On Nov 12 and 13 this week I found myself drawn back into the land of corporations – a land full of meetings, conferences, esoteric experts, Powerpoint and vats of bad coffee. I attended the TechVision Research (TVR) inaugural technology conference in San Diego. I have some deep connections with TVR – part-time consultant for them, investor, and occasionally an author of technical advisory notes. I also led a panel discussion on the topic of analytics, something I still find fascinating.

After most of a year spending my time on non-technology things, these two days back in corporate-ville felt pretty strange. Familiar, but strange. Full of terms like hypervisors, elastic search, devops, APIs, workflows and microservices. They (we) speak a foreign language in the land of corporate technology. Fortunately I still understand that language but I found myself wondering “why?”. Why should I bother to stay up to date on this when I’ve pretty much left that land and focused on other aspects of life?

My reasons for making this journey back are pretty thin. One, it’s hard to break the habits of 30+ years. I’ve studied and evangelized digital technology my entire adult life, and it’s hard to leave it behind. Two, I am on the board of one technology company and invested in another, so there’s that. Third and finally, because I can. I get satisfaction from understanding how digital systems work, so an occasional refresher in that feels good.

I get so much satisfaction from digging into tech that I’ve often thought of dedicating another blog/website to observations on technology, but…that’s not the direction I want my life to go. I want more writing, more family and more self-improvement, not the deja vu satisfaction of technology cred.

Fortunately, this journey was a short one. I spent two short days in Corporate-ville, then I traveled back to a steady diet of KY basketball, reading, writing, travel, golf and plain old laying about. In other words, retirement.