I just got inspired, thanks to James Van Dyne, a colleague of mine and amazing team leader, to start a personal blog. I would like to make a commitment and write one post per week, trying to follow the principles of IndieWeb.
Here we go with Week #1, but, since this is the very first post, I need to go a bit further than a week to be able to describe where I stand today.
It hasn't been an easy month, this one.
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The morning of June 12th of 2025 I find myself awake at roughly 4.30AM, very unusual for me. At 5AM I decide to get up and enjoy the silence and tranquility of Bubbiano when everyone is still asleep. I make myself and my wife a nice Japanese style breakfast, then I head to the Milan office looking forward to attend a social event organized by my colleagues. During lunch we briefly talk about a something we all heard that morning: Air India 171 crashes right after landing in Ahmedabad, India. We are not particularly touched by the news, as this kind of things happen a few times a year.
Fast forward to late afternoon: I'm one the bus, heading home after a physically exhausting day of social interactions, go karting and tremendous heat. I get my phone, after ignoring it for most of the day, and start looking at Slack (the messaging platform we use at work), scrolling through the messages. One message gets my attention, they scheduled a "last minute very important meeting" at 6PM for my whole team (I work in a sub-team of the broader Comms team). That can't be good. I quickly realize that I missed it, so I go to the following message and I read it.
It hits me hard and I start to cry.
Heer Baxi, fellow colleague, the brightest person on the team, was on that flight that a few hours earlier did not matter. It mattered now, suddenly.
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The next few days at work were just unmanageable. Impossible to concentrate. The feeling of not being entitled to feel bad about what happend, because I did not know her as much as others, was prominent, but as it turned out I was not the only one in that situation, and that helped.
I quickly decided to head to the UK, as my colleagues organized a gathering to remember Heer at the London office. I went by train, from Milan.
I enjoyed participating to the gathering and appreciated the closeness shown by all the colleagues who knew her. It's amazing how a group of people scattered around the world are able to show such love and empathy to each other in a difficult moment. I'm really grateful for that.
As a person on the spectrum, though, traveling is not the easiest thing. In addition to that, I've been living with PTSD because of an armed robbery that happened ~3 years ago, and I struggle walking in crowded cities. All this, though, was enough to made up my mind and finally start therapy to work on this issue. I'm happy about that.
Finally, I can talk about this week, in which it was my turn to be Interruptible Engineer at work: it basically means I have to keep monitoring Slack channels and answer questions about our framework/product, which is not my favorite activity, since I hate getting interrupted. Besides that, and difficulty concentrating (will talk about ADHD another time perhaps), the week was not too bad.
I'm excited because next week I'll be on holiday, and I'll go camping in the mountains with my wife and our dog. Will do a lot of hiking and trekking, and hopefully astrophotography as well, which I'm starting to get excited about again, finally.
I feel like this was enough for my very first post.
I'm excited about these new commitments and ready to stay on track 🌿.