note to self

In 2018 my then employer asked me to write something for their careers blog about relocating from London to Amsterdam. I did, they published it, and last week I went to look for it. It is a 404.

The company is still there. The website is still there. The blog is still there, and still lists eleven posts, several of which are other people’s employee stories. Mine has simply been taken down at some point in the last few years without anybody mentioning it, which is entirely their right and also exactly the thing I keep writing posts about.

The Internet Archive has it, in five snapshots between August 2019 and September 2020. So here it is again, on a domain I pay for. What follows is what I wrote at the time, unedited, minus the corporate preamble about the company’s brands which was not mine and is not interesting.

Moving to the land of pickled herring, biertjes and stroopwafels

Originally published on the Travix careers blog, 9 August. Reproduced from the Internet Archive copy.

A year ago, I made the decision to move from London to Amsterdam and I absolutely love it. I had been to Amsterdam a few times over the years and also did an Erasmus study abroad at Tilburg University—I’ve always really enjoyed it here. So, when I was sitting having a beer at Rembrandtplein after a year of round-the-world travel, I decided to look into the possibility of staying longer by getting a job. I came across a job ad for a position as product owner at Travix via Arrows recruitment agency.

I immediately applied and, a week later, I had an interview! And after a few more interviews, I was offered the job! During the interviews, I got the impression Travix was like a startup where everyone was very keen and passionate about their work and, to me, that was a great selling point for wanting to join the company. Everything happened so quickly and now I’m working as the Senior Product Owner of the website landing pages and content management system.

Buddying up and apartment searching

Landing the job was the first big hurdle, but then came the time to actually plan the relocation and move. Travix helped me along the entire process. They have a buddy system and my buddy was the person I was replacing in the position. It worked out really well and it was nice to speak to someone about everything related to moving and settling into the Netherlands, next to regular day-to-day work topics.

Since I had just returned from a year of travelling, I could start working right away in the London office while I prepared for my relocation to Amsterdam. Travix introduced me to a relocation specialist named Yael. I explained what I was looking for in an apartment and she started searching right away. She found 6 apartments and took me on the back of her scooter to visit them all. Between visits, she introduced me to pickled herring and told me about the different neighborhoods. The hard part was choosing which apartment to rent!

Travix offered me a number of relocation benefits. Next to arranging a buddy and paying for a relocation specialist to assist me, they pay for shipping and flight costs and help me set up my appointments to get a BSN (national identification number) and to open a bank account. They are also willing to pay for the first month’s rent in an apartment while you apartment hunt, but I didn’t need that since I found one while working from the London office. Travix also supports you in learning Dutch and I’ve been learning how to speak basic Dutch for everyday living. I met 7 other people in the Dutch lessons held at the office who are not from my own department, so it has been a great source for getting to know colleagues and make new friends.

I can truly say that Travix lives up to their Mantra “We move people”. Not only physically, in my case from London to Amsterdam, but also emotionally by really supporting me and making me feel very welcome all throughout the relocation and onboarding process.

My 3 tips for people relocating for work

Overall, the relocation process has gone super smoothly. Things that I thought would be difficult, weren’t! I am also happy to share my 3 tips for people planning to relocate for work. They are:

• Find every piece of important paperwork you think you may need – from bank statements to birth and marriage certificates, and so on. Put them all into one folder so you have them ready on hand, as you will need to have copies of them to do several things, such as opening a bank account.
• For moving to the Netherlands, I recommend reading the Undutchables book, as it puts a lot of things into perspective.
• Anytime you move house, I advise you put things that are important to you—things that hold some emotional or sentimental value into a box, such as a photo, mug, etc. to move with you right away (before the rest of your items are shipped) so you can feel at home more quickly. It makes all the difference.

Amsterdam living (and avoiding the tourists)

I’ve only been living here for a year, but I’m already trying to avoid all the tourists. My partner and I take a lot of weekend trips to explore other Dutch cities and towns. Every city has its own charm and people are amazingly friendly. I feel that Amsterdam has all of the benefits of London with the theaters and buzzing nightlife, but without the rat race and stress you have with living in London. People are more laid back here and not in a rush.

What surprised me most about the Netherlands is how much fried food there is! I’ve also gotten used to the small beers – biertjes – instead of the large pints you get in the UK. A big lifestyle difference is, of course, the cycling. It’s so easy to get around the city, which you can do in almost 15-20 minutes to anywhere. I would never cycle in London!

I think you can tell I’m happy to be living here in Amsterdam and working for Travix!

Greetings from Amsterdam,
Iain Croll

A note on all of this being temporary

Reading it back, the striking thing is how confident it is. A year in, everything going well, tips for other people. All of which was true when I wrote it.

