u/zetret

A big part of technical roles at large companies is being asked to build “eminence”: represent the company externally, present at conferences, teach workshops, engage with clients, and show that the company has real experts behind the products.

But now there’s a new international travel restriction saying travel should be limited to “essential” only. The examples of essential travel are things like directly billable client delivery, client-required workshops tied to active deals or revenue commitments, late-stage sales pursuits, or critical client support. It also says internal meetings, conferences, training, strategy sessions, or relationship-building visits should be deferred or moved virtual where possible.

Here’s the gray area: what if you’re accepted to present at an external client-facing industry conference, and paying clients have signed up for your technical workshops?

In my case, these are multi-hour technical sessions for a customer and partner audience, not an internal meeting or casual networking trip. The sessions support product enablement, customer engagement, and the broader ecosystem around the platform. But because it is attached to a “conference,” it may still be viewed as discretionary travel.

I understand the safety and cost concerns, especially with unpredictable international air travel. But I’m struggling with where the line is drawn. If external technical presence is part of the job, and clients are attending specifically for that content, shouldn’t that be treated differently from internal conference travel?

Curious how others are handling this. Are your companies still allowing exceptions for external speaking engagements and client-facing workshops, or is all conference travel basically frozen now?

There seem to be many variations. If someone can point to the best edition that will last a while, that would be helpful. For a toddler aged 3.5 but of course he'll read more as he gets older.
Or are there any other (Indian) books you'd recommend?

In less than three years, Chinese tech giant Alibaba has become a dominant force in open-source AI. Its Qwen series has surpassed 1 billion cumulative downloads and spawned more than 200,000 derivative models, making it the world’s most popular open-source model family. Its appeal reaches well beyond China. Airbnb has said it relies heavily on Qwen for its AI customer-service agent, citing the quality and low cost, and Pinterest uses Qwen to analyze visual content and generate contextual text for pins. Alibaba is now trying to turn its open-model lead into a full-stack AI empire. The company is scaling its already expansive cloud computing infrastructure, making its own AI chips and consumer applications, and selling agentic, hosted versions of its models to enterprise clients. "Over the next five years, our goal is to surpass $100 billion in combined cloud and AI external revenue," CEO Eddie Wu told analysts on a recent earnings call.

Thank you. Any other logistics I should think of? I really like Miele there but not sure if it'll work on US electric but also if it's bringable in a luggage. Just an example.
Are there other products like that? Thank you!
Good apparel (men and women) is also of interest.