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!

Being in Berlin, I had to take advantage of the season – the Christkindlmärkte (Christmas markets) were just starting to open, so I had some glühwein at the Potsdamerplatz market. I find the markets so cheery in the European wintertime.

I was also favoured with decent weather – not a lot of rain – so was able to do a lot of evening and weekend walking.

After my onboarding, I headed to Melbourne rather than coming straight home – Tom and I were guests at a beautiful wedding in Eddington in rural Victoria, so we took a bit of extra time and had a little country holiday.

First we headed down the coast to Port Fairy, where we mooned along the beaches and ate delicious fish & chips (well, I had chips only. Tom said the fish was great, so I’ll take his word for it!). The area is stunningly beautiful.

After that, we headed to the Grampians region and stayed at Halls Gap – the town is essentially an overgrown Scouts camp, but it was all very wholesome. We hiked and read books and relaxed ourselves into a peacefulness that can only really be achieved without reliable internet access!