I’ll start with what is essentially the prequel to what should be my journal entry today.
Technically, today started on a plane. It was only 0:45 when our flight from Larnaca, Cyprus, landed in Stanstead.
We then took what I always find as being a strangely long duration of time, to simply get up, grab hand luggage, and make it off the plane. Then there’s the maze around the airport, leading up to passport control. Where usually only around 25% of the electronic passport machines are operating, which are then removed of their efficiency by having two or three people members of staff getting in the way. We British know what a queue is, we understand that a green arrow on a newly empty passport gate means it’s ready for the next person, and we also would all like to talk to other people a bit less.
Of course, that isn’t quite the end of the journey through the airport. As you then have to collect your luggage that has been kept in the plane’s hold. I’ve always found airports in mainland Europe to be a bit more efficient than English ones, in that by the time you make it to the looping conveyer belt of luggage, your bags are already there, waiting for you. What happens here, is you have to first make it rhgough the crowd that has already gathered for their bags from another flight (there’s never just one flight on one conveyer belt), find a good spot to be able to quickly identify your luggage and lift it off, and then simply wait until it comes along. Sometimes it involves you picking up another bag that is similar to your own, or you don’t recognise your own bag and just let it loop a few times before realising.
After this step you are basically free to leave.
We did have to get on a free shuttle-bus to one of the airports long-stay carparks, but luckily this required minimal waiting, and was pretty fast. Then my girlfriend drove us home, which took us about an hour, but luckily she let me get a bit of sleep.
Once we were home, we greeted our cat, and went straight to bed.
Who would have though all of this so far would have been about the first 12.5% of the day.? Anyway, back to the regular scheduled content…
I woke around 6:30. Not quite enough sleep for a full day back at work, but honestly not much less than I would usually get. I had a shower, got ready, and left for work. The commute went pretty well, which was probably helped by the good weather and lack of congestion on the trains.
However, being back at work was a bit of a weird experience. As we have quite an open floor, and there tends to be a lot of fun discussions going on, people chatting, and just a nice (for me) level of background noise. There had been a few desk moves while I was away, and this led to people just not talking at all. It was near silence all day, and I was totally not ready for it. In the late afternoon it did liven up a tiny amount, but nowhere near normal.
After I’d finished work, and completed my commute home, I was greeted by my girlfriend before she imminently left for her night shift. So I ate dinner, and then went for a coffee with a friend.
I spent the evening mainly sat in my office with my cat, learning about SwiftUI. With all of the travelling I’ve been doing, I had only watched the Keynote and SOTU from WWDC so far, so I was glad to spend some time to finally introduce myself. From what I can tell early on, it looks like it will be really fun and beneficial to work on, but I’ve still got a while to go before I can say I fully understand it and have it replace my UIKit code.