What I am up to now
This is a ”now page“, and you should make one too.
Updated 2025-07-29
👨👩👧👦 Family
- Our family has been on several trips together this summer, including two trips to Michigan where the kids got to see their grandparents and some cousins at Dutch Village, a Dutch-themed amusement park that was a core memory of my childhood.
- Our nuclear family went to Kansas City with no agenda, and it was a reminder that low-stakes road trips are really my favorite. It can be wonderful to visit with others, but the people I love most are often the ones I take for granted, and it is just wonderful to spend time together when we are not trying to rush to something in particular. We spent almost three hours in Level One, a local board game shop just showing each other things we liked.
- Neem went to Italy on a cheese trip and also took her regular Mother’s Day weekend in a hotel. I went on a couple trips with friends without her or the kids. All of these trips without each other were really nice to remember why I like her enough to miss her. It can be hard to both work in the same place that you live together all the time, regardless of how much you love each other!
🧑💻 Work
- Maestro QA is going well and I have two work trips scheduled, which is more than what I did in my entire last two years at my previous company. It is really hard starting at a new company without knowing anyone, but things are going well even though I am doing more infrastructure and architecture work than I anticipated.
- Some of the struggles with chaotic start-ups are hitting me, but it is largely just the lack of clear direction on what I need to be doing given that there is so much opportunity to choose my own adventure there. I am looking forward to doing more customer-facing features soon.
🍿 Media Consumption
- Lots of movies as always, includingSuperman, which was a delightfully campy romp, but the stand-out wasFantastic Mr Fox, which is shocking because I find Wes Anderson to be fairly yawn-worthy most of the time.
- Now fully caught up on theDungeon Crawler Carl series, I am kinda bummed that I have to wait for the next one until 2026. They are violent, offensive, and downright silly, but they have kept my interest and excitement like no series since Bobiverse. Having a break from them has let me start digging back into Sanderson, who has more books than a human could expect to read in a decade.
🎲 Games
- In the past two months, I have gone on three board game trips. One to Las Vegas for some light gambling, one to Geekway for four days of complicated board games, and one to BenCon at the Gamers Ranch.
- In video game world, I have mostly logged hours into Shogun Showdown, where I completed all of the achievements other than one, which would take at least 100 hours more to get, so I will probably take a break from that for a while.
🎨 Creation
- Not much has been happening for my creative outlets recently since most of my energy has been driving into work and family obligations. It was pretty disheartening to have my five week gap in work basically get eaten alive by acts of god that knocked kids out of school, but at least it is a good reason to not feel mad at myself about not getting a game out the door in that time.
- One of my struggles has been that a lot of the joy I get from exploring development happens while I am completing the rote tasks needed in development, and those can largely be done by AI, which gives my brain very little time to bask and explore. I am trying to supplement this with walks or other creativity-driving endeavors, but not having much luck with it yet.
🧠 Thinking About
- What a good marriage looks like. We are looking at minivans and finding places where we compromise without becoming resentful of each other is hard even though we share 95% of our values. Being a good spouse and parent is absolutely the priority, and doing so in a way that keeps me as a whole person that is adding to those relationships is a constant balancing.
- How to prioritize friendships without feeling drained. As much as I value seeing people, it can be really tiring and I enjoy time just being able to process things alone. Some of the friendships I value most are the ones where we go on walks or just wander talking about things instead of doing an activity (even one as simple as dinner) and I want to foster those types of activities more. It feels like it is much easier to actually build deep relationships when you are not focused on an activity, but obviously that is not a thing you can just jump into. Finding a way to transition from a lighter form of friendship that centers around activity into a deeper form that centers around caring for and fostering each other’s goals is not easy.
History
Updated 2025-05-14
👨👩👧👦 Family
- The kids got to spend time with their cousins since we went on a trip to the Crown Ridge Tiger Sanctuary for Bethany and my birthday. Seeing the Tigers from 4 feet away and learning about them was great, but the time together (with a surprise visit by Tim and his family) was the true magic.
- Neem went on a bunch of trips for work, but Logan and I went on a Cub Scouts Camporee at S-F Scout Ranch. It involved fishing, canoeing, sleeping on the ground, and learning safety techniques of all sorts.
- We went to the Red Wings vs Blues game, per a somewhat annual tradition, and this time, instead of going with Neem, I went with Logan and a few friends. It was a great time that ended with Logan nearly falling asleep on the MetroLink and talking about it for days.
🧑💻 Work
- I made a tough decision to leave OpsLevel to go to Maestro QA. It is a start-up that is focused on making call centers and customer support better. Since all of the funding in the world is currently only going to AI-focused areas, I wanted to be in that space, but most of the use-cases are pretty suspect to me. This company has actually compelling use-cases that are focused on the problems instead of on the technology.
