I live in Turkiye for two months now and gradually trying to explore surroundings of Antalya. Two days ago friends invited me and my family to watch lavender fields not far from Isparta (Antalya, Turkiye). I’m not a big fan of the lavender, but agreed because I love trips and we’ve never been in that part of the region.
Somehow, in my mind Turkiye was never associated with the place of beautiful nature. The picture of a huge sea resort packed with hotels, diverse Istanbul with its mosques, and Kapadokya with many air balloons, was formed by previous conversations with many hotel tourists, Instagram and news promoting Turkiye resorts.
However, this trip changed my perception a lot. I saw fascinating views of mountains, valleys, lakes, fields and rivers. It challenged my confidence in how much I know about this and many other countries.
Sharing some pieces of that beauty with you. Maybe it will change your mind too and inspire to travel into that beautiful country beyond the sea shore.
It’s been about a month since I published my last post – book review for Indistractable. I know I planned to write 30 minutes a day and one post per week as part of my blogging experiment, but so many things happened to me so far that I had to drop the experiment to digest the life. Keep reading for more details about my adventures.
Role switch. I got a new role at Automattic – Director of Engineering for Transact Merchant Experience group at Woo 🎉 That’s both exciting opportunity for me and big challenge at the same time, because I have never led other leads before. It takes time and energy to transition and settle in the new role, but I’m surrounded by great people and professionals, feel supported by my leads and excited about the plans we have this year! Follow WooCommerce.com site and social media for updates.
Vaccination in Croatia. The decision of going to the other country for vaccination sounds weird taking into account several vaccines are available locally in Russia and there is no need to wait for it. However, none of the local vaccines are approved by EU and US authorities, making it hard to travel for work, so I went to Zagreb for COVID vaccination (some nice images from the trip are here). It didn’t go perfect – I was able to got a shot which is great, but unfortunately I got sick a few hours later, and it took me a whole week to fully recover from it. Everything is good now, and I received my EUDCC (EU Digital COVID Certificate).
Moving. Another surprise was awaiting me on return from Croatia. We had to move out of the place we rented with the family, urgently, almost without any notice. That was a very stressful and exhausting experience: looking for places, calling all the agents, arranging meetings, and running around the area to check potential places (we decided to stay in the same area due to convenient logistics for kid’s school). Luckily, we’d found a very nice apartment quickly and moved in within a single week 🤯 It took another two weeks to unpack and get used to the new place.
Now. It feels like the storm is over. Each of the events would be fine to handle on its own, but not all of them in such a short period. Now I’m good, enjoying a calm weekend, started seeing friends, doing some sports and ready to get back to blogging 😌 I’m grateful to all the people around who supported me over those weeks. I also started building plans for the future, both personal and work-related. Those are exciting, and I’m looking forward to making them real.
I’m glad to be back on track with my life and blogging!
Croatia is one of the few countries vaccinating tourists from COVID. Few weeks ago I went to Zagreb to get EU vaccine. Unfortunately, those vaccines are not available in Russia, and vaccines available in Russia are not recognized by EU or US entities. But that post is not about vaccination in Croatia, it’s about beauty of Zagreb and some bits I was able to catch during the journey.
As usual, I don’t give any comments to images because I believe you’ll better build your own impression, but if you have questions, please ask in comments under the post.
“Now” – the magic moment in time which will never happen twice in your life. It’s shared by billions of people on Earth but still unique for every individual. In this post, I want to capture my very own “now” and share it with you. It’s all about me and my life, so proceed reading if you are interested in day-to-day details. As always, it’s ok to skip if you are not at that place now.
I’ve heard about the idea of “now” page from my blogging group fellows and liked it a lot but was putting aside for a while to focus on writing about leadership, software development and books. I’m at the end of the year and sort of trying to slow down a bit after a long, challenging and eventful year. That in my opinion makes a good timing for “now” post. So where I am now?
I am at my home now (the rented apartment at the northern part of Moscow), in my office (cozy corner in the living room), writing in the dark room (it’s less than 5pm, but already dark).
The Christmas tree is all set up and lights are blinking to remind about the upcoming New Year. There are still three days of work left before the holidays, but the holiday mood is already there. I probably need to explain a bit the context specific for Russia and some other countries. Christmas is celebrated on Jan 7th, that’s why I’m not away from keyboard yet as most of my colleagues, and New Year’s Eve kicks-off a holiday season with big presents exchange happening on the New Year night.
