Michael Heap is a developer who works at Datasift. On Thursday January 28th 2016 Michael flew from London Heathrow to Brussels to attend the PHPBenelux Conference 2016. Unfortunately he forgot his laptop on the plane.

While driving Michael to the airport, I decided to ask him a couple of questions and that resulted in a nice conversation.

Michael Heap’s reasons for traveling to Belgium

We talked about Datasift and the big data problems they try to solve with their product. Michael had 2 reasons to travel to Belgium: PHPBenelux & FOSDEM. PHPBenelux is on Friday and Saturday whereas FOSDEM is on Saturday and Sunday. He had talks at both event and had a total of 3 talks to present.

Miles and points

I asked Michael why he flew instead of taking the Eurostar. His answer put a smile on my face:

I used Avios

It is not secret that I’m big fan of air miles and hotel points. I even do presentations about it. Here’s a video of me doing my “Developers Travel In Style” presentation at Devs Love Bacon in London in 2013.

We spent the majority of the time talking about Avios, British Airways, Heathrow Terminal 5, Hilton Honors, SPG and Uber.

I could literally spend days talking about this!

The video footage

The video was recorded in the car, hence the background noise. However, I didn’t record the audio with the built-in microphone from the camera. I used lavalier microphones instead. The audio quality is quite reasonable.

In case you wonder: I’m driving on the E19 from Edegem in the direction of Brussels.

Podcast

For the podcast fans out there: I also put the audio on my Soundcloud channel. My channel is even aggregated on iTunes.

Thank you Michael Heap

Thanks to Michael for the interview, I’m glad he got his laptop back and I’m equally glad he agreed to this interview.