On the 17th of July, with the sun shining over Cambridge, the Dreams AI team swapped desks for punts and took to the river Cam.
Punting is something of a Cambridge rite of passage. You glide past the colleges, under the bridges and along the Backs, steering a flat-bottomed boat with a long pole. It looks effortless when someone else is doing it, and considerably less so when it is your turn.
On the water
Some of us were seasoned punters, and some had never held a pole before. By the end of the day everyone had taken a turn, with mixed results. There were a few close encounters with the riverbank and one or two near-collisions with other boats, but happily nobody ended up in the Cam.
Iced drinks were passed around, sunglasses came out, and the conversation drifted happily from machine learning to whose punting technique was the worst (there was no clear winner).
“Same team, different kind of pipeline.”
Why we do it
We work hard at Dreams AI, and days like this matter. Spending time together away from deadlines builds the kind of trust and friendship that makes the hard problems easier to solve back in the office.
Thank you to everyone who came along and to our very patient guides. We are already looking forward to the next one.
