Ten years away, and it felt like I never left
Ten years is a long time to stay away from a place that gave you your name.
I moved to Sydney in 2014, fresh into a role at Jamf, and quickly learned that Australians give everyone a nickname whether they ask for one or not. Kitzy was the obvious one for my last name. Somewhere in those first few months around the Australian Mac admin community, it stopped being a nickname and became the only name I answer to. It felt comfortable the way my given name never did, and before long it became my identity.
I hadn’t set foot in X World since 2016. I actually tried the following year, but a family emergency meant turning around and booking a flight home before I got anywhere near the conference. Ten years of near-misses and good intentions later, I finally made it back this week, and it undid the distance in about the time it took to walk into the venue.
The place that named me
There’s a specific kind of disorientation in being away from a community for a decade. You brace for it to feel like visiting somewhere you used to live, familiar but removed, like touring your own history instead of living in it.
That’s not what happened.
I walked in and it was just Tuesday. Same warmth, same willingness to pull up a chair, same total lack of ceremony about the fact that I hadn’t been in the room in ten years. Nobody made me explain the gap. Nobody treated me like a returning guest. I was just back, the way you’re just back from being out of town, not the way you’re back from being gone for decade.
I don’t fully know how to explain that to anyone who wasn’t there. Maybe it’s that this community was never really about proximity in the first place. I’ve been on the other side of the world for most of the last decade, and it never actually let go of me. Maybe good communities just work that way - less like a place you have to keep visiting to stay part of, more like a place that keeps a seat open regardless.
Old friends, new ones, and the same hallway energy
I spent most of the week doing the thing that’s the whole point of conferences like this: catching up with people I hadn’t talked to in years, and meeting people I’d only ever seen as an avatar in a Slack sidebar. Both felt like the same amount of good.
The old friends picked up conversations mid-sentence, like the last ten years were a commercial break. The new ones already knew who I was before I said a word. Half of them joined the community after I’d already left the country, and picked up who I was secondhand, through stories that stuck around longer than I did. Meeting people who already knew of me and catching up with people who never stopped knowing me, in the same room, in the same week. That was a good way to spend it.
Rambling about configuration as code
I also got to talk, a lot, about the stuff I can’t stop thinking about lately: managing devices as code, and what AI-accelerated device management looks like once you stop treating it as a buzzword and start treating it as a workflow. I know I ramble when I’m excited about something. I know my sessions run long and go on tangents. If you sat through one of mine this week and stuck around anyway, thank you. Genuinely. Enthusiasm is a lot more fun when someone’s in the room catching it with you.
Thank you, AUC
None of this week happens without Tony Gray and the rest of the AUC keeping X World alive, year after year, in an industry that isn’t always kind to community-run conferences. Running something like this for this long takes a kind of stubborn generosity that doesn’t get thanked enough. So: thank you. For the conference, and for giving a whole community somewhere to keep showing up to.
Thank you, Fleet
And thank you to Fleet, for sponsoring the conference and for sending me to represent the company on top of it. Getting to bring my employer into a room full of people who shaped who I am, and getting paid to do it, is not something I take for granted.
I hope it’s not another ten years
I let this stretch to ten years, one aborted attempt included, telling myself every year I’d get around to it properly. I’m not doing that again. I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back, but I know I’m not going to wait until 2036.
Thank you, Melbourne. Thank you, Australia. I’ll see you sooner than last time.