That Christmas/New Year mood though has a bittersweet flavor this time. My daughter has got sick couple of days ago and there is not that much emotional energy left to party and celebrate. Anyway, I’m looking forward to it as a very needed break to refill my tank and jump into exciting 2022. There is still enough time for my kid to recover and for us to get prepared for a little family party.
My wife and I had a very productive year, learned a lot and have enough moments to remember. We both miss trips, but 2022 looks more promising in that regard, despite all the additional risks and unexpected changes which have been appearing since COVID times the beginning of 2020.
My work at Automattic has been an amazing adventure this year. I’m proud of what we achieved with the company as well as with teams I work closely. WooCommerce Payments has become available in 18 countries and got a ton of new features, it’s powering thousands of online stores and is helping merchants to sell their great products all over the world! It’s incredible to be part of that journey and share it with such wonderful people and professionals. There are ambitious plans for 2022, but I won’t share them here, you’ll find out yourselves either by following my or WooCommerce Payments’s updates.
I’m glad that I started writing and sharing my thoughts with people a few months ago. It’s not easy sometimes and far from ideal, but I’m happy with consistency since the beginning of the blogging experiment.
Wellbeing has become important to me recently. I started to focus more on this part of my life as well as continuing to care about other’s comfort. Thinking is not doing though, so the “doing” step needs to be improved in 2022 😀
Pausing here for now to spend some time with my family, bye!
TLDR; This is my second attempt to start blogging on a regular basis, but this time it’s more about writing and creating content for the audience rather than building a personal blog with fancy frameworks for developers. Keep reading for more details and ideas behind this blogging experiment.
Story & history
I’ve never considered myself an outstanding writer and was admired by all those people creating and publishing content over the internet. Often I thought “I’m not smart enough”, “I don’t have anything outstanding to share”, or “everybody knows this, so why would I publish the same”. However, with time I’ve noticed, there is a lot of overlapping content, found some posts describing the fears of beginner writers and got other positive signals that encouraged me to start. And I started, but (there is always some but in the good stories) it didn’t work out 😄 Here is what I did wrong the first time – I tried to do two big things at once: build a custom blog from scratch with a modern framework (that deserves its own story) and create content. Both required reasonable time, effort, and knowledge I didn’t have, so I stuck pretty soon and abandoned this idea.
These days I’m proudly working at Automattic – the company has a common history with WordPress and develops many other great products for the web. I write a lot internally and improved my writing skills significantly over the last months so the idea of getting back to blogging has been revolving in my head for a while. Luckily I came across an internal post about a blogging group, read a few posts and stories from other Automatticians about their journey in blogging, got inspired and come with an idea of my own blogging experiment.
My 5 whys
The purpose of the initiative is of large importance for me, that’s why I want to be clear about why I’m going to do anything. Here are my whys for this experiment:
I got curious about the blogging world and the technology driving it. There are lots of tools and practices helping people to deliver useful content to the audience and I’d like to learn them.
Automattic creates lots of great products but there is always room for improvement, so by using our own products as a customer I’ll be able to provide valuable feedback to internal teams and make publishing on the web even better.
I want to join the community of bloggers and hopefully make some new connections across the globe.
Share my knowledge, thoughts, and experiences with readers at the highest quality I’m able to provide.
I’m curious how far I can get in the long term doing baby steps every single day.
Experiment
Here are few words about my vision of experiment:
I’ll spend at least 30 mins/day creating: writing posts, learning, doing backstage tasks (need to learn them first).
My target is to write at least 1 post/week.
Reading other blogs is also learning, so I’m aiming to read at least one blog post per day (on average). Maybe will read several posts but not every day.
Experiment duration: at least 1 year. Until September 6, 2022.
That’s it, very simple, isn’t it? But looks challenging enough to me 🙂
What I’m going to write about?
That’s a great question! At the moment the plan is to write about something close to me like software development, leadership in IT, book reviews, and some personal stuff and thoughts. But who knows where this blogging journey will lead me to.
Follow the blog for more content! At the moment I think only authorized WordPress.com users can subscribe and follow it, but hopefully, I’ll find a way to improve it soon so anybody interested will be able to subscribe via email and other media. Stay tuned and have fun!
Vasily Belolapotkov 