If you’re looking for the About page, that’s here.

What I’m Focusing On Now

Professional Life

  • SVP, Engineering at Lark since April 2023.
    • Remit includes Software Engineering, IT, Data Science, Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, Technical Project Management, Customer Support.
    • Transforming a scrappy startup into a world-class health tech organization, while staying lean.
  • Really enjoying working through Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forssgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. This is offering a lot of insights on how to go faster, better.
  • Getting more hands-on with generative AI as a means to accelerating innovation in a variety of roles both within and beyond my remit.

Personal Projects

Jan 27

  • I’m staying up way too late working on my Huginn server. I’ve got some things figured out but I clearly have to climb the learning curve on how to create my own agents.

Jan 26

  • Improvements made on my Obsidian to Hugo export flow. Switched from zsh to python3 which made it easier to get the formatting right on exported shortcodes, avoiding extraneous curly braces being added during the transformation.
  • Explored n8n for automating workflows between different tools. I’m particularly keen to integrate with my local AI lab so I can experiment with things like summarizing all of my social media mentions. I ended up really not liking n8n, mostly because it’s not open source and the free version is badly hobbled. I ended up installing Huginn instead and published my notes here.
  • Did some code cleanups on my Hugo shortcodes for info and warn boxes. Examples:
This is an example info box.
This is an example warn box.

Jan 25

  • Lots of focus on my personal Traefik deployment. Major upgrade to back-end software. Hardened configs for modern TLS best practices, double checking security headers, adding support for http3 to my selfhosted apps.
  • Starting to mess with Bookstack for keeping shared notes with other members of my household who are decidedly not tech-friendly and wouldn’t want to use any of my existing tools.
  • Worked more on my personal Forgejo server. I have some ideas about automating more of my regular work with git, and while I could do that on GitHub, I learn a lot more by running my own service. I’d also like to start open sourcing more of my homelab work, and I’ll probably set up Forgejo in a way where that’s where my real work is getting done, and I’m just automatically mirroring my personal repositories to public GitHub repositories. I’m still thinking about how a good workflow will look for me.

Jan 20

  • Set up a personal Forgejo instance.

Jan 19

Jan 18

  • Launched my own personal Mastodon instance. I used a hostname that I don’t plan on keeping long-term, mostly because I’m trying to learn from this before I deploy something more serious and intended for long-term use.
  • (#obsidian) Trying to ramp up on Obsidian and the “second brain”. Everything on this site under notes is exported from a folder within my larger Obsidian vault, including this page you’re reading now.

Reading & Learning

  • Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim - I’m taking my time with this one, applying the lessons within for the next phase of my transformation strategy at work.
  • Shift by Hugh Howie - I like the TV series Silo on Apple TV+. “Shift” is the second book in the series (which begins with Wool ) that the series is based on. I read the first book and enjoyed it. The showrunners definitely took some liberties to make the story work on the small screen, so the books is worth reading if you want to “go deeper”.

Recently Completed

Life & Personal

Jan 26

I’ve been stuck on the second and third floors of my house for a full week now. Back in October a large reef aquarium ruptured on the first floor of my home. Extensive repair work is underway to mitigate the damage from almost 100 gallons of sea water spilling out abruptly onto my hardwood floors and into the floor registers of my force-air HVAC system.

New floorboards were installed in the immediately damaged area, but since the wood floors extend across the first floor of my home, they had to sand it all down and re-stain it. And then they had to come in every day for a few days laying down successive layers of urethane sealant.

That part of the work finished yesterday but I still have to wait until tomorrow before it’s ok to walk on the floor (in socks) and it will take even longer before the urethane sealant is cured so I can start moving furniture back into the rooms.

Jan 15

Returned from Sweden. It was my first trip, and I went during a time that tourists typically wouldn’t visit (January). But I really enjoyed it and would love to return someday.

Trying to get back into the habit of writing more. Re-launching this blog was part of that intent. But rather than trying to be overly ambitious with crafting lovely articles all the time, I’m trying to make room for rough notes to be published directly out of my Obsidian vault into Hugo. So there will be a mix of well-crafted posts and rough notes.

Nits

  • I am aware that my Obsidian notes are exporting Hugo shortcodes strangely sometimes. Particularly adding a superfluous { character before rendering a link. Every time I think I have this fixed, it pops up again somewhere else. I do plan to put more effort into the Obsidian -> Hugo (blog) pipeline.
    This is resolved! I worked with my local AI to translate my glitchy zsh script to a new python3 script that is much more effective at transforming my Obsidian notes to Hugo markdown! At some point I might look for a more out of the box solution built into Obsidian.

This is my now page, inspired by Derek Sivers. It’s a snapshot of what I’m focused on at this point in my life.

More research on my about Now Pages note.

I update this page when my focuses change significantly."