What I am up to now

Updated 2025-02-16

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family

• So much traveling! We went to Hong Kong to visit Craig, Cristina, Gabri, and Mateo, with a brief stop in Japan since it is a short stop over. Neem and Logan went to Austin to visit family, and had two canceled trips as well, including one that was canceled while it was trying to land resulting in a long trip that ended up in the same airport (STL).
• Logan has been enjoying Cub Scouts, with a completed pinewood derby car to show for it as well as a lot of badges from the events we did last Autumn. We are both looking forward to hiking more in the Spring.
• As a family, we saw the Ambassadors of Harmony concert which was run by his former teacher, and Logan and I went to see How The Grinch Stole Christmas at the Fox Theater as well. Doing events like this are always a big investment in energy, time, and money, but still feel worth it.

🧑‍💻 Work

• I am still at OpsLevel. We recently launched UI Customization to much excitement, and I did most of the fighting for a widgetized layout that was well received.
• Not seeing my co-workers has been pretty draining emotionally, but I have come more to peace with it given how flexible the role is, both in terms of time as well as in the amount of latitude I am given to build what makes sense in this crazy start up world.

🍿 Media Consumption

• Star Trek: Voyager has been my comfort watch, but I probably watch one episode a month given how much I have been reading and watching of films that require more focus.
• I watched a 12 hour viewing of Lord of the Rings at the Hi-Pointe Theater with some friends which was really fun but also very long.

🎲 Games

• Rogue Legacy 2 is a good one that Logan enjoys watching me play, and it is scratching my desire for a Rogue-lite while still being easy enough that I am not stressed when I have to set it down to help with something.
• Despite St Lotus streaming slowing down, I have still been playing more Magic, and even got to play in a couple VRDs recently. My performance has not been where I want it to be, but it is still fun and I am trying to get myself more comfortable at doing things sub-optimally.

🎨 Creation

• Not much creation happening recently other than putting together some Lego sets (such as the Perseverance Rover) that I got for Christmas, but we are in the thick of family time, so much of my creation has been on bonds with family.
• While not really focusing on it, I still enjoy spending 30 seconds each morning improving my Latte Art. I am wildly inconsistent, but occasionally things work out the way they should. Most of my problem is that the time between creations is about 24 hours, so it is hard to remember what I am trying to improve.

🧠 Thinking About

• I had a surgery to improve my sinuses that went well, but I have a sleep study coming up that will likely diagnose me with sleep apnea as well. Getting old is tiring and I hope that focusing on my physical and mental health will pay dividends in forty years, even if it is annoying now.
• How to be a better husband. The more I learn about how my brain works, the more I am aware of the ways that I want to be more in control of how it functions. Like everyone, I look back at past me and realize the ways in which I have been just vaguely inconsiderate without intention. Similar to last quarter’s goal of focusing energy on time with children, I am thinking of ways to ensure that I can be more kind to Neem.

Updated 2024-09-02

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family

• We’ve made a tradition of going out for a meal together as a family on one day per weekend, and it has been a blast to see the kiddos grow into polite restaurant children even if they can still be monsters sometimes.
• Neem and I went to London for a trip to see Taylor Swift, but she was kind enough to let me see a bunch of historical sites as well. Stonehenge was a bore, but the inside of Parliament and Windsor were huge highlights. The concert was very cool as well, both from a vibes-aspect as well as the sheer technical achievement of it.

🧑‍💻 Work

• I am still at OpsLevel and having fun with lots of little learnings, such as drag-and-drop libraries. Still looking forward to the future, but it is nice to see technical investments that and re-organizations to support it.
• The biggest challenge has been trying to move quickly with experimental items (which is very fun) while also making sure they are built in a way to be supported by others, which is tricky given the lack of time to productionize them. It largely feels like being a sales engineer.

🍿 Media Consumption

• On family movie night, we have been watching Lego Masters Australia which I fully admit is not a movie, but I will not complain. I am also re-watching The West Wing as is a semi-yearly tradition.
• While we were in London, Neem and I spent most of the time reading books, which was delightful. The stand-out was a meditation on being disguised as a sci-fi novel.

