I wasn’t quite sure if I should put this post on this blog or my personal one, but since it is about two people who have been important in my life as well as being involved in open source I figured I’d put it here.

When I was in Zürich for NixCon I decided to stay a couple of extra days to meet up with some friends. The first person was Alex Finger. I met Alex in 2005 when he worked for Swisscom.

When young companies get started, especially ours, there was always that one customer who was a little more invested, a little more involved, than the others. For us that first company was Rackspace, and then it was Swisscom, and Alex was our main champion there. It was to visit Swisscom in Geneva that I made my first trip to Switzerland.

I consider Alex a friend (when his family came to visit the US we were lucky enough to get to host them for a few days) and a lot has changed in twenty years.

For one thing our hair is a bit grayer. (grin)

It was nice to catch up, and our lunch seemed to fly by. Alex is the CTO of SAP/Switzerland and so he actually had meetings in the afternoon, but we got to talk about how lucky we are to still be having fun with technology even after two decades.

For my next meeting I ended up taking a train so I could visit another country.

I like international travel and as of now, including the US, I’ve been in forty-four countries. The most recent was Liechtenstein, which I noticed was just an hour train ride from Zürich.

I ended up reaching out to my friend Kaj Arnö, the Chairman of the MariaDB Foundation Board, and he agreed to meet me in Vaduz. While I mainly wanted to spend time with Kaj (we have great conversations) I also wanted to mark another country off of my list.

Unlike the US, Europe has a functioning train network and I could take an express train from Zürich to Sargans in about an hour. Then it was a relatively quick Uber ride to Vaduz.

Liechtenstein is very closely tied to Switzerland, and the national currency is the Swiss Franc. The only way I knew I had crossed over into another country was the flag on the bridge over the river (Swiss on one side, Liechtensteiner on the other).

Although the evening was rather gray, the views from the train were amazing (you travel along two alpine lakes, Zürich and Walensee) and the scenery didn’t stop once I got to Vaduz. Kaj and I spent a couple of hours wandering around under the watchful eye of Vaduz Castle.

I’m very happy I made the journey, and in order to maximize my time with Kaj I cut it close to get the last express train back to the city. That is when I found out that Uber doesn’t operate in Liechtenstein.

Ooops.

So we scrambled to get a taxi for me and I ended up missing my train by about ten minutes, but I was able to get on a slower train (more stops) a few minutes later.

I really enjoyed this trip (well, except for the trip home) and I hope to return in the near future, if not to the area at least somewhere I can spend time with Alex and Kaj.