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

Feb 1

  • I’ve been quiet on here for a few days but incredibly active behind the scenes on things I’m looking forward to publishing notes on in the coming days. Examples include:
    • Deployed a production GoToSocial instance: pompat.us
    • Deployed a related shlink URL shortener.
    • And a complementary PeerTube instance: PompaTube
    • Aaaand a private / single-user Matrix instance.
    • I’m not done yet. There’s also a Lemmy instance.
    • I think there’s probably more. But clearly I’ve been on a Fediverse streak!
  • Some of these Fediverse platforms are more complicated to deploy than they need to be. I’m going to take a crack at documenting more of an “easy path” and work with the upstream projects to see how much of my work, if any, they’d welcome in a PR.
  • Other platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed are still really complex. I don’t know if there’s an easy button approach to deploying either of them. I’d like to take a crack, though. I think the Fediverse is stronger with many small instances than a few big ones.
  • I also have some ideas about quickly improving federation of small Fediverse instances. So I’d like to publish my notes on that soon.
  • I replaced Huginn with ActivePieces. I’m really enjoying ActivePieces so far and look forward to sharing some neat use cases for it as I get better with the platform.

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

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.

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’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.

I update this page when my focuses change significantly."