Two kinds of ephemerality turn out to be sitting in the same post. The obvious one is the web. A page written for a company blog exists exactly as long as somebody at that company sees a reason to keep it, which is not a decision you are party to and not one anybody is obliged to tell you about. Nothing was deleted maliciously here. A site got rebuilt, or a page got tidied, and the version of me from 2018 was not on the list of things worth migrating. The only reason it still exists at all is that a non-profit in California decided to keep a copy.

The less obvious one is the workplace. I do not work there any more. Neither does my buddy, or Yael who found the apartment on the back of her scooter, or most of the people I met in those Dutch lessons. A job feels permanent while you are in it, in the same way a website does, and the honest lesson of the last few years is that a company is a group of people who happen to be in the same place for a while.

I would still write the post. I would just keep my own copy of it this time, which is what this is.

I was chatting to a friend recently about a gay bar in London that we used to go to when I first moved for University. Then to a work colleague when I was on a work trip to London about how the office block used to be Turnmills and I used to go to a club called Trade there back in the day. Also a milestone birthday is just around the corner so that makes you reminisce a little too. Anyway I think I discovered a problem with Google and that is that it’s not great at recent history unless someone has taken the time to write that history down. So here is a (not complete) list of the bars and clubs I remember from when I first moved to London.

1989 to 1993: the University years

I was new to the city and I did a lot of exploring in those 2.5 years. (0.5 was in NL on an Erasmus exchange and 1 was a work year.) Earl’s Court was the gay centre back then with Hammersmith a close-by companion, and Soho hadn’t yet made its mark as the place to meet and wouldn’t until later in the 90s.

I think the very first bar in London I went to was The Royal Oak in Hammersmith. It’s now a strip club and very straight. Back in the late 80s it was a boisterous bar with drag. Lola Lasagne was on stage the first time I was there, and I met a man called Chris while there with some university friends. That’s when I first discovered how big London was, and how hard it was to traverse at night without a lot of money for taxis.

West

• The Royal Oak, 62 Glenthorne Road, Hammersmith (closed)
• The Coleherne, 261 Earls Court Road, Earl’s Court (closed 2008, became The Pembroke)
• Bromptons, 294 Earls Court Road, Earl’s Court (closed)
• Silks, Shepherd’s Bush Shopping Precinct (closed)

North

• The Black Cap, 171 Camden High Street, Camden Town (closed 2015)
• King Edward VI, 25 Bromfield Street, Islington (closed 2011)

East

• Benjy’s, Mile End Road, Mile End (closed)
• Trade @ Turnmills, Clerkenwell Road, Clerkenwell (Turnmills closed 2008)

South

• Daisy Chain @ The Fridge, Brixton (The Fridge closed 2010, now Electric Brixton)

Central

• Some bar on Bear Street, Leicester Square, which is now Zoo I think, but I can’t remember the name
• Subway (I think that’s what it was called), Leicester Square (closed)
• Jonathan’s (I think that’s what it was called), Leicester Square (closed)
• First Out, 52 St Giles High Street (closed 2011)
• Vespa 15, St Giles High Street (closed)
• Admiral Duncan, 54 Old Compton Street, Soho
• The King’s Arms, 23 Poland Street, Soho (closed)
• City of Quebec, 12 Old Quebec Street, Marble Arch (now straight?)
• Comptons, 53 Old Compton Street, Soho
• Madame JoJo’s, 8-10 Brewer Street, Soho (closed 2014)
• Bang!, 157 Charing Cross Road (I think, but it might have already been at Busby’s)
• Heaven, Villiers Street (now G-A-Y). I worked here too during this period
• Substation, Falconberg Court, Soho (closed). I think it was open in this period but it could have been later
• Village. I think it was somewhere else before it ended up on Wardour Street, Soho

Bars I discovered after University

• The Edge, 11 Soho Square, Soho (closed). This opened I think as I was working at La Rues in 1993
• G-A-Y, Astoria Theatre, 157 Charing Cross Road (the Astoria was demolished in 2009)

Bars I didn’t discover until much later

These came while I was living briefly in Mudchute, the only time I lived on the DLR.

• The Joiners Arms, 116-118 Hackney Road, Bethnal Green (closed 2015)
• The Spiral Staircase? Shoreditch
• The White Swan, 556 Commercial Road, Limehouse

And one that is still open

The Two Brewers on Clapham High Street. It was already a regular by the end of 2000, and it turns up all through the archive of this blog from then on. On 28 January 2007 I met my husband there.

After a list this full of closures, that one being still open feels like the exception that earned its place.

If you remember one I’ve missed, or you know I’ve got a name or an address wrong, the comments are open. That is rather the point of writing it down.

The Light Festival is the one thing in the Amsterdam calendar I have never got bored of, which is notable because I have now seen a lot of editions of it. This is the short version. The detailed write ups, edition by edition, live over on cramberts.com, which is where I put the proper travel stuff.