🎲 Games

• Dave the Diver has been a fun game that is playable in small chunks and is great to play with the kiddos in the room. When they’re not around, I have found Cult of the Lamb to be a fun Binding of Isaac clone that is definitely not child-appropriate.
• Physical games have been tough to get to the table, but Spirit Island is a great one that and it’s been an easy one to play in 2-3 hours after kid bedtime

🎨 Creation

• We played another Vintage Rotisserie Draft and it was fun with less stress about making the stream perfect. I didn’t do great, but it was still relaxed. I’m trying to do some content afterwards.
• Despite not really knowing what I am doing with art at all, I have been playing around with making some pixel art. It is interesting to learn about how deep it goes, and I mostly just wish that I had the mental endurance to be able to tackle them after a full day of work. Context switching is hard!

🧠 Thinking About

• It is really hard to find the energy to do things after work and bedtime for the kids. It seems like there’s a narrow window where I have time to do side-projects but before I start winding down (since my brain goes buzz while I need to sleep if I write code after 10pm) and I can’t use it effectively.
• Spending quality time with the kiddos. Knowing that my phone will always be small but my children won’t be is incredibly true, but in the moments where I feel brain-dead or annoyed, it is hard to muster the self-control to still engage with them in the way they deserve.

Updated 2024-07-13

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family

• Our family is wonderful, with many trips to see the extended family (two to Austin and two to Chicago this quarter!) and it is wonderful to see the kiddos building great memories with their cousins.
• Logan has been riding his bike often, while Ororo is far more nervous around her trike, but is still a good sport because she wants to keep up with her brother. Neem has been venturing out more on family walks and it is good to be able to spend time outdoors as a family, including an aborted camping trip that got flash-flooded.
• Despite the ridiculousness of the situation, we all went to the UFL Championship Football Game hosted in STL.

🧑‍💻 Work

• I am still at OpsLevel and enjoying it. There is much more dreaming about the future and hoping that things are set up to make those dreams a possibility. Assuming that the company can deliver on some big initiatives that we are aiming for, it would be really cool to be able to help level up the product in a bunch of ways that we know we want to do.
• I have been spending more time doing back-end Rails work, which I really do not generally enjoy, but being able to help with stuff that needs to get done regardless of skill-set is a nice feeling.

🍿 Media Consumption

• Movie night is great, largely leaning more towards fun movies like Independence Day rather than hard-hitting dramas.
• I finished the last books of Octavia Butler’s, and can now confirm her as my favorite author. Parable of the Talents hit me really hard, and possibly due to the election, and possibly just due to being more in tune with my own mortality due to my children, it’s been in my thoughts a lot.

🎲 Games

• Traditional rogue-likes have been more in my focus recently, with Jupiter Hell being the most addictive. I am not at the point in my life when I can dive really deep into wikis or even into perfecting game-play, but it is a nice step back into challenge while allowing me to step out of the game if I need to handle the kids.
• The physical copy of Slay the Spire was a nice addition to my board game collection, as well as the first single-player board game that I had fun with.

🎨 Creation

• Vintage Rotisserie Draft went well this quarter, but I have put the quarterly cadence on a hiatus after over 5 years. We are still going to play the events, but trying to get the Twitch streaming working and not being able to audible if people cannot make it was just very stressful.
• Friends Builder was my first app release! While I enjoyed the experience of getting an app out there and able to be used, I feel like the end of the experience left me mostly disappointed in all the things I could not do rather than happy about having finished it. There is still plenty I could add to it, but the effort versus the benefit feels like it hard to justify.
• I am spending some time making a base for building traditional roguelikes (previously I was working on a much more ambitious project with a similar ethos called Splinter) that hopefully will let me prototype roguelike ideas much faster.

🧠 Thinking About

• How to stay focused on projects after the initial luster wears off. Whether it is a game I am making, a hobby, or even a video game that I want to play, I find that my lack of Grit has really been holding me back and I want to get better at it.
• Continuing my focus on time with the children, particularly Rory. It is easy to make sure to go on adventures with Logan because he wants to and gives me actual feedback afterwards, but it is equally important with Rory even though she is too little to be able to express herself.

