MediaWiki Platform and Developers Experience Offsite 2024, Barcelona, Spain

Barcelona

In December 2024 I was at an offsite in Barcelona. This was my second work trip to Barcelona. The first one was the Wikimedia Hackathon 2018. I was in Barcelona at least one more time before that, in 2000, at the European Youth Meeting. I vaguely remember visiting Barcelona once or twice while in school, but I’ll have to check my old passports. If I can find them.

Offsite

The offsite gathered about fifty people from two teams, MediaWiki Platform and Developer Experience.

I used to be in a team that recently split into two smaller teams. This was the first offsite for my new team. It was also the first time I have met in person some people from the team. I wish we had much more time just for us to talk. I think we only had half a day. We barely had time to introduce ourselves. In my opinion, my team needed almost the entire offsite for itself.

There were too many meetings with all teams for my taste.

One of the most fun things we did during the offsite was running almost every day, at six in the morning. The surprising thing was that most mornings about five of us would show up. The entire offsite was about fifty people. That’s about ten percent attendance for an optional, very early morning activity. Every morning we would go for a run to a different sight. Of course, one morning we went to Sagrada Família.

Another fun activity was the dark chocolate tasting workshop. I led the workshop and we talked about how to properly eat dark chocolate. We tried 60%, 70%, 85% and 95% chocolate.

There were a lot of dinners in small groups in various local restaurants. One day we also had several sightseeing options. I selected a walking tour.

Uber

A funny thing happened after I landed. The company gave us Uber vouchers to get from the airport to the hotel (and back). I tried to order an Uber, but the app thought I was still in Croatia. If you take a look at the top-right corner of the screenshot, you can see that my phone knows it’s not using my usual telecom, but a network in another country (the letter R under 4G+). My guess is that the phone’s GPS didn’t update to the new location yet and Uber app only relies on GPS. I had to get outside of the airport so my phone could clearly see GPS satellites in the sky. After a few minutes it did realize I’m in Spain. Then I had to get back into the airport, because the Uber pickup location was there. That proved to be tricky because the exit I took was exit only, and I had to find another place to enter the airport.

The more I think about it, the stranger it sounds that Uber was happy to order me a car (seven minutes away!) that will take me from Croatia to Spain. It’s about a seventeen hour drive and crosses multiple countries.

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