What follows is what has actually stayed with me across the years, which turns out not to be the ambitious pieces.

Darth Vader fishing in the Amstel

By a distance the cutest thing the festival has ever put on the water. Not the most impressive, not the most technically clever, not the one that photographs best. The cutest. A Sith Lord, sat on the Amstel, having a quiet go at the fishing.

That was edition 10, over the winter of 2021 into 2022. I have looked at a great many illuminated installations since and it is still the first one I mention when anybody asks.

Walk it, do not just do the boat

We usually do both. The boat is the version everybody books and it is genuinely good, but if you only do one, walk it.

Two reasons. You go at your own pace, so you can stand in front of the one you like until you are finished with it rather than gliding past on somebody else’s schedule. And you can break it up, doing a few installations an evening across a couple of weeks instead of consuming the whole route in one go.

That second point is the one I would press. Treating it as a single event you tick off is the fastest way to stop enjoying it. Treating it as something that is simply on for a few weeks, that you wander into after dinner, is much better, and is also roughly how people who live here actually experience it.

The strange one was 2021

That edition ran under coronaregels, and it closed at 17:00. Sunset was before that, so there was a window of perhaps an hour where the thing was both lit and open.

I expected that to be bleak and it was not. The city was emptier than I have ever seen it in December, which suited the festival enormously. But it was also busy in a way that took me a moment to understand, because everybody in Amsterdam was desperate for something, anything, to do that was outdoors and legal. So you had a quiet city and a crowded route at the same time, which should not work and somehow did.

It is getting more commercial

This is true and I cannot decide whether to mind.

Better, because more money means bigger and more reliable installations, a route that is properly organised, and a festival that will still be here in ten years. Worse, because the more sponsored and packaged it gets, the less it feels like a thing the city is doing and the more it feels like a thing being sold to the city.

Both of those are the same sentence about most successful festivals, so I am not claiming any insight. I am still going every year and still enjoying it, which is the only review that really counts.

Every year around now I go through the tech, work out what earned its keep and what quietly let me down, and write it up. This year the exercise produced an unexpected result, which is that nothing broke.

Nothing died. Nothing got replaced. Nothing needed a repair, a battery or an argument with a support chat. I sat down expecting to write about a failure and could not find one, which after twenty five years of buying gadgets is genuinely novel.

The inventory, such as it is

• Work MacBook, an M1 from 2020. Four years old and still faster than anything I ask of it.
• A MacBook Air at home, doing the not-work half of my life.
• Nothing Phone (1), bought 22 July 2023. Seventeen months in.
• Nothing Ear (1), bought 29 September 2023. Still work perfectly.
• A NAS in the flat running Plex and a handful of other services.

That is the lot. The newest item on that list is fifteen months old. It is the most boring audit I have written and I have come round to thinking that is the point: at some stage this stuff stopped being a hobby that needed feeding and turned into infrastructure that works.

Still very happy with the Nothing Phone

Seventeen months in and I still like the interface, which is the bit I expected to tire of. It is simple in a way that phones mostly are not any more, and the simplicity has not curdled into limitation.

It is also doing two jobs. Work and personal live on separate profiles on the same handset, and it runs two SIMs, because I have been in Amsterdam for years and still have not given up my UK number. I suspect I never will. That number has been mine longer than some of my friendships.

Carrying one phone instead of two is the single best change I have made to how I work, and it was not a change I planned. I just bought a phone that could do it.

The annual Trello failure

Here is the one thing that did break this year, and it was me.

I tried to use Trello again. Set it up properly, boards for the right things, good intentions all round. It worked for a while and then it fizzled, exactly as it did the last time and the time before that. At some point I stopped opening it and did not notice I had stopped.

I am writing this on 29 December, which means I am three days away from deciding that next year I will really use Trello. I am aware of what that sentence is. It is a new year resolution with a login page.

The honest conclusion is that Trello is not the problem. Nine years of evidence says I am not a person who maintains a board, and the correct move is probably to stop buying the idea that one more attempt will take.

The accounts audit

The hardware held still this year and the accounts did all the moving. I went to Bluesky properly, which I have written about separately. And I think I got rid of Threads, though the fact that I am not certain rather makes the point about how much it mattered.

So: nothing to buy, nothing to fix, one habit to give up on honestly rather than fail at again in February. Not a bad place to end a year.

Timeline of Social Networks: From Orkut to Bluesky

Orkut (2004-2014): Launched by Google, Orkut was one of the first platforms to connect friends and communities online. It gained immense popularity in countries like Brazil and India before being discontinued in 2014. I think this was also the first network I used 8lettersuk as a username?

MySpace (2003-2011): MySpace was a pioneer of the customisable profile and of course the infamous music integration. It reigned as the most visited social network until Facebook surpassed it. Yes I had a profile no I have no idea what was on it now.

