Dubrovnik, Croatia | So many tourists

So many tourists 2nd May 2013 in Dubrovnik, Croatia

We caught a morning bus from Split to Dubrovnik. Along the way we had to pass through a corridor belonging to Bosnia and then, after a 20-minute stop-off, re-enter Croatia. When we arrived at the bus station a taxi driver speaking fluent English greeted us and drove us to the home we'd be staying at. I thought he was a random driver hired by the homeowner we were staying with but it turned out he was the homeowner.

The flat was nice. It was a lot more expensive than what we were paying for our place in Split but Dubrovnik seemed short on space given the amount of people visiting. My advise for any future trip to Croatia is that a lot of places in the country look alike so just find somewhere quiet and the cheap rents will follow.

Dubrovnik is a city of steps; there are very few streets that are flat for long. We found our way past a lot of construction down into the Old Town for dinner. Triin had found a restaurant online that had good reviews and we stopped by for a dinner there. The tables were along a backstreet with the cleanest white stone I've ever seen used as the key material in the streets and walls. The waiter said he'd studied wine and food at University and asked what we were going to eat before recommending drinks. I went against one of his recommendations and had a local beer with my steak. The steak was perfectly cooked, leaving plenty of moisture and as a result, flavour.

The only two problems I could see with Dubrovnik was the constant changes in elevation and the thousands of tourists which come off the cruise ships into the old town everyday. The woman who lived in the place where we were staying said sometimes six ships disembark passengers in a day and there can be 10,000 people suddenly entering the Old Town.

In Montenegro there were some points where I found myself looking through the viewfinder on my camera and I knew I was about to take a special shot. I again had that feeling when we were on top of a hill next to Dubrovnik. We had just finished our first-year anniversary dinner and were about to take the cable car back into town when we saw the sun setting over the sea. It was a really special moment and one of my favourite sunsets of the whole trip (the other being the purple sunset in Costa Rica).

The family we stayed with were really friendly. I learnt a few words of Croatian to meet and greet with them when we walked past their main door every day. Usually in the evening they were sat on the patio with drinks and I'd chat with them for fifteen minutes or so. The husband of the family had been a sailor for ten years and had seen a lot of the world. A lot of the jokes that I had about the events on our trip seem to translate well.

The homeowners were kind enough to drive us to the airport for free at the end of our stay. While driving, the husband pointed out where a lot of the fighting had occurred during their War for Independence in the 1990s. I told him we'd visited a lot of countries that hadn't been to war in a long time and looked in worse shape.

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The past ten years

Since 2002, I've worked as a PHP Developer, Python + Django / LAMP Developer, Technical Manager and Technology Director and Chief Technology Officer. I've worked in the UK, Canada, Germany, Estonia and India.

The work I did in Germany and India cannot be displayed to the public but a good portion of the work I've done for blue barracuda and Bloomberg New Energy Finance here in London can be. Below is an assortment of projects I've worked on over the past few years.

I've worked in a team in almost every project I've done so I've listed the tasks I performed in the captions of each screenshot. There are numerous occasions where I would share a task with another colleague or use an existing code base we've been managing and developing over the years. Left to it, I could have done most of it on my own.

To give you an idea of what I do and usually don't do:

I do: Django SEO CSS3 HTML5 photoshop ffmpeg PowerMTA JQuery
Bash Ningx ubuntu linux sphinx Redis Python mysql memcached
git CouchDB Gunicorn
I usually don't do: Flash .NET Java Drupal Joomla php Apache