How did we get to Q4 so quickly?! Set some ambitious goals. Yep, I’m still so excited to be a part of a company that are leading the way in cloud developer environments. Kudos to Gitpod for making it the best place I’ve ever worked, by far!
• 📟 I went on-call for the first time at Gitpod! Woo, talk about throwback to DevOps Engineer days, eh?
• 🎤 I made an appearance on the Communities Show which was so much fun!
• 🎤 I kicked off CNCF Co-located DevX Day as part of KubeCon and hosted the Gitpod booth with a bunch of my colleagues.

Personal

• 👀 I had my LASIK surgery done and it was a huge success!
• 🙃 As part of my month long recovery, I have had the most inactive month ever. Since like pre-2016 before I started working out.
• ✨ I was inspired to create videos and ended up making one about getting into DevRel.

• 🎮 I got back into gaming with an Xbox Series S. Something fun to set boundaries between work and play when it’s too cold outside.
• ❄️ Temperatures have dropped, and I’m very cold.
• 🧤 I discovered my new favourite clothing brand (UNIQLO)
• 💀 I ordered the Apple Watch Series 7 and iPhone 13 Pro
• 🍎 …I really wanted the new Apple MacBook Pro, but then remembered that my MacBook Air is more than enough for the things that I do. 😁
• 💜 My iPad Mini became my favourite iPad of all time (and the one that is most used!)
• 🤓 Clark came to visit me and hang out a few times for half-term
• 🏡 Matt and I have started the process of moving and getting our first property together
• 🎃 We haven’t got any plans for Halloween this year, and didn’t even dress up! But who can beat last year’s Troy and Gabriella “costume”? I think we can retire from Halloween now, right?
• 😁 I finally met Joe Bell in person as he visited Leeds — just as awesome irl 😊

Things that made me happy

As I’ve already said in my previous blog post and across social media (if you follow me), LASIK has changed my life. 🤩

I have just started to get back into working out after a few weeks of recovery (which strictly meant: no working out to heal eyes as much as possible and avoid eye pressure build-up.) I ended up completing 4 days of full-body workouts without the need to put contact lenses or glasses on. I can even do a deadlift without my glasses slipping down my face (and falling off eventually…) When I said that it changed my life, I meant, it changed my life. 🥰

Sure, I’ve had to put quite a bit of eye drops in this month (i.e. I was putting some kind of eye drop in my eyes every 2 hours 😅) and I had to wear an eye shield at night which scared Matt every night… But I can see!

Other luxuries are going on a walk and seeing everything – not just what your glasses field of vision – and being able to read text from afar (like, I could never see THIS well before.) Don’t get me started on how wearing masks are less of a pain now too! 😎

I’m definitely not going to take vision for granted ever again. I’ll take care of what I have by wearing blue light filter glasses, using eye drops regularly and taking breaks from screens. I feel like I was given another life with my new eyes, I’m super thankful 💜

October In Photos

Quote of the Month

Next month, my intentions are to…

🌱 Keep on going. That’s it, that’s the intention. ✨

It’s been a crazy month in my personal life and both Matt and I are barely keeping sane as we juggle everything at once. We’re expecting another crazy few months ahead, so it’s important to remind ourselves every once in a while to just keep going. Just keep going ☺️