It’s been a hot minute since I last made a post here. In many ways, life has changed a fair bit for me, but in some other ways, it’s not really all that different. While having a tough time sleeping the other night, I went and looked back at some of my old blog posts and had a sense of hiraeth. This has inspired me to get back into blogging. Not so much for the public, though it’d bring me joy if someone found my musings insightful or inspiring in some way. I’m mostly doing this for my future self.
In my past life, I was connected quite a bit deeper with the open source community, especially Openstack. That chapter of my life has closed and I’ve been on some new adventures. I look back at those experiences with fond memories and appreciation for how much I learned and grew as an individual. I am thankful for the mentors in those communities who helped sharpen my technical skills. There will certainly be new connections along the way though and I’m excited for what the future holds!
The past is the past
However, I’m not interested in quite the same approach to blogging as I was taking before. My life is dominated by technology and I find a lot of enjoyment and value in that realm. As such, I’m certain that the driving force for posts here for the foreseeable future is going to be surrounding technology. Looking back through my past blog posts though, I can recognize that I was hanging my identity on being apart of the Openstack community which came by way of my employment. I don’t think this was fundamentally bad, but it did set a trap that I ultimately fell into. My identity and self-worth didn’t come from within and I relied too heavily on an version of myself I was trying to project publicly.
Looking forward
My hopes for future blog posts is that this will become more of a journal about my life as I am, rather than an attempt to project who I wish I was. Given that I find such joy in technology, it is certainly going to be tech-driven. However, I would like to touch on some more personal things as well such as other hobbies (music/lyrics, art, snowboarding, living life on our ranch, physics), physical and mental health, my political views, and anything else that may seem important to me in the moment.
A quick catch up to today
Here is an attempt to try to recap the major things that have gone on in life since my last post. I’m currently employed at NVIDIA, focusing on automating the storage-plane for AI products. I’m both impressed with how effective the team has been at achieving the levels of service they have and equally surprised when I notice some fundamentals missing. There is a company culture here called “speed of light” which is the idea that we should measure ourselves by what is possible (measuring ourselves against the universal max speed limit), not by what our competitors our doing. With this lens, it definitely seems as though the storage team accomplished astonishing things, though it was done by cutting a few corners. Anyway, I have a lot of appreciation for the path that has been laid here prior to my arrival, but there is still a lot of work to do to achieve the next-level of maturity for our infrastructure.
I’m learning (as the entire industry is) how to balance “vibe coding” with meat-driven coding. There are quite a few musings I have on this front, but I’ll save those for a future post. In summary, it feels like we’re at an inflection point, not just in the software development world, but as a society and AI is at the center of it all.
My daughter is driving now. So, that’s a thing I guess. And my son is going to start driver’s ed soon. Somehow, time hasn’t slowed down on the family front, regardless of how much you love memories from the past.
We had a barn fire about a month ago. Lost about 50 chickens and 4 geese as well as the entire barn structure. Insurance is horrible and we’re having to fight for every inch that we are owed, but that’s how life goes I guess.
That pretty much catches us up to my current life. I’m still living the dream in rural Montana on a 40 acre ranch, trying to raise my kids as best as I know how and plan for a future of financial independence.
Recent musings
I want to try including a “recent musings” section in each of my future blog posts. The idea here is to try to capture what things are influencing me as of recent. This will likely be things like songs/albums, podcasts, news, life events, or really anything that is on the front of my heart/mind.
Music: This will certainly be a common theme, but Nightwish has been on replay. Especially their latest album Yesterwynde. 3 songs in particular have been speaking to me.
An Ocean Of Strange Islands is a song that sees life as an ocean and different phases of life as islands on this ocean. I don’t actively see my life in this way, but it is an interesting way to look back at your life and the stops you made along the way that lead to who you are today.
Something Whispered Follow Me is a song about a carnal drive within that drives us to be who we are. I found technology fairly young and knew when I was 13 that I wanted to work in the tech field. This song does a great job capturing my story there.
Hiraeth (yes, I used this word earlier, and yes, it’s because I’ve been listening to this over and over) is a welsh word that doesn’t have a direct English translation, but it’s a word that captures the feeling of longing for something in the past that can never be again, or perhaps never existed to begin with. When I look at pictures of my kids from years past, and their cute little faces and voices, I wish I could somehow relive those moments. Unfortunately, time marches forward regardless of our desire to hold these precious moments.
Final thoughts
This has been a bit of a brain-dump post and attempt to play some catch up. Future posts will be a bit more coherent and hopefully include some more useful bits (code snippets, Github links, images/pictures, etc.). I’m going to make an effort to post weekly(ish), but I’m not going to beat myself up if I’m unable to accomplish it. Assuming I keep with my cadence though, here’s to next week!