Through the Interface

I'm back online after a thoroughly needed (and fully appreciated) 2-week break. It was great to relax and hang out with my immediate family: we spent most of the fortnight up in the mountains, and managed to snowboard for 11 of the days.

There was pretty decent snow – not loads and loads, but then we often don't have much at all at this time of year, these days – and we had a lot of sun.

This is the second year we've all been on snowboards. As the kids get older I'm starting to see my board moving down through the order (when sorted on length). Mine is currently second from the right.

One highlight was bumping into my old friend – and former Forge colleague – Philippe Leefsma, who happened to be skiing the same mountain.

Another highlight was seeing this avalanche dog wearing its ski goggles.

For those of you who missed the posts on Twitter or LinkedIn, we also all had a lot of fun making holiday pictures using a set of custom LEGO minifigs an old friend from the UK sent across for us. A big part of the fun was rummaging around in LEGO boxes, looking for appropriate accessories.
Here's our Christmas photo:

Here's the New Year one:

Both images were made with almost no editing: we just added the text and borders using Pixlr. It's really amazing what you can do with a smartphone, these days. (Yes, I know that makes me sound old, but then that's increasingly true. Time to accept it!)

Alas, the holidays are now over. It's time to get stuck into the fresh new decade. (Although it's possible we still have another year for that.) There's been a lot of change already, over the last few months – I'll be talking more about that via this blog, as soon as I'm able – and I expect more to come in the first half of 2020. For now, though, I'm mostly excited about the opportunities on the horizon, and am curious to see how the year unfolds.

This time last year I talked about 2019 being "the year of Generative Design". I think that probably wasn't premature, but there's certainly still plenty of progress to be made in the coming year(s). I'm not going to make any bold predictions today – I'm happy to have spent most of the holiday almost completely disconnected from work, not thinking about the future – but I do have a really fun topic to cover in the next post, at least.