traveling

2022 Year Review

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This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Year Reviews

I’ve been doing year reviews since 2017 under the #year-review tag, and 2022 is no different. Expect I have been living aboard a sailboat traveling the world for the latter half of the year. So this year is probably going to look a little different in retrospect, including far less time coding and writing about technology, but far more nautical miles traveled.

(the GPS track below is mostly accurate, but also has some odd artifact in it…)

Blogging (and Boating)

The trip has resulted in some alternative blogging about sailboats, and much of which has been on an entirely separate blog https://sailinghannahpenn.co.uk.

In fact, here is a picture of Hannah Penn from last week after hauling out of the water in Guadeloupe for form extra painting.

There is always lots to be doing while sailing, and second to sailing comes enjoyment. I have also been working 10h per week for Wikimedia Deutschland, and altogether this leaves sparse gaps for other things on the side like blogs.

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Sailing: Months 2 & 3

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It’s been a while since my first personal sailing post, life is busy as ever, just now on a boat. Lots of sailing, exploring, relaxing, resting, working and boat jobs.

We have written lots of adventure content at sailinghannahpenn.co.uk, but now for my own summarised take on the past few months and general thinking of this boat life.

Exploration time

Looking back over the past 3 months I can now say for certain that you should spend more than 3 months adventuring down the western coast of Europe. In fact, just schedule 4x the amount of time you initially think for a sailing adventure. There are many gaps in our explorations and places I will need to try and see again.

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Sailing: Month 1

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I’m writing a lot of content over on sailinghannahpenn.co.uk, and I want to share some of that here, linking to most of the posts and adding a little more.

We actually wrote most of the initial blog posts in Month 1, as we had already set off before creating the blog. I’m looking forward to being able to look back on the blog in the future.

I tried writing a diary while driving my old van through Europe, but I stopped halfway through. These blogs feel like something I can continue.

Month 1 covers the initial splash of the boat after having lots of work down, all the way through to the day before the Biscay crossing (day 1 to day 31)

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Mediawiki Developer Summit 2016

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The Wikimedia Developer Summit is an event with an emphasis on the evolution of the MediaWiki architecture and the Wikimedia Engineering goals for 2016. Last year the event was called the MediaWiki Developer Summit.

As with last year the event took place in the Mission Bay Center, San Francisco, California. The event was slightly earlier this year, positioned at the beginning of January instead of the end. The event format changed slightly compared with the previous year and also included a 3rd day of general discussion and hacking in the WMF offices. Many thanks to everyone that helped to organise the event!

I have an extremely long list of things todo that spawned from discussions at the summit, but as a summary of what happened below are some of the more notable scheduled discussion moments:

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Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 (Lyon)

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By Jean-Philippe Kmiec & Sylvain Boissel (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
This years Wikimedia Hackathon was located in Lyon, France at Valpré-Lyon between the 23rd and 25th of May.

The hotel (Valpre-Lyon) was absolutely beautiful with large grass areas, great architecture and a place for you weather you wanted to have a large or small discussion, sit quietly or sit outside. As well as Pétanque, table tennis was also available as well as plenty of people to meet!

Valpré Castel
Some of the hackathon grounds. By Alex Cella (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
I planned on primarily hacking on my MassAction extension along with one of two others but as at any hackathon I got massively distracted talking to people and working on other projects.

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Mediawiki Developer Summit 2015

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The MediaWiki Developer Summit is an invitation-only event with an emphasis on the evolution of the MediaWiki architecture and the Wikimedia Engineering goals for 2015.

It took place on Monday, January 26 and Tuesday, January 27, 2015 in the Mission Bay Center, San Francisco, California.

Overall it was very interesting and a lot of good discussion happened. Again I am writing this post months after the event so sorry for the lack of content.

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Wikimania

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Wikimania 2014 was a 2000+ person conference, festival, meetup, workshop, hackathon, and celebration, spread over five days in August 2014, preceded and followed by fringe events. Wikimania is the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement, where one can discover all kinds of projects that people are making with wikis and open content, as well … Read more

Wikimania Open Data Weekend

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Wikimania 2014 logoThe Open Data Weekend was fringe event to the Wikimania conference this year. It took place in Frobisher Room One at The Barbican Centre in London on the 5 & 6th of July and was well attended.

The weekend included:

  • Discussion about how open data, specifically Wikidata, is helping the Wikimedia movement as a whole covering its current integration with sister projects such as Wikipedia and Wikisource as well as future integration with these as well as Wikimedia Commons.
  • A general discussion on open data and the philosophy and the Semantic Web technologies.
  • Exploring various tools and applications that run and depend on the data stored within Wikidata and Wikimedia projects.

Unfortunately I am writing this post in 2015  and various details have fallen out of my mind… Luckily there is an EtherPad that contains lots of notes!

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Zürich Wikimedia Hackathon

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This year the Wikimedia Hackathon was held in Zürich, Switzerland from the 9th to 11th May 2014. The organization of the event was great, from lanyards and badges that included a USB memory stick to a city map and a ticket for public transport, Wikimedia Switzerland had prepared fantastic hackathon. More than 150 developers, engineers, sysadmins, … Read more

Spaghetti Open Data

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Spaghetti Open Data is made up of a group of Italian citizens interested in the release of public data in open formats, in order to make it easy to access and reuse. Starting in 2010 they have had yearly conferences. I was lucky enough to be invited to their conference this year (SOD14) as the keynote speaker … Read more