Long time no see. It’s been 12 weeks since my last weeknote but I’ll try and get back into it after my co-worker Andrew said some nice things about me on the internet.

I actually started writing these weeknotes 2 weeks ago with the intention of publishing them while I was at the airport waiting for a flight to go to Toronto, but that day and the couple of weeks that followed were absolutely bonkers so I didn’t quite get around to it, so these are the culminations of a couple of weeks now.

We bought a new car. With a third kid on the way I’ve had to go full Dad-Wagon MPV, with sliding doors and everything.

Liz went to collect it while I was in Toronto at the Shopify Summit, and it’s great. The kids absolutely love it, and they’re obsessed with the sliding doors.

We took the kids to the beach on Fathers Day and just chilled there all day, despite the occasional rain shower. Sandcastles, chips, ice-cream, the lot. We all had a great time! Phoebe and Elliot each made me beautiful cards, and they (presumably with the help of their mother) gifted me a very nice Japanese whisky.

I have a pretty dry sense of humour, and I know that can often come across as me being facetious, or snarky. But, without any semblance of irony: I genuinely feel like a very lucky human sometimes, and this was one of those days.

I organised a meeting at work with Koichi Sasada from the Ruby team to talk about our plans for GC in the next couple of years, and talk about a few pieces of outstanding work that we wanted to wrap up.

A fairly normal sounding occurrence: except that it was at 09:00 JST, or 01:00 BST. I am reasonably used to working pretty late most days, say 22:30, give or take half an hour, but honestly, having a meeting at 1am has nearly killed my productivity for the rest of the week.

The meeting was on Tuesday and on Friday I still felt like I was wading through treacle.

I apologise to everyone I paired with that week.

We also had the Shopify Summit, a 5 day conference, team-building and hack days event for the whole company, with 2024’s summit marking the 20th anniversary of the company.

I had mixed feelings about all this before going. I was super looking forward to meeting my work friends again, and hopefully making some new ones. It’s been about 5 years since I last attented Summit in person, and there are folks I work with that I haven’t seen in person since then. It was also in Toronto.

The only time I’ve been to Toronto before was my Shopify onboarding back in November 2018, and I remember it being a pretty fun city. It’s going to be interesting to see it again with more well-traveled (read: jaded) eyes. And in the summer to boot.

On the other hand it was scheduled only a few weeks before our kid is due.

Anyway, the summary is that, kid remained firmly in place while I was away, and Summit was outstanding and I had a really good time, althought I didn’t get to see much of Toronto.

The schedule was absolutely rammed, both with company organised things, and just personally with meetings and catchups and stuff that I’d organised to keep in touch with folks. I think there was one night out of 6 where I was back in the hotel and in bed before 2am.

In music news: I owe my ex-colleague James an apology. Our music tastes have a lot of crossover, so we talked about music together quite a lot when we worked together. I’ve always given him shit (in a lighthearted, between friends sort of way), about the band Russian Circles, who James has maintained, are the best band in the world, and I always thought were overrated and slightly pompous. Still excellent, just overrated.

Well this Audiotree From Nothing session with them came up in my YouTube recs this week, and it was inspiring enough that I went back and really spent some time with their discography.

And I have to say: James, I totally get it now, and you were right. These guys are amazing, you have my permission to mercilessly mock me the next time we meet.