Sunrise over a rural southwestern Missouri hayfield field w/a round haybale and native trees in the background.
Some days I wish I had my old blog because it’s easier just to write whatever I want about whatever I want. I haven’t started a Substack yet. So I feel like I have to create something that’s polished or that’s directed in certain way or has a theme, whereas my personal blog is just whatever the hell I wanted to write because it was mine. It was raw and real and it was about me, I didn’t have to go with a certain theme or something. And maybe I don’t have to do that with a Substack blog either, I don’t know.
Okay, well after about 20 minutes, I got my old WP blog back up and running.
Still not sure if I’m going to post this there or on Substack and try starting that. But Substack’s kind of annoying because every time I visit the homepage, I get hit with a wall of crap that I don’t want to see. I think they call it a “feed”. I don’t want to see a feed when I go to publish things on my blog.
So as crazy and counterintuitive as it might sound, I think I’m just going to stick with my old school WordPress blog, maybe.
Anyway, back to transitions. Transitions are hard. Especially when you’re doing a lot of remote hunts. Which seems to be the case with my life right now.
I’m starting a new position soon, which is a nice, welcome relief after being unemployed for almost a year. It’s in an exciting domain, however, I’m not going to discuss that here because I don’t want to associate my work and personal life publicly.
But we’re also trying to sell the property we have now, and we’re trying to do it all at once, which is in and of itself quite stressful.
On top of that all, my mom apparently had a mini stroke a couple days ago. I don’t know how long she’ll have left. My dad’s not in great health either. They’re way down in southern Texas, which is a bit far from here (Northwest Arkansas area). I’m afraid we’re going to have to make a visit soon if we want to see them again.
On top of it all, it’s extremely hot and humid, and the heat and humidity combo feels very oppressive anytime we go outside.
It’s not like a 105°F oven, but a step or two below that. So it could be worse. But it feels difficult to be productive and try and get things done with this combo of heat + humidity.
And then there’s the grief of losing our daughter Asami about a year and a half ago. We have good days and bad days, but today it’s been very difficult for my wife, for example.
She’s been asking questions like, “What if we would have taken her in (to the doctor) earlier?” Maybe we could have changed things. Maybe we could still have her here with us.
I try and let her know that no matter how things turned out, it is extremely unlikely she’d still be alive today. People born with type 1 SMA rarely survive beyond two years. It’s possible we could have got her into a gene therapy treatment if we had detected it as soon as she was born. But it’s unlikely we could have detected it as soon as she was born, given that she was born in Brazil, number one. And number two, it was a home birth. And there’s no easy way to screen for that in that kind of environment. Also, we simply didn’t know. We’ve had two babies previously and everything was perfectly healthy, everything turned out perfectly fine.
But the loss of Asami really hits us hard, and especially her mama.
On top of all of this above, I find myself wanting more than anything to start my own business and build something for myself and my family, and I’ve always wanted to. This is how I’m hardwired and I can’t not do this. I can’t not think this way.
In a very quickly changing world where things which worked before don’t necessarily work now. And the world that we lived in, even two or three years ago, is not the same world as it is today.
AI and robotics are changing literally every day, as well as technology in general, blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, etc.
It’s exciting, but it’s also scary. I’ve been scared to death of having my own job automated until, of course, I started writing with AI and creating AI agents, learning RAG, etc.
What’s exciting, of course, is that we can literally create anything we think of or dream of, especially people who already know how to write code, because the people who don’t know how well-generated coding eventually hits the kind of roadblock where you can’t make much forward progress because it doesn’t architect it well or it needs to be rewritten for the upside. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, as far as software engineering goes—or even if you do—it can get a little complicated.
And also revamping my resume to the point where I have to beat away recruiters with a stick. Also see above about me starting a new position soon. I’ve hibernated my LinkedIn account and hopefully I’ll never have to enable LinkedIn again, and it can die the dumpster fire death that it deserves.
“You Can Just Build Things”
I’m thinking about publishing long-form video content where I just build software and publish it entirely on the recording / stream. It could establish authority / my skills as a software engineer and architect, and be used to drive leads to some kind of coaching/consulting offering for either individuals or startups / enterprises.
Maybe it could even involve hardware solutions later on or firmware, I don’t know. I basically have a generalist nature in that I have a breadth of experience. I’ve touched so many different kinds of systems, from mainframes to low-level embedded hardware to backend, UNIX/Linux, and all kinds of things. And this is kind of a double-edged sword. Anyway, I’m digressing now.
I don’t know if I have anything else to say. This has kind of been a bit rambly. I’ve just kind of been wanting to I guess mention the transitions I’m going through and write about that to help me gain clarity personally as I also share with the world.
This has also been my first post, publicly, since 2017, and it’s hard to believe it’s been 8 years, but it’ll be good to be getting back to writing regularly.