Why This Exists - Crossroads & Random Coincidence #
At 39, I’m approaching somewhat of a crossroads in life. I could continue on my current trajectory where I spend a majority of my time, effort, and mental capacity on “work,” which primarily consists of meetings, emails, PowerPoint charts, whitepapers, and… more meetings. Or I could try to reclaim my life from this general sense of resignation, and a broad acceptance of an unknown fate and make it my own. I feel like I’ve been in a sort of stupor or malaise for years now, probably enhanced by the daily broad consumption of social media content and “news.” I’ve gone with the flow and, through hard work (read: significant infusion of my personal time and mental bandwidth), let my personal circumstances beget subsequent opportunities, which then determine my next steps. Sense the problem? Where’s the agency? Where’s the passion?
My educational background is in engineering (BS mechanical and MS electrical). I’ve had several engineering-related jobs over the last 17 or so years. And while I’ve found many of these jobs interesting, challenging, and enjoyable, I don’t really feel like I have ever personally designed or built anything significant end-to-end. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve participated in many design reviews and I’ve sat in more meetings than I could ever count. But I haven’t really dug in and built anything by myself or for myself. And if I don’t start now, then when?
I bought this web address years ago when I was motivated by the changing American political landscape to communicate my thoughts and opinions to the world. I believe I created one or two short blog posts at the time. Ultimately, I shied away from putting myself out there. I did, however, hold on to this web address for whatever reason. So, now that I’m taking on several personal projects (mostly software-driven initially), I thought it’d be a good place to document and share what I’m learning, what I’m building, and the occasional hard-won lesson along the way. Much of what I expect I’ll do at first will be “vibe-coded” using different LLMs. And while I’ve been able to watch in awe as Claude Opus builds amazing capabilities in real time, I’ve also realized that I have no idea what half of it is or does. And that’s scary. I can’t thoroughly and honestly review the code it writes and trust that it is robust and secure.
So I need to learn. And I hope my experiences can help others along the way. But even if it doesn’t, this site will help me learn how to organize my thoughts and to express myself. Oh, and how to build and maintain a website/blog. That, too, I guess.
What I’m Working On #
Right now I have a few S/W projects in flight:
- A personal budget and finance tracker — a 25-page Streamlit app that can be used to visualize spending and plan out a budget. Motivated by the frustration with spreadsheets and wanting something more custom and purpose-built. Built with Python, SQLite, and Plotly.
- This blog — built with Hugo and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. My first real foray into web hosting and static site generators.
- A run tracker (coming soon) — a web app for me and some coworkers to keep each other motivated as we train for races later this year.
What to Expect #
I plan to write about the projects I’m building, the tools I’m learning, and the mistakes I’m making along the way. I also anticipate many random tangents on (usually nerdy) topics. If you’re someone who’s also learning to code and to make things later in life, or an engineer wanting to actually engineer something, hopefully some of this will resonate.
More to come.