Updated 2024-04-10

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family

• Our family is full of so much excitement and busyness. It feels like every day of the week we are getting the kiddos at five after their activities, getting dinner, and then rushing to bed. I wish I could be spending more chill time with them.
• Logan has taken to bike-riding like a fish to water after getting a big-kid bike for his fifth birthday. He followed his Uncle Tim’s training guide and is flying around parking lots. There are still some control issues that make me leery of sidewalks, but we are on our way.
• We had a wonderful journey out to Valier, IL to view the Solar Eclipse this year. My parents, sister with family, and brother came down to the home of my friend and we were able to see the eclipse from totality. It is truly breathtaking and a once-in-a-lifetime event that we have managed to see twice so far.

🧑‍💻 Work

• I hit my one-year anniversary at OpsLevel. It’s going well and the constant battle of what is worth doing to make the future easier is much harder to make decisions about when you’re a Series A start-up. Finding the trade-offs and defaulting to trying things with the assumption that a partial feature is better than a perfectly scalable feature is a new experience that still feels fun.
• Tech still feels like the right fit for now, but basically all of my interest is either in game-development (which isn’t tenable for financial reasons), or in other arenas. There is no itch for me to jump careers at the moment, and I don’t even feel like I am burnt out, but work has never felt more like a job. My default assumption is that this is largely driven by remote-culture, since I really struggle to self-fund my motivation and generally receive energy from others in the workplace.

🍿 Media Consumption

• Movie night is going strong, with the highest point for me being The Holdovers, but I have been making a point of watching all of the movies from Orphaned Entertainment as well, which has exposed me to many more old films that are largely not great, but are always interesting.
• Tons of books have been read, but nothing really stood out as incredible so far. GoodReads says that I have read 28 so far this year, but very few five stars. Some high school classics that I had never read did manage to break through however: Watership Down, and The Old Man and the Sea.

🎲 Games

• Marvel Snap is probably still my primary game at this point, which still carries the same feeling of obligation rather than true immersion that often comes in mobile games. I did fall deeply in love with the casual game Hardspace: Shipbreaker as well, and got all the trophies before setting it down.
• Lego has been a good time, both individually (doing a big Star Trek set) and working with Logan on it, since he likes the parallel play and doing a big set ”together”.

🎨 Creation

• I finished the series of YouTube Shorts for Vintage Rotisserie Draft, which was fun, but definitely burnt me out in the end. We have another big event coming up in May, so that will be a good time, but trying to get the daily content out is such a chore.
• I succumbed to temptation and threw together a game for the 7 Day RogueLike after saying that I probably would not do it. Ric-Rac-Rogue was a lot of fun to build, and even though people are in conflict over whether it is a roguelike, I still love it. I wish I had more time for it like always, but it is probably the one I feel I should be most proud of finishing.

🧠 Thinking About

• Due to weird health stuff with my sinuses, most of my time has been more about surviving than actually contemplating life. I look forward to having a healthy body that lets me go to bed without feeling completely exhausted, and hopefully by then, life will stay at the same slower pace where I can do things more mindfully.
• The biggest focus of my past quarter has been about being intentional with the kids. Finding a way to ensure that every night we do something together and that I am not just dropping them to their own things while I am on my phone near them, but instead spending time engaging with them has been my goal. This particularly matters with Rory, since she is little and it is much easier to play with Logan since he engages more.

Updated 2023-12-25

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family

• Everyone is back to relatively good health and we are exploring the world together. I’ve been trying to prioritize going outside with the kiddos more while we have the opportunity, which led us to going up in the Arch.
• One of the things I try to focus on with little kiddos is how to ensure that we don’t just get focused on the day to day, but can actually build traditions that they will remember. One of the biggest for me is cultural heritage, particularly around St Nicholas Day, where we put out wooden shoes and fill them with oranges and treats for the kids.
• For Christmas this year, we were separated from each other since Neem and Ororo hung back in St Louis, while Logan and I went to Grand Rapids to spend the holiday with my parents. It was so nice to share some of my holiday traditions with him, but also sad to miss Christmas with the girls.