- It sounds like I will be going to to be traveling about once a quarter for meet-ups with the team, which I am hoping will really help me stay engaged, since I thrive on the uplifting energy in my workplace, and that is a tricky thing to do purely remotely.
🍿 Media Consumption
- Movie Night every week is still a high-point of my week, with more silly films this quarter like Demolition Man and Bringing Up Baby, but also with harder hitting films like 8½.
- I am always reading 2-3 books at once, but the most impactful so far this quarter has been House of Leaves, which is a strange-horror book that is the most ambitious non-religious text I have encountered. I am looking forward to finishing it to have more thoughts, but you can always track what I am reading at my GoodReads.
🎲 Games
- I was gifted a MSI Claw handheld gaming computer which has re-sparked my interest in a bunch of games I have been unable to play on Mac computers, so my Steam profile has been more active than usual.
- Spiritfall (Super Smash Bros mixed with Hades) has probably been the biggest winner of my time recently, but there have just been a lot of new games that I’ve been able to try and I am enjoying the exploration.
🎨 Creation
- This year I opted to skip the 7 Day Roguelike since life was just a bit too chaotic. I really missed out on it and there are a few game ideas that are spinning in my head even though none of them fit cleanly in the “Roguelike” genre.
- One of the biggest ideas I have had is just to clean up some of my previous 7DRLs into releasable Steam games that are $5. It would require some time, and require learning how to publish things, but it would be nice to have them available for people to play as more than just tech demos. The thing holding me back is the lack of time constraint on the process. Since it is not a one-week project, the games feel like they are likely to seem incomplete rather than a nice example of what is doable in 7 days.
🧠 Thinking About
- How to function with ADHD. I have gone to therapy for a month or so, but feel like most of the therapy has been intellectualizing the experiences rather than trying new strategies to be better able to accomplish goals. Some of this certainly comes from the lack of concrete goals, but it is all connected since the lack of goal-setting comes from the likely inability to achieve them to the level that makes me happy (all-or-nothing thinking, which is deeply common in ADHD).
- What do to after school for the kiddos. There is a about a two-hour window of time after pick up where they need to eat, get ready for bed, and ideally have some family experiences that are positive. It is hard to find the right things to fit in the 30-60 minute window of time to help them feel like a part of the family without making the necessary activities fall through the cracks.
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.
🧑💻 Work
- I am still working at OpsLevel. It’s been a good experience and although start-ups are chaotic, I feel like I’m finding a solid balance that lets me leave work after work.
- The struggle to upgrade old libraries is still ongoing, but I have merged over 60 upgrades so far, and there are only a few more big ones left before we are fully caught up.
🍿 Media Consumption
- We are struggling to keep up with all of the Marvel and Star Wars shows and movies, but so far have managed to do so. None of them have stood out enough to mention, but all are still enjoyable enough.
- The weekly movie night has been helpful in expanding tastes and I have found a few that I really enjoyed, including Top Hat, which has moments that are on-par with the Marx Brothers, as well as more serious films like The Banshees of Inisherin.
🎲 Games
- Spider-Man 2 came out! It was exactly what I wanted from the game, which added enough interesting pieces from the first two without losing the core fun of the game. I finished it in about 16 hours and then hit 100% achievements by 26 hours. It was a little shorter than I hoped for, but I expect DLCs to add more soon.
- Marvel Snap has ramped up a little, but it’s more of a time-filler now that I removed TikTok from my phone. That has been a really nice trade-off and I feel like I am spending more of my time fully-conscious.
- St Lotus has our yearly city championship against Chicago, and we managed to pull out a 10-6 victory to claim the title. This was a fun experience for a few reasons:
- We got to travel to Chicago to play on their turf.
- I actually got to play because I was not just focused on hosting.
- We played a team-draft, which is a format that has largely been unexplored in the rotisserie sphere.
- We put in a lot of preparation time to get ready for the tournament, and it payed off with a win!
🎨 Creation
- I spent a lot of time building tooling for St Lotus, including migrating the website to Next JS and adding a few sections for top cards and bulk deck builder.
- My brain is already spinning on what to build for the next 7-Day Roguelike. I want to build a more traditional roguelike, but don’t want to spend as much time on the tooling and boring things as I did the first time. This has led to me getting some thoughts down into a repository called Splinter that hopefully can make the process less painful.
🧠 Thinking About
- How to function when it seems like our family is always in some stage of sickness.
- I really value family, both extended and immediate. I have been feeling incredibly grateful to be close with my immediate family and want to make sure my kids feel the same way. My parents are coming to visit for Thanksgiving and we get to go visit Michigan for Christmas, so my cup is feeling very full with love right now.
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.
