Barcelona

race number This year I took part in the second Gran Fondo Barcelona. A Gran Fondo or Sportive is basically a large group ride with a given route, which shouldn't be competitive. The advantage is that you are often travelling on closed roads and there is some support in form of food stops and mechanical support. I already took part in the 2015 edition, so I knew a lot of the things that were expecting me. Registration was a lot better this time. It was situated on the top of Montjuic, not far from the Olympic stadium. This time it was held outdoors in a big tent, so it would have been possible to come with your bike. The whole process took only ten minutes or so. A minor problem was the availability of jerseys, my large version was too large and there were no more mediums available. But they are sorting this out now, so I will have my jersey to remember the ride with a good fit. As you were required to wear the official jersey on the day I just used the too large version. I don't think requiring these is a good idea. Cyclists are picky about their equipment and I probably would have chosen something a bit warmer. It also makes it impossible to recognise any friends you are riding with. Or yourself on the photos. Anyway - I got my race pack, which includes the jersey, arm warmers, some energy food and for some reason a pack of beef stock. sunrise This time I tried to prepare a bit better than the last time. On the night before I had a massive portion of spaghetti, more than I can usually fit in my belly. start Early rise on the day, shower a large muesli and packing energy bars and wind-stopper. It was pretty cold in the morning. Short ride up to the starting line on Montjuic. I guess there were maybe 600 riders all together. They had the usually horrible euro-techno sound-system and for some reason cheerleaders (!) stop From Montjuic we went along the coast to Sitges, where the first food stop was. I skipped that one to keep going a bit faster, but after a kilometre or so we all got stopped by the lead car and basically waited until everyone caught up. This would be a theme that would continue for most of the race. And when we were not stopping the car in front would drive so slow that everyone was riding in one big peloton. This made riding some narrow roads quite tricky. another stop I am not a fast rider, but for 120km I was able to see the "leader" in front of me and I even arrived just ten minutes behind him at the finish line. When they said "non-competitive" they really meant it. There was a mention of a minimum speed of 24km/h, but apparently they also enforced a maximum top speed of 30km/h. At some point we also lost the police escort for further delays. In the end I only used one food stop to refill my water, with the energy bars I had with me it was enough. I got away without a puncture too. medal But I managed to finish. The finish line is extra special with this Gran Fondo, because it is 10km away from the start, the medal and the pasta party. I heard from some people who didn't know this and so either were surprised by the additional climb or never picked up their medal. My average over the 138km was 28.88km/h I would really suggest to move start and finish to the same place. It doesn't have to be in the centre of Barcelona either, which probably would make it easier with space and permits. Overall I enjoyed myself, but I am not sure I would do it again next year. Compared with Gran Fondo Mussara, which I am doing in May it is just not as well organized. And most of the roads I am riding all the time anyway. It will be more for people who come from other cities and want to also enjoy Barcelona. In summary, the good parts: the route registration food stops police escort (they where very nice, skilled and helpful) the jersey (and replacing it with the correct size) food stops beef stock the bad: distance between finish line and pasta party + medal the medal is a bit boring "official" and "VIP" cars, they were in the way quite a bit slowing down the whole ride, so that really fast riders were probably bored random stops As I said: next sportive is Gran Fondo Mussara mid May near Reus, which will be much harder. Last year I gave up after 120km of 189km. This time I will be hopefully better prepared.

Today I gave a talk at WeLovePHP, which is a quarterly talk and workshop series organized by Softonic in Barcelona. They also do one about JavaScript. I can highly recommend them if you are interested in PHP, JavaScript or related topics. I talked about the processes and tools we are using at Splendia. There are no pictures in the slides … sorry.

I must admit that this post comes a bit late. As I have mentioned before, I have left Softonic last year. The main reason was that it was too difficult to change anything there and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. This might have changed by know. After Softonic I started at Splendia, where I am still at. Splendia is a hotel booking website focusing on luxury hotels. The company is much smaller than Softonic in every respect. What drew me in was that they replaced nearly the whole IT team and replaced it with a much more agile team using technologies and methodologies that are industry standards in most PHP companies. The team is also always open for changes to improve the speed of development. When we arrived the state of the code was pretty bad. How bad? Well, there were zero unit tests at the beginning of 2012 for example. By now we have a growing test suite, continuously run through Jenkins. We use github for code reviews, vagrant for workspace virtual machines, cucumber for functional tests, puppet for configuration management and composer to pull in various dependencies including symfony components, doctrine and pear libraries. I will post some more about how we use these in the future. Other nice perks: the computers are nice with two big screens, you get to install your choice OS as long as it runs vagrant. The office is located in the centre of Barcelona, which gives a better choice of restaurants and shops. I can also park my bike in the office, which allows me to commute every day now (more about this later too). There are some things I miss about Softonic though (besides the people there): the pretty office, Spanish classes, free coffee, snacks and the cafeteria for my tea time. Compared to Softonic the office hours at Splendia are also very rigid, which is annoying. Well, hopefully more soon…

moving on Pretty much exactly two years ago I started working for Softonic. I changed from the rather small opus5 to what has been the largest company I have worked for so far. Working in a company of about 250 people with a development team of around 80 people is certainly a different beast. I learned a lot of things especially regarding scrum management and web technologies. I also learned that it is very difficult to change things once something big like this is in motion. Size also brings nice things, Softonic offers a lot of "google-style" perks, like massages, conference trips, insurance, free fruits, sweets and soft drinks, a very nice office with chill-out room and great views. If you are interested have a look at: careers.softonic.com. It also means that you will always find someone interesting to talk to. But now it is time to move on. I am joining a smaller company with a new team, that I will write about in another post. I will stay in Barcelona though. I want to thank everyone I worked with at Softonic, especially the brilliant SD team, SEO, the leads, the UK content team (for tea time entertainment) and everyone I chatted to in these years.

Today I tried a restaurant which has been on my list for a while. Firstly because it is just one block away from my flat and second because it seems to be one of the few authentic Japanese restaurants in Barcelona. Can Kenji is located in an ugly tower block near Passeig de Sant Joan in the Eixample district. If you don’t know it is there it will be difficult to find. The restaurant itself is pretty small with just a handful of tables and a bar at the tiny kitchen. I took a seat at the bar with good view on the magic happening in the kitchen. I choose the medium tasting menu, which consisted of: a vegetable salad with soy sauce and razor clams, stir fried noodles with clams and mussels, a seared beef fillet, a selection of sushi and finally a ball of sesame ice cream. All together with a water for €17.40. This was the best lunch menu I had in my time in Barcelona. Every dish was fresh and I was able to watch while it was prepared. The sushi was the best bit, finally a nigiri with rice which didn’t taste three days old and fish which melts in your mouth. The stir fired noodles were also amazing. If I had to nitpick I would say the beef was a bit stringy and the ice too frozen, but I would take it again any time. You find the restaurant at C/Rossello 325, 08025 Barcelona and on-line at: www.cankenji.com .