I've been considering adding more inefficiency in my life. It's time I embraced it. Instead of trying to be a finely tuned, get-things-done-machine, I could be a bit more human and exist between my tasks.

Our careers shape our lives. Being a programmer for the last 10 years has shaped my life. Primarily, it has lured me into optimizing my personal life: Creative projects. Personal admin. Relationships. Content. Time. Time is one of those things that I try to optimize. Only in the last few years have I really begun to question the driving force behind that engine.

This year I started out with a phrase. The phrase was "Say yes to less." So far it's going poorly. Tonight I spent some time reflecting on that and a few other things. Employing the macabre but scarily-useful technique of imagining I'm at the end of my life and looking back, I realized that one thing I need to do better is just let (most) ideas be ideas.

Ideas are a hot commodity, though. People want them. People feel bad if they don't have them. There is an overwhelming desire and pressure to make real an idea, in varying capacities. Whether one feels an idea should be realized for money, status, security, or some kind of meta-reasoning: people want ideas and they want to turn them into something.

I'm having a nice, slow Sunday evening where I've decided to revisit this little blog here and putter on its design a bit.

It would be fair to say that I seem to be in a perpetual state of mediocre satisfaction with this thing. While poking at some Tailwind styles, I started wondering what a blog should be (somewhat facetiously). I have some ideas, but I think I might have more ideas of what it shouldn't be, for me.

Last night I took my first improv drop-in class in some ... 7 or 8 years and it was a blast! It was really nice to shake things up and do something entirely different. When I introduced myself to the other participants I said that I spend all day in front of a computer screen and that I probably …

For the past few months, I've been practicing figure drawing in the mornings before work. Today, something clicked. Suddenly, it seemed like I was better proportioning heads, arms, and legs, picking up on how to lay down shadows with the charcoal, and I was moving faster and more confide…

It's that time of year! In this post, I do some looking back on what I had planned for this year, how it went, what I learned, and all that good stuff. It's a long one this year!

Hi there 👋,

Today I'm writing from a cottage patio, taking my first stretch of summer vacation. I have five full days off, plus some weekend time. It feels great so far. It has been a hectic month starting a new job, and now I have some time to decompress and let some thoughts unfold. Seem…

Today I'm writing a small post to thank my blog (and circuitously myself, I suppose) for helping me find work I'm interested in doing.

I started a new job last week at a software consultancy. The consultancy places consultants at different clients in pairs or small groups. The clients could have any range of challenges or technical problems, using any variety of languages/tech stacks. And so, when joining, the consultancy tries to find a best fit between the consultant and client based on technology and interest.

I don't have an extensive list for things I discovered, watched, read, or listened to in 2021, but here are some standouts: