I moved from the Netherlands to Switzerland in August 2006, and I’ve been working at Google for
about 18 years now. I have had the most wonderful time so far! In the Summer of 2024, I decided to
take a little break. Thanks to the awesome support of my manager and the teams I work with, my
request for a Sabbatical was approved and the date set for the 29th of July through the 3rd of
November, just over three months of time off.
If you follow on any form of social, you’ll know that I like to write. My website
[IPng.ch] is full of nerdy stories. But this website serves a
different purpose. Because a sabbatical is something that not many people have the privilege to be
able to do, and because I plan on doing only one of these in my life, I’ve decided to mark my
travels with a little story and some pictures of every day of my time off.
Well, I guess that’s it for this blog. I will spend one more day care-free and then tomorrow, I will
start work again, in a different building, with a different manager and team, and with a
significanly different mission.
I will say that I really really needed this. I didn’t know how much I needed it fourteen weeks ago
when I started my break. I’ve been doing Site Reliability Engineering for 18+ years at this company,
and very strongly identify with the discipline of reliability engineering. I’ve built some of the
most high performing SRE teams at Google, possibly the planet, in my first 10 years of tenure as a
manager. I’m looking at you, Geo SRE and Identity SRE. Then, I spent the next ~8 years as an
individual contributor working on Production 2020, the re-imagination of the internal control and
management plane of Google services, where I got to help teams in the areas of observability
(Automon!), change management (Annealing!), capacity (Autocap!), and incident response (OMG!)
through initiation, childhood and adolescence. I am incredibly proud of those teams, their ambition,
drive, and most importantly their unique subject matter expertie. These are some of the most
talented and dedicated software and systems engineers I have ever met.
Today I spent the whole day kind of just … hanging out. I need to decompress from this wonderful
experience, so I potter around a little bit in the sim, trying to practice soft landings.
In the evening, I made Bami Goreng, but I don’t feel like writing about my day today.
In the morning I spent some time tidying up my basement. I really want to make sure it doesn’t
revert to the pigsty it was three months ago. I spent a almost week cleaning it up! Today marks the
start of my last weekend before shipping back off to a dayjob. In the morning, I play with the newly
created Microsoft flightsim and cruise around over the Zurich metropolitan area with my trusty
Cessna. This is going to go down as one of the small wins of this sabbatical - I learned a new
thing, and thanks to my buddy Tim invested in reclaiming an old project that had been on the wayside
for north of 12 years!
Today is Hallowe’en! When we moved to Brüttisellen in 2006, it was not a thing. Over the
years, a few of us would decorate our houses, but most of the kids were not really with the program:
no trick or treating, no dressing up in scary costumes, nothing. But when we bought our place in
2015, we we decided to really decorate in the week of Hallowe’en. These days, kids will come round,
sometimes in small groups, sometimes in very large ones, parents and all. Many of them still don’t
really know what they are doing: ring doorbell –> get candy. The German way to say trick or treat
by the way is süsses oder saures (English: sweet or sour) which I find hilarious because if
you say “well I choose sour!”, the kid will look at you as if you’re crazy: “Sir, this is where you
hand over the candy?!”.
Today I did pretty much nothing :) I spent a bunch of time in the flight simulator flying circuits
and trying to keep my altitude. Also I did about twenty (flyby) approaches where I would try to have
a sink rate of 400ft/min and 60kts with flaps at 10 degrees. The airplane is sluggish at this speed,
so there’s a bit of a delay before the correct attitude is reached. Think of it as a really slow PID
controller. I’m still pretty terrible at it, but at least I am putting the airplane down in one
piece. Doing visual approach is really difficult by the way, because looking left and right is a bit
awkward. Seeing as my spiffy video card has four monitor outputs, I think I’ll try to get my hands
on some cheap screens that could serve as left and right windows.
This morning my buddy Arend sends me a message on Telegram - and asks me if I can check the port in
Qupra. Oh my deity, it’s finally happening! After the general assembly of Coloclue approved a
member’s petition to allow members to install cross connects at Qupra, a few months of “kastje, muur”
happened, and the networking committee and association board reached an agreement on how this would
happen.
I have to say I’m a little bit melancholic seeing that today, week fourteen of my sabbatical, has
started. My journal is going to be perhaps a bit of an anti climax because I have promised myself
that in the last week I would not do very many things, but just recompress after having been able to
let my mind roam free for so many days.