🧑‍💻 Work

• I am working at OpsLevel, where it’s a pretty relaxed culture while still exposing me to enough new things that I am having a good time. Since we don’t have a lot of the other things I am used to, such as a design department a strong engineering culture of design-focus, it has been a fun journey trying to identify what things are actually useful to fight for, and what things are not needed yet. Series A start-ups are hard!
• The longer I spend doing front-end focused work in start-up culture, the more I wonder if I would be better suited to either diversify into a more generic skill-set (which would probably be better if I want to be a first-four engineer) or slide back towards Fortune 500 companies. It is hard to feel like you are helping your co-workers as much as you could be while still staying specialized.

🍿 Media Consumption

• Movies have still had a hold on my heart, with weekly movie nights which range from the silly with The Fly, to the serious with The Hustler.
• Reading snuck up on me, which I discovered when I realized that I have read seventy books this year. Some of the stand-outs were a biography of Lafayette, a leadership book, and one of the latest by Sanderson.

🎲 Games

• I have largely been spending my time gaming on casual mobile games, such as Marvel Snap and Pokemon Go. Although I have done well with them, they alternate between boredom-fillers and chores. I look forward to the kiddos being old enough to spend more time without direct involvement so I can play games that require more continual focus, but I genuinely love that I am choosing to spend my time focusing on them instead of trying to play games.
• Table-top role playing games are even more of a time commitment, but I recently ran a holiday one-off that was fun because it was low-stakes and let me still get a little invested with a group of friends.

🎨 Creation

• My free time creating has been largely focused on St Lotus this quarter. Not only did I play in an event in Chicago (where we soundly defeated them), but I also ran another event in St Louis. On top of all of that, I have started creating YouTube Shorts in consumable one minute videos talking about Vintage Rotisserie Draft which has recaptured some of the fun for it for me.
• Since I know that the next 7 Day RogueLike is happening in March, I’ve been toying around with a framework for making a traditional roguelike. It’s still more chore than fun at this point, but my hope is that if I get it to a useable state, it will make the game development during the game-jam more focused on mechanics and fun than on rote-coding.

🧠 Thinking About

• How to keep energy more consistent with the kids. I love that I can spend time with them and devote my life to making theirs as good as I can, but in my worst moments, I know that I am being dismissive. I don’t want to flood them with affection one moment and stand-off the next, so I’m thinking of ways to remind them that I love them even when I can’t deal with them in those moments.
• What work means when it isn’t something I want to be the focal point for my life. I still care about helping others, but it isn’t something that I want to spend the majority of my waking day thinking about, and finding a way to accept that it likely means letting some aspirations go is a thing I am dealing with.

Updated 2023-08-06

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family

• Our family has had a lot of sickness, but nothing critical. As I write this, I am on antibiotics and steroids for some kind of tonsil infection, Logan is on antibiotics for strep, and Rory is on antibiotics for an ear infection. Neem is healthy as a change of pace.
• Rory loves exploring and has been insistent on having books read to her, which is adorable. Her favorite is The Itsy Bitsy Pumpkin.

Updated 2023-08-06

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family

• Rory is getting bigger by the day. She loves eating more than any kid I’ve seen, and she just took her first steps at 13 months.
• Logan is so full of love and excitement. He is really proud of biking on his balance bike and he loves giving advice on how to best play Slay the Spire.
• Neem is still loving her job and is doing her best to live in the moment. It has been amazing for us to take trips, some together and some separate which have helped us remember that work isn’t everything.

Updated 2023-02-13

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family

• Logan has been in “Magic Class” which means that we are seeing lots of cute magic tricks, like 3-Card Monte.
• Rory is pulling herself up on furniture and is eating up a storm. She loves calling Logan “bra-bra” and getting tossed in the air.
• Neem is happy at work, but has been going through a lot of breathing difficulties including a partially collapsed lung and four cases of bronchitis this year so far.

Updated 2023-02-13

Updated 2022-11-21