Where I've Been: Moving Three Dogs to Thailand

A month off the newsletter, an international move, and what's next for my client work.

If you’ve been wondering where the weekly posts went, fair question. Many of you know me personally, so you may have already heard bits of this. For everyone else, here’s why it’s been just over a month of silence: I moved my life, my work, and my three dogs across the world to Thailand.

I’ll be back on the weekly cadence starting now. But first, the story.

Moving three dogs across the world

Moving one dog internationally is a project. Moving three is a program with dependencies, hard deadlines, and zero tolerance for failure. And like any good program, ours hit a late-breaking change request.

Days before departure, a heatwave in Europe forced us to change the dogs’ entire flight path. Instead of routing through the EU on a cargo plane, they would fly through Qatar. What first felt like a scramble turned out to be the best thing that happened to the move. On the Qatar route, the dogs flew on a passenger aircraft instead of a cargo plane. And because I’ve had great experiences passing through Doha before, I booked my own ticket on the same flight as the dogs. They were scheduled for a long layover in Doha, and the timing worked out so well that I was able to book a hotel room inside the terminal and rest while they did.

Once we landed in Bangkok, I cleared immigration and met up with my fiancée. We had coordinated a mini bus from our local village to help us pick up the dogs from the pet transport company, and we spent the night at one of our favorite Bangkok hotels, which happens to be very dog friendly. After a night of rest, we loaded up the van and began the 11 hour drive home.

In total, the dogs traveled around the world for over 50 hours. They did an amazing job, and they’re settling in great at our home in rural northeast Thailand.

Getting settled

As many of you know, Thailand isn’t new to me. I’ve been traveling back and forth for over two years, so this move wasn’t a leap into the unknown. It was making permanent a life we had already been building. The workspace was ready, the internet has always been rock solid, and the routines were waiting for us.

What two years of splitting time already taught me is that the time difference is a feature, not a bug. I do deep work all day while the US sleeps, and clients wake up to finished work. After thirty years in this industry, I’ve never had fewer meetings interrupt my focus time.

Officially open for client work with Skyform

The move also marks a milestone I’ve been building toward: I’m officially taking on client work through Skyform.

I’ve started work with my first client engagement and I’m looking to take on a few additional ones. Many of you have worked with me before, so you already know how I operate. For everyone else: I care about AI and cloud architecture that actually ships, built on three decades of watching what works and what quietly falls over in production. That’s the work Skyform does: helping teams design, build, and harden AI and cloud systems without the hype tax.

Here’s my ask. If your team could use that kind of help, or if you know someone whose team could, reach out or pass along my info: darin@skyform.com or skyform.io. A warm introduction from someone who has worked with me is worth more than any marketing I could ever do.

Back to your regularly scheduled signal

The weekly posts resume this week. The industry didn’t slow down while I was in transit. If anything, the backlog of things worth writing about got deeper. More soon.

Darin