Traveling long distances
There's something magical about traveling across a long distance. Especially when you're a passenger on a ship or a train, and when the trip is long enough to require sleeping during the trip. Knowing that there are staff who work while I'm sleeping, staying in a cabin or compartment, hearing noise from the vehicle, feeling the vibrations and slight changes in speed, and waking up to a sunrise in a new location with a long distance behind me.
A contributing factor to that feeling is the reenactment of being a traveler in a distant time. The romanticized image of being an explorer traveling to a new location, being far away from home, out on an adventure.
If I had the opportunity to pursue another career, there are multiple things I would like to do, and one of them is working with cargo ships in some capacity. I find it fascinating with the distribution, planning and shipping of goods across the globe. It could be hands-on work on a vessel, or the management and planning of the transportation – both I find compelling.
The closest I have come to working on a ship was once when I worked as a contractor at Consilium. Consilium makes fire detection systems, and their fire detectors are especially popular within the marine industry on cruise ships, cargo ships and oil rigs. I helped to maintain a piece of software for their fire detection system, and once I was invited on a ship to debug a bug that had been observed. I drove from Gothenburg to a port outside Copenhagen and went onboard together with a colleague on a ferry that was doing its test sailings before it opened up to customers. I got to sit and work in the engine room and on the bridge, eat with the staff and sleep in a cabin during the night. Eventually we came back to Copenhagen the following day and I drove back to Gothenburg.
Within programming, one of the aspects I like is the infrastructure angle. I think it's fun to set up a well-working server and CI/CD-pipeline. I like what Docker's logo symbolizes – the whale that ships standardized containers. There's something satisfying about maintaining and improving the mechanisms for developing and delivering software. There's a parallel between Docker's software containers and real-world containers, which is why I find shipping actual containers intriguing.
When traveling on a ship, I like to look at ships around us and identify them on an online vessel tracker. There's so much food for imagination when reading about the country flag it sails under, the type of cargo it transports, the ports it's traveling between, the construction year, and more.
What I also like about traveling far by train or ship is the thought of being far away from home and not easily being able to get back. Sure, there usually are airplanes as well to choose from. But still, there's something thrilling in the thought of being out on an adventure far away from home time-wise. If I want to go home, it's one or more days worth of travel to get back.