🧑💻 Work
- I am still working at OpsLevel, which has a great balance of passion for delivering features quickly (driven by actually being in a competitive market, which is something new to me compared to previous companies) and ensuring that the company has enough stability in people and product to be able to exist in five years.
- After getting my feet under me by doing some basic feature work, I have largely been hopping in to help speed big time-sensitive feature lifts across the line, or upgrading long-neglected libraries that have been slowing the team down for years.
- There was a fun journey about Content Security Policies that I should probably write a blog post about. It started with a simple request to pass a security audit and ended up yak-shaving into a month long debacle where I learned a ton.
🍿 Media Consumption
- I was saddened to finish The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which was such an immersive visual time capsule. I don’t think it was the greatest show of all time, but it is such a fun watch for people into comedy or who enjoyed the aesthetics of Mad Men.
- I went to Barbenheimer, which was like Peanut Butter and Chocolate, two great tastes that get better due to fantastic advertising. Because it’s likely the last big blockbuster due to the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike (which is a well-warranted strike), I wanted to see these in theaters and it was well worth it.
🎲 Games
- With the pending release of Spider-Man 2, I went back and finished getting 100% of the trophies for the previous two games. They are such immersive wonderful games that I hope the new one can live up to.
- Magic: the Gathering Arena and Marvel Snap still have a little bit of time on my mobile game rotation, but there hasn’t been anything that has really bitten me recently so I’m hoping that I can find an RPG to fall into. Gaming with children requires such short attention spans that anything complex seems impossible right now.
- Slightly different than my normal games, but a group of us have been meeting up to play outdoor Racquetball every week and it has been a wonderful reminder than physical activity can actually be fun and competitive without being emotionally exhausting.
🎨 Creation
- Neem got me a gift of a solo hotel for Father’s Day (after I did the same for Mother’s Day (it’s probably a new tradition)), and in the hotel, I built a large Voyager set that is trying to find a permanent home on our shelves at home.
- There’s a game-like concept I’m toying around with around Tessellations, but most of my off-work development time has been beefing up a lot of things for St Lotus recently.
🧠 Thinking About
- What is family and how to keep engaged with it without spiraling into a cycle of over-investment and then frustration and exhaustion. Parenting either feels like a race to the bottom or a massive set of impossible expectations a lot of the time.
- How to compress more things into digestible chunks. Life feels like it operates in 10 minute increments, so I am trying to think about how to make things I want to do fall into those chunks. This largely means that I tend to stop doing creative endeavors because those are things that I need “mulling” time for.
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.
🧑💻 Work
- I started a new job at OpsLevel, a dev-ops start-up that helps companies manage micro-services by creating a developer portal with visibility into architecture.
- I’m primarily spinning up on the existing application, but starting to do my traditional task of adding all of the linting rules.
- This company uses Vue, so while I am spinning up on that right now for the first time, I anticipate helping with an upgrade to the latest version in the next few months.
🍿 Media Consumption
- My comfort television is re-runs of Star Trek: Voyager and it’s a common post-child-bedtime event recently.
- I rated a book as 5⭐️ on Good Reads which is quite rare for me. Hero of Two Worlds was a great dive into the life of Lafayette which I would heartily recommend to anyone who enjoyed Hamilton and wants to know more about the life of a legend of two revolutions.
🎲 Games
- I am nearing the end of The Last of Us Part Two. It’s brutally violent, but some of the best storytelling I’ve ever seen. I am loving it and feel so conflicted about all of the characters.
- Board games have been on the back burner mostly, but I am excited about a few Kickstarters that are finishing up soon, including Slay the Spire.
- I finally managed to get a lead on my MTG White Whale: a Summer Magic version of Serra Angel, which would complete my collection of every printing of this card.
🎨 Creation
- Swords With Friends was my entry to the 7 Day Roguelike contest. It is far from a perfect game, but I’m happy that I was able to get a mobile game working in that amount of time, particularly with the difficulty of multi-player.
- I built Ormos as a fun challenge to build a tool for a local MTG shop owner who wanted a tool to help identify which binders to look through for a list of cards. It wasn’t the most technically challenging project, but it was fun to have an easy one just come together relatively easily. It was written entirely without frameworks, which made it a special challenge as well.
- Logan and I have been building Lego, recently has worked on a NASA Space Academy.
🧠 Thinking About
- How to stay connected with friends without seeing them all of the time? It is pretty easy for me to feel close to people while spending lots of time with people, but harder with long-distance or just busy-life folks.
- What parts of fitness are exciting for me? Since my bicycle accident, I’ve been biking again and really enjoy commuting places, but have a hard time exercising for the sake of exercise. I want to be healthy but know myself well enough to not try to do things I don’t enjoy since I don’t maintain them.
