After visiting my company offices, my flight home was booked through Singapore, so I figured… why not stay a few days? Well, that turned into something a bit more special…
Office visits
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to make an extended visit to both of the Contentful offices (San Francisco and Berlin) recently, in advance of our company offsite event in August.
First I headed to San Francisco, where the team is based near the Embarcadero. I caught up in person for the first time with many of the people I work with remotely. I loved being able to finally put a real face to the Slack avatar and get to know a bit more about how my colleagues in SF – mostly related to Sales and Customer Success – operate and how I can help them directly.
I also did a little bit of sightseeing!
Midwinter lantern carnival
On June 22, Dunedin celebrated Midwinter and the longest night of the year with a lantern festival through the city and around the central octagon (the main meeting hub in town). The theme this year was “The Never Ending Night” and aimed to highlight the creatures and beauty of Antarctica.
Present and remote
Working remotely is great – for me, anyway. I can completely understand that it’s not the ideal situation for everyone, but there are ways to make it work for most people. For starters, I find that I have fewer distractions than when I worked in an office – this lets me focus more on the task at hand.
A new year on the horizon
Another year gone, and more changes! I recently accepted a position at Contentful, a Berlin-based headless CMS startup as a remote Support Engineer to cover the APAC timezones. It’s my first totally remote role, so I’m excited to see how this works for me.
Since the company is based in Berlin (and also has an office in San Francisco), I headed there for two weeks for onboarding training. It was lovely to be back in Germany, and it turns out my German is still pretty good!
It was great to meet the team I’ll be working with in person, and to train up on the product with the engineering and product teams. Working remotely is a really different experience to my usual office-based roles, but it’s been going really well so far – I’ve had the chance to try both working from my home office and also going to a co-working space. I’m not sure which one I prefer yet!