Facebook (2004-Present): Initially launched only for students, Facebook expanded to become the largest social network globally, integrating features like News Feeds, photo sharing, and groups. It all started though with farmville and pokes. Yes I still have an account. No I don’t want to talk about it.

Twitter (2006-2022): Known for its 140-character micro-blogging format and it’s fail whale, Twitter became a platform for real-time news, discussions, and global trends. It’s time is over though now it’s X and basically a propaganda machine.

LinkedIn (2003-Present): I guess this counts as another micro blogging platform just with a specific niche for companies and networking. LOL of course I have an account.

Instagram (2010-Present): Initially focused on photo sharing, Instagram introduced stories, reels, and shopping features, basically anything Meta thought it could use to kill off competition like snapchat. Yes I have an account. Yes I have issues with their overtly anti-LGBTQ moderation. No I will not elaborate.

Snapchat (2011-Present): Known initally for ephemeral content and AR filters, Snapchat changed how users interacted with disappearing stories and messages. Your Instagram stories exist because of Snap. Yes I had an account. No I was not the target audience.

Vine (2013-2017): Vine introduced looping 6-second videos and became a cultural phenomenon before shutting down. Its legacy influenced short-form video content on platforms like TikTok. Yes I also had an account.

TikTok (2016-Present): Originally launched as Douyin in China, TikTok gained worldwide popularity for its short-form videos powered by a highly engaging algorithm. It’s also attracted lots of hate in the US because (in my view) it is the only major network on the list that is not US owned and operated. This one kind of passed me by because I don’t really like video content without subtitles and most of the content is not really that.

Threads (2023-Present): Created by Meta and tied heavily to Instagram Threads emerged as a direct competitor to Twitter, aiming to merge visual content and text in a micro-blogging format. It suffers the same issues as Instagram and indeed all Meta properties in it’s moderation issues and LGBTQ suppression.

Bluesky (2021-Present): So this brings us to Bluesky which focuses on decentralisation. So here we go again? What is old is new again. Re-inventing the micro-blogging format but is it worth the effort?

I skipped over Mastadon (yes I started with it but it is still I think way too techy barrier to entry for most people) and I skipped over FourSquare which I loved and think I may still be the Mayor of some London places but meh they messed that whole thing up when they split it into two apps and lost focus on why people where using it. Anyway this is a shorter version of a list of of profiles i have online (https://8letters.co.uk/profiles/). I say this because well here I am extolling the virtues of yet another platform. BlueSky.

Why Bluesky Stands Out Among Micro-Blogging Platforms right now

If you’re looking for a fresh take on micro-blogging platforms, Bluesky might just be what you’re after. As someone who’s explored multiple platforms – including Twitter (or X if you insist) and Threads – I’ve found Bluesky to offer a better experience that deserves attention. You can find me sharing my insights and stories over at my profile 8letters.co.uk on Bluesky. Oh yeah it nicely allows you to use a domain as a username very easily (more details here https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial).

Decentralised Structure

One of Bluesky’s better features is its decentralised architecture. Unlike say Twitter, which is controlled by a single company person, Bluesky leverages the AT Protocol to create an ecosystem where users have more control over their data and experience. This approach promotes openness, innovation, and user autonomy, setting it apart from the closed ecosystems of its competitors.

A Cleaner, More Natural Timeline

The clutter-free timeline is another major advantage over some of it’s competitors. Bluesky’s design focuses on user-generated content, without the noise of excessive ads (although I am sure they will come) and losing the major algorithmic pushes seen on Twitter and Threads. This means your timeline will likely stay relevant and free from distractions, letting you engage with content that matters to you. At least that’s been my experience so far.

Community and Culture

Bluesky has managed to cultivate a unique and tight-knit community. Early adopters and creative individuals make up a significant portion of its user base (and we I guess can skip over the furries), which fosters an environment of genuine interaction and creativity. Unlike the polarised or heavily commercialised culture of Twitter, Bluesky feels more like a community where individual voices are valued.

Data Portability and Control

One major pain point with platforms like Threads and Twitter is the ‘locked-in’ nature of user data. Even in the EU with our data portability laws it’s kind of pointless to have my Twitter archive if there is nothing I can do with it. With Bluesky’s AT Protocol, data portability is not just a promise but a feature. Users can move their profiles and content between different services that use the protocol, giving them true ownership over their digital presence.

A Refreshing Alternative

For those tired of the ego-driven changes on Twitter or the brand-heavy feel of Threads, Bluesky offers a refreshing alternative. It’s a space that values quality interactions over quantity, allowing users to feel connected and heard.

15 Million and counting

With the exodus from other platforms and the natural network effects as a platform grows more an more people are using BlueSky (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/13/tech/x-musk-bluesky-users-post-election/index.html). More than a million joined this week alone (https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3larljiybf22v).

Check out my profile here to see more about my journey on yet another new platform.