December 2024 Newsletter
Message from the co-ordinators
You may notice this newsletter is coming out slightly earlier than the usual schedule, we were keen to have one final push on advertising for the London Winter Party! With just a few days left for sign-ups, this really is your last chance to get a ticket to join THE most exciting party of the year*. We, the co-ordinators, are looking forward to this opportunity to connect with so many different people who have worked at Metaswitch (/Data Connection/Microsoft) over the past however many years! Not to mention the opportunity to get competitive over bowling - we know how much Metaswitchers love a bit of competition!
*probably.
London Winter Party
The deadline for signing up is this Monday 2nd December as we need to submit pre-orders after that so this is your absolute final chance to get a ticket! You’ll find all the information you need at https://withjoy.com/metaswitchalumniwinterparty but TLDR;
Fill out this form: https://forms.gle/ha2hnf9ivvqfmDoz5
Send money to: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/MetaswitchAlumni
Local Upcoming Events
Cambridge
Cambridge are still having relatively regular meetups (just not organising them with much warning!), check out the #cambridge-events channel on Discord to see what’s going on.
Edinburgh
December meet-up
Edinburgh is having it’s very own Winter Party on Saturday 30th November, from 7pm onwards at the Slug & Lettuce on George Street. Ticket sales for this event have now closed but if you’re desperate to come along, drop Kathryn McClain or James McDougall a message and we’ll see what we can do!
Enfield/London
A reminder that there are regular lunchtime sports still going on in Enfield. Check out the #enfield-london-sports channel on Discord if you’re interested. All abilities welcome and you don’t need to be a MSFT employee to come along!
Things you can get involved with
Get yourself a ticket to the London Winter Party! And while you’re at it, gather your friends and make sure they get their tickets too, all the details you need are at https://withjoy.com/metaswitchalumniwinterparty.
We’re looking for a new local meetup rep for the London and/or Enfield areas so if you’re interested in helping ensure regular alumni meetups happen in this area, get in touch!
Subscribe to this newsletter so that you don’t miss out on future editions!
Please share this newsletter with friends and (former) teammates to ensure no-one misses out on news over the coming months!
Events round up
Cambridge
The Cambridge meetup at the Haymakers was well attended with about 12 peeps in total, with both AFO and an exciting mix of other communications software companies now represented by the attendees. At one point we had enough people to need to spill over two tables! Almost all of the crew made it to the Haymakers without any navigational incidents. Conversation was briefly disrupted at 7.30 when the band started to play, fortunately we were eventually able to relocate to a quieter part of the pub. Many classic topics were discussed, including the end of Capitalism, whether Star Wars is Fantasy, and The Rumour. Around 10pm, as the last stragglers were leaving, Tom suddenly remembered his promise to provide a photo of the evening - the following is the result.
Thanks to Huw (and not Twm) for organising.
Edinburgh
The November Edinburgh meet-up was held on Thursday 7th November at the Pear Tree. It was good to see such a great mix from over the years!
Midlands
The latest meet-up in Coventry was a lunch on Tuesday 26th November:
“We had an early christmas dinner get together with the folk in the midlands office, at the traditional venue (the millpool). Everyone ate a bit too much, as should be expected at christmas. It was tasty”
Updates from the community
Job updates
There have been a huge flurry of job updates shared in the Discord channel lately including:
Martin Howarth starting as a lead software engineer at Flexciton
Jamie Parsons starting as a squad lead/people manager at Kraken
Philip Hannay starting at MIS Emergency systems
Peter Brown starting at Transaction Network Services
David Parker starting as a DevOps Engineer at Mulvaney Capital later in December
Andrew Robinson-Hodges starting at Snyk
Alex Hockey starting at Evroc (along with Belle Atkins and Andrew Lee)
Richard Whitehouse starting at Jane Street Capital
Huw Smithson starting at AST SpaceMobile (along with Ant Hayward)
Hassan Barakat starting as a software engineer at Deliveroo
Keep sharing your updates, we love hearing where everyone is moving to!!
Other updates
This year’s Scoff Movember fundraiser was the Mo Row. On 2 rowing machines we borrowed from a nearby gym, we set off to row the distance from the Edinburgh office to the Enfield office, raising over $1700 for the men’s mental health and cancer charity (not including donation matching which we estimate increased this amount to ~£5000). We quickly learnt that rowing 1 mile is much harder than it sounds. 15 head to head races later, we saw Rob Halls crowned the fastest rower and, as sweepstake winner, Al Mitchell one fetching Movember hat richer (still to be collected so no photo yet I’m afraid).
At around 12:30 on Friday 29th we reached our target, mooring up at Genotin Road courtesy of a 2.5 hour stint from Graham Kelley to get us the final 19 miles. This was a great effort from all involved, be they the folks who donated, rowed or matched donations. Thanks to everyone who participated in any way!
If you have any updates that you’d like to be included in the next newsletter then email metaswitchalumni@substack.com or message Alice Walker on Discord! There’s also a #job-and-life-updates channel on Discord if you want a more low-key way of sharing news and keeping up with others.