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Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors

Bazel in Watercolors

This article is part of the series "Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors".

One of the challenges of leading a globally distributed company with employees and customers on 6 continents is making time for meaningful connections with people. I’ve embraced this challenge and turned it into an opportunity. That means combining travel with industry conferences, team summits, customer and future customer relationship development, and product discovery. So far this year, that includes 12 cities (Sydney, San Francisco, New York, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Boston, Munich, Berlin, Cologne, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle), 71 customer and future customer visits, and gathering a total of 231 engineers at our events, plus meeting up with EngFlow team members.

To help me in this journey, I leaned into my childhood passion, watercolor painting! Growing up, I wanted to become a craft artist in Ukraine, but the reality of making money hit hard as a refugee in the US. I looked for the closest career to art that pays well at the time and somehow landed on computer graphics, which then led me to a software engineering career. I haven’t done art in several decades aside from the occasional sketching at NYC museums with my kids when they were little. The discovery of super portable paint pre-filled watercolor brushes reignited the watercolor fire in me. So I started including these 5-10 minute watercolor sketches in my hectic travel itinerary.

In this blog series, I’ll cover my Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors journey in the familiar EngFlow Core Principles structure:

  • Happy team: notes about local culture and team meetups
  • Happy customers: notes from our customers on their Bazel journey, successes and challenges
  • More happy customers: notes about the bigger needs of the developer community and insights from our meetups

Stay tuned for the first post in series, which was my first trip in 2024 to Sydney, Australia, combined with the San Francisco layover!