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.

Feb 10

• I realize I’m re-using and refining a lot of the things I’ve developed in other companies. Not because I’m a broken record, but because I’ve developed some tools and frameworks that work well for me pretty reliably in some vastly different organizational contexts. I think this means I’m overdue to write a book. But I’m ADHDAF. So I’m thinking of other ways of doing this. One thought is to use this site more effectively, flesh out the capability for curating content series, so I can go at my own pace and get it out there. And when a series is “done done”, only then explore curating the collection into an ebook. What do you think?

Personal Projects

Feb 17

• I’ve been working on my first mini rack. The hardware going in is either going to be a Docker Swarm, or Kubernetes
• Lots of 3D printing going on for mounting computers nicely in the mini rack.
• Easing up a little on updating this site for a minute. I’ve been taking the time to learn more about how to get the most out of Obsidian and I’m realizing there’s a full reboot of the site coming. Yeah, I know. It hasn’t been up in this form for very long. But it’s going to bother me forever if I don’t nip this in the bud sooner rather than later.

Feb 13

• Ugh. Another book binge. (But I don’t have a problem… really…)
• The way I had been using Obsidian is undermining me. I definitely have some cleanup to do.

Feb 10

• Putting some more effort to get my Obsidian vault organized more around the PARA method.
• Picked up a couple of books.
  • Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples by David Kadavy
  • Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte
• I’ve got my first minilab/mini rack coming. This one will be 8u so it’s a bit big (as mini racks go). There’s a couple of different ways I’m wanting to use these kinds of racks. Since this is a larger one, it’ll probably be better suited to one of my amateur radio projects. I’d eventually like to get a 4u model for hosting a hyper-converged ProxMox cluster.

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.
• • Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte - I’d really like to get the most out of my transition to #Obsidian and Forte’s #PARA method is what I’m going to be trying out.

Recently Completed

• (Feb 23) “Dust” by Hugh Howey. Finishing the “Silo” trilogy.
• (Feb 9) 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”.
• (Jan 15) Wool

Life & Personal

Feb 1

I was able to start walking around downstairs in my socks last Monday. And as of Wednesday the dogs were allowed downstairs, and we were able to start moving some smaller pieces of furniture back into the space. We’re moving more of the furniture back in this weekend. There’s still some painting work to be done inside of the house, re-installing the kitchen island and in-built desk in the kitchen. And some work under the house to replace the HVAC ductwork that had filled with (salty) aquarium water when the reef tank exploded.

I’m still working from my bedroom for now, from a “desk” improvised from a “muscle rack” type garage shelving unit. My real desk was just moved back into my office today. I’m looking forward to being back in that room.

The new floors, by the way, turned out gorgeous and I couldn’t be happier.

Nits

• I built everything under the /notes/ section of this site from my Obsidian vault. But I wasn’t yet experienced at all with the tool, and I’ve made some choices that I wish I could go back and do differently. And I still might. But I’m worried it might break links on this site to get it all reconciled. I’ll try to preserve those links if I can.
  • All of my notes are dumped in one folder and I can’t organize them without breaking site structure right now. I’ll need to go into the front matter of every note and hard code a slug: value for each one. Hopefully I can do this in a non-breaking way.
  • All of my private notes in the vault use topics: but my public notes use tags:. I’d like to be able to have my public notes use topics: and handle the translation to Hugo’s preferred tags: in the export. Or change Hugo’s configuration to use topics:. No matter what, there’s a lot of rework to do.
  • I’ve put a lot of work into migrating my private notes into a layout prescribed by the PARA methodology. I can’t do that for my public notes until I resolve some of the above issues more effectively. I think ideally I don’t want to have a public folder and a private folder; I just want to put some binary switch in the front matter and anything that’s true gets published to Hugo. But hopefully in a way that only creates links to other public-facing notes. I’d really really love to do some internal referential linking in my vault between public and private content without having to expose the private content.
• I’m really not happy with my PeerTube deployment. I followed the upstream installation instructions and I had to rewrite a lot of their work just to get my deployment working. I’d like to take some extra time and work out my own “clean room” process for deploying PeerTube, and then restore my existing data into it. I don’t want to publish notes on what was ultimately a break-fix solution. I’d rather share notes on how I think it could be done from the ground-up more cleanly.
• I have my services sending me email notifications, but there are two parts of this solution I’d like to fix:
  • I’d been using the bytemark/smtp image for awhile (and it shows up in the notes that I have published right now). But the image is unmaintained, hasn’t been changed in over 7 years. I’d like to replace it with something that’s better maintained and uses versioning tags so I’m more in control of what’s being deployed, when upgrades happen.
  • Deliverability is poor. Emails from my services routinely get routed to the Spam folder. I’d like to put in the extra work to make my service notification emails look less “spammy”.
• Regarding ActivePieces, I have some flows I really like that integrate with AI. Integrated with OpenAI gpt-4o model or Anthropic claude-sonnet-3.5 model is super easy. But costly. I already run Ollama in my homelab, but ActivePieces doesn’t cleanly integrate with it. I’d like to figure this one out. I’d like to make more use of LLM in my ActivePieces flows, but without sending my data to a paid AI service.

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.