Updated 2023-02-13
👨👩👧👦 Family
- Neem is at Stitch Fix and survived the recent lay-offs. Everyone has been sick a lot, so she has been spending time as the comfort parent more than we would like.
- Rory is getting huge. It is wild to see her grown and develop a personality. She can sit up and play, and is resisting our encouragement to crawl.
- Logan is almost 4 and is pumped for his Lego birthday party. He loves Forsyth School and constantly asks for play dates.
- Neem is going to Cancun twice in a month, once on a girls’ trip and once with the family. We’re going on a trip together to DC in a few weeks too.
🧑💻 Work
- I got hit by the lay-offs at Stitch Fix so I’m spending time taking care of kids while figuring out longer term plans.
- Interviewing is exhausting, and doubly so because I am mostly just responding to people reaching out to me rather than looking for a company I really want so far.
🍿 Media Consumption
- The Last Of Us has been amazing. I really think it is better than the game so far, which is surprising since that one is the best narrative game I have played.
- Movie Night on Thursdays have been really rewarding. Marriage Story was one of the best films I have seen and it was so painful to watch that I never want to think of it again.
- My GoodReads shows that I am 7 books ahead of my goal of 30 books for the year. Audiobooks have been amazing to let me read things I would not normally find the time for but value.
🎲 Games
- Vintage Rotisserie Draft at St Lotus came back and went really well. We have a “Friends and Family” one in a week that will be lower stakes but more fun since I get to play in it.
- I got to play Blood Bowl Team Manager at the Super Bowl and it was a fun quick deck builder. I want to dig more into that genre since it feels like it is less awkward than drafting while still having variance I enjoy.
- The PS5 is still for Fortnite, but at least I am replaying The Last Of Us.
🎨 Creation
- 7 Day RogueLike is coming up fast. We are ditching the social media game since it was too hard to make a Roguelike and we are just going to try a mobile multiplayer Rogue instead.
- I have been doing a few little games that are mostly to try out things I don’t know well such as mobile interfaces, but Sigils has been fun to build so far.
- Logan and I wrote a tiny book from stapled paper this weekend. It is fun to watch him create and be a part of that process with him, even if it is for little stuff that won’t last other than in memories.
🧠 Thinking About
- What work success means to me still. Money is feeling like a constraint to my career right now, since most of the interesting companies pay worse than the amount that I set as my lower-bound. I am worried that I am boxing myself out of work happiness.
- How to do more than survive with kids. When they are sick or in crisis, it is easy to constantly tell myself that “I just need to get through this” but I realize that I am sleepwalking through life with that defense.
Updated 2022-11-21
👨👩👧👦 Family
- Neem is doing great, but none of us are sleeping well with all the life transitions. She is still doing iOS dev at Stitch Fix.
- Rory was born on June 19. Everything went great and we are learning to deal with a little less sleep.
- Logan is 3 (and a half according to him) and loving his time at Forsyth School.
- We are stopping at 2 kids, but cannot wait to go on adventures together. Next big one is Cancun in March.
🧑💻 Work
- I am doing front-end platform work at Stitch Fix.
- My primary focus is on the design system, but I am playing with NextJS quite a bit too.
- We are spending time on migrating to a monorepo using TurboRepo.
🍿 Media Consumption
- We are mostly keeping up on all the Marvel and Star Wars shows. Andor has been lagging a little, but we will catch up.
- The Sandman was fascinating and a great adaptation of the book.
- I have been posting all of my movie reviews on Mastodon. The one I think is a must-watch is The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934).
- TikTok and Youtube take up too much time in my life and I am actively working on replacing them with things like podcasts.
🎲 Games
- Vintage Rotisserie Draft at St Lotus has gotten bumped a few times due to my health, but is hopefully coming back in 2023.
- Marvel Snap has been dominating my phone gaming time. It is addictive and quick, with a good progression system.
- Board games haven’t been much of a focus recently, but I am probably going to spend some time on Marvel Champions LCG as winter comes.
- I got a PS5 and mostly use it to play Fortnite, but I was pretty excited to get the Spider-Gwen outfit.
🎨 Creation
- Planning is already happening for the next 7 Day RogueLike. Very likely it will be out of zeitgeist by then, but a game where you run a social media company sounds like fun.
- My lack of SQL knowledge is really stalling some work I want to do on St Lotus card rankings.
- Logan and I have been building Legos together. We have completed a Saturn V rocket and the Space Shuttle Discovery. Also many Logan-designed cars that he loves.
🧠 Thinking About
- What work success means to me. Moving up a career ladder or down in hours is no longer my goal at work, so figuring out what it is has been taking time.
- How to raise children. I know a lot of my personal values, but finding what to pass on to my children and how takes a lot of thought and planning.