Lunch with Mayflower

Since well before I joined MySQL in 2001, I have had contact with now-members of the four-headed management team of Germany’s top-notch PHP experts and solution providers Mayflower GmbH.

Mayflowers and MySQLers frequently pop into each other at PHP conferences and other Open Source events, and meet informally under various circumstances ranging from Christmas parties to Biergarten discussions. It’s always interesting to exchange thoughts on virtual companies, Open Source, business models, IRC, scrum, and finding developers (some of which have worked for both MySQL and Mayflower, incidentally). And by sheer coincidence, Mayflower’s Munich headquarters is now about 150 metres from where I live, in the same street that I look out at from my home office (Mannhardtstr.). This time, they copied us, though — I arrived first and they became neighbours several months later …

So you can imagine that I was happy last Friday when I had asked Johann-Peter Hartmann to come to celebrate life under the Sun “with a colleague or two”, and he brought in all three other members of the Mayflower leadership quadruplet: Albrecht Günther, Björn Schotte and Gregor Streng. We had miso soup and sashimi, with hot sake and green tea, at Jin’s Heaven Takumi another 200 metres towards Isartor. Delicious food, good drinks (they wondered I hadn’t brought along salmiak vodka) and entertaining discussions.

Looking forward to more of the same with Mayflower over the years to come!