What I’m Focusing On Now#

Professional Life#

• SVP, Engineering at Lark March, 2023 - May 2025. (Yes, I’m looking for my next role)
• Chief Tentacle Officer, Groktopus LLC
• Interim Fractional CTO Mindr

Personal Projects#

July 21#

• I clearly haven’t been keeping this page up enough.
• TONS of work on n8n, setting up my AI agents with an emphasis on research capabilities and multi-modal memory systems.
• I was burning through too many tokens on Claude & OpenAI API’s. After some quick napkin math, I realized I could pay off a GPU rig in a year or less. So I moved the majority of my API workload to Ollama and the qwen2.5:14b-instruct model. I’m using bge-m3:latest for embeddings and it’s stupid fast on this machine. The GPU is an NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti and I quite like it.
• I’m working part-time for Mindr right now and I’m pretty pleased to be there. But I still need more work.
• I really need to re-learn Python.

May 17#

• My last day at Lark was earlier this month. I have been looking for a full-time role, but have increasingly been focusing on rebuilding my consultancy (Groktopus LLC).])
• Completed books:
  • “Source Code: My Beginnings” by Bill Gates
  • “Living Aboard” by Scott Wilson
  • “Make a Zone!” by Bill Brent and Joe Biel
  • “Fantastic Four: Life Story” by Mark Russell
  • “Sailing Alone Around the World” by Joshua Slocum
• Currently reading:
  • “Capable Cruiser” by Lin Pardey & Larry Pardey

Apr 24#

• I haven’t updated in awhile. Lots going on. I’m looking for my next role, which is a big chunk of focus right now.
• Here’s a bunch of books I’ve finished since my last update:
  • “Escape from the Ordinary” by Julie Bradley
  • “Sailing Alone Around the World” by Joshue Slocum
  • “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams
  • “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte
• Currently reading:
  • “Fantastic Four: Life Story” by Mark Russell
  • “Hidden Potential” by Adam Grant
  • “Living Aboard” by Scott Wilson
• You might have noticed a trend with my recent reading habits. I’m thinking this is the year I start taking sailing lessons and go on some coastal adventures. Maybe more, if I take to it.
• Given that I’m transitioning from one job to another, and I haven’t secured the next job yet, I let the registration lapse on my motorcycle. The weather is beautiful but I’m not out there riding. And this is exactly the kind of situation where going for a motorcycle adventure would be therapeutic.
• This job change also stalled plans to launch my first real attempt at making a YouTube channel. Once the cashflow is more regular, I’ll return to this idea.
• I’ve transitioned fully off ADHD meds. Yes, it makes me more “productive” to take them. But it can also be exhausting. I made this choice to optimize for happiness.
• I’m really, really liking Perplexity, which has been a great research tool both personally and professionally. And has helped out with some of the content you’ve seen me posting here recently.)

Long Period of Neglect#

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.

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.