As The World Turns

The PineTime Chatroom is busiest between midnight and 6 am (Singapore Time)… When I’m deep in sleep.

My phone lights up late at night to remind me that people are talking about me. I resist the kaypoh urge to reach for my phone and check the messages. Because if I do that… I won’t be able to fall asleep again.

When I get up at 7 am, the chatroom will be totally quiet.

Between breakfast and lunch, it’s just me plus a handful of Australians on Discord. I’ll switch into “Hitchhiker Mode” and spout out random facts to amuse and educate us… What is CMSIS-DAP? Could one of us be Google Meena? How do Chinese folks decide which auspicious day of the Chinese New Year to start working? (Depends on their Chinese zodiac)

After lunch the Eastern Europeans will join us via Telegram.

Sometimes I’ll be chatting with a Russian university student… Asking me for tips to spice up his IoT special interest club.

By dinner time the rest of Europe will slowly join us on Matrix and IRC. I’ll poke fun at BBC micro:bit with the UK blokes… How it runs on Arm’s mbed OS but doesn’t really support multitasking… How it keeps crashing because Static TypeScript runs out of memory.

Sometimes I’ll be chatting with a UX designer from Italy (Home of Arduino!) To reassure him that he should focus on creating the best watch UX possible… While the rest of us techies scramble to figure out how to implement this.

By midnight I’ll be exhausted from the intellectual discourse as the Americans start trickling in. And I’ll wake up in the morning wondering if we have agreed on anything overnight.

Maybe we need more Asians on board to keep the discussions alive overnight and into the morning. So that I can quickly catch up on the discussions. Or shall I shift my body clock to sync up with the Europeans and Americans? (I’ll miss the friendly Aussies) Hmmm…

But it’s utterly fascinating to watch humans around the world collaborate in this peculiar pattern… Feels like watching a BBC animal documentary!