With the impending releases of Geobank 2018 and Geobank Mobile 2018 a key part of my role as Product Strategy Manager is to get out to the regions and ensure that our staff and clients are aware of the changes that are coming in this release and planned development over the next year or so. Recently I was in Kazakhstan and Russia to meet with the local teams and some key clients in the region to do just this and it was a great trip.
I started in Kazakhstan, a new stamp in my passport, landing in Almaty early on a very cold Tuesday morning. Living in Western Australia you just aren’t prepared for -10 and 20cm of snow so it was a bit of a shock to the system but the city is really nice. It was cloudy the first few days I was there but that cleared towards the end of the week and the mountains to the north are spectacular, more on them later.
The plan for Kazakhstan was to meet the team and talk all things Geobank. We have a medium sized team in Almaty that is responsible for the Central Asian region (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, led by Erick, our Regional Manager. The Almaty team includes a core group of Micromine developers as well so it was great to meet them as well:
As well as meetings in the office with staff and clients I was able to get out for dinner with the team one evening to a cool Che Guevara themed bar:
We also got up into the mountains a few times, the first for dinner at a traditional Kazakh restaurant where I tried Horse meat (once is enough) and the second time we managed to fit in an afternoon skiing on the surprisingly well appointed (and cheap) ski fields 20 mins from the CBD. The view at the top of the high peaks with glaciers cascading down was amazing. I am not a regular skier but I managed to get myself down the mountain without too many issues, bruises or broken pride:
On the Saturday I travelled to Moscow and it seemed as though the weather was following me as the snow was coming down hard as we landed and the city looked as pretty as a picture from my (warm) hotel room:
I had a rest day Sunday and even though it was freezing cold outside I didn’t want to waste the day so I rugged up and took a walk around Red Square and the Kremlin which was amazing. I just had to keep ducking into shops and cafes to warm up:
Monday was back to work though and our local Geobank development team lead, Pavel, was good enough to meet me in the morning and help me navigate the Moscow Metro system to the office. Moscow is a strange city. In many ways it is very familiar, the architecture and people look European and you could be in Paris or London except all of the signs are in Cyrillic and it can be really hard to navigate around. Fortunately the Metro has some signs in English and being a Geologist I only need to be shown the way once 😊.
The aim of the week in Moscow was to work with the local Geobank development team. We have been building this team up over the last 12 months so this was an opportunity to meet our newer developers (Nikita, Dmitry and Igor) as well as catch up with Pavel and Taras and the sales and support team. The Moscow office is a really strong team with a great office culture, they are all genuinely friends and hang out all the time together. Wednesdays a group of them play Volleyball at a local school gym and I was invited to join them. It was great fun though they do take it seriously and I’m pretty sure some of the Russian being directed at me wasn’t printable but I think I managed to not embarrass myself too badly. Thursday was flyout day but it was a late flight and the team had planned to go ice skating in a local park that night so I figured why not join them. Again ice skating isn’t something you get a lot of training for in Perth but I was able to stay upright most of the evening and we had a good laugh. That is till Max (Micromine scripter) took a tumble and managed to cut his head open requiring some stitches, he is Ok and was in good spirits afterwards.
Once Max was fixed up Pavel and Taras kindly drove me to the airport and then it was the long trek home. All up it was a great trip to Almaty and Moscow and I am looking forward to going again (though next time I’ll try summer 😊).
Thanks for reading and below you’ll find more pictures from the trip:
