This week, ten years ago, I was in London for MySQL AB‘s first “train the trainer” course, also meeting (for the first time) my first boss at MySQL Kaj. I’d been hired mid August as employee#25, also doing training but actually primarily as tech-writer for the MySQL documentation (taking over from Jeremy Cole, and essentially I was the documentation team for quite some time . So from this you can deduce that yes, I was hired without meeting either Kaj or anyone in-person! I don’t think we even had a phone call, only email. Oh the days

The training week itself was of course disrupted quite a bit by the events in New York. We had Jeremy who had come on a UA flight from the US, and others from all over the place… it also taught …

If you'd like to follow shorter scribbles of what I get up to, like my work at Open Query, OurDelta and of course the BlueHackers initiative, I've got myself organised at http://twitter.com/arjenlentz or http://identi.ca/arjenlentz (you can pick one, they have the same feed).

This little project is quickly growing into a pretty big movement, the response at and after Linux.conf.au in Hobart was tremendous! Ah sorry, should tell what this is all about eh!

Well, many among us have dealt with or are struggling with depression and related hassles. It's not because we're geeks, but because we're all human. However, in our line of work we may have particular non-optimal work environments: working inside, lack of movement, lack of daylight. Also many companies are pretty high stress through understaffing, short deadlines, ad-hoc management and the like.

Also, one of the key issues with depression is the feeling of being alone, and it's not something that commonly gets talked about. That of course doesn't help people cope and recover.

While there are many excellent sites and organisations that provide help, BlueHackers acts as a …