Personal Life

Nothing much has changed for our family these past few years, and that is by design. Work is stable, life is stable, everybody is happy. I am very thankful for that.

Work

Since 2022 I have been leading a department that is tasked with making the company better at creating new games. This involves encouraging all staff to submit game ideas at any time, working with people to strengthen game ideas and create attractive pitches, coaching teams through early development phases, maintaining a corporate strategy for the release of new games, and more. It allows me to work directly with a lot of people throughout the company, and has been tremendously fun.

Hobbies

In 2022 I joined a Haiku study group. We decide on a few prompts every month and submit our poems in advance of a meet-up, where we comment on each other’s pieces and have our teacher critique them. Haiku is fascinating because its extreme minimalism (only 17 characters allowed) makes it feel like putting together a puzzle. It is also a great way to learn about nature and Japanese culture.

Last year I set up GoToSocial as a solo instance to join the Fediverse, and that has been a lot of fun. It’s nice to be social on the internet again. I think this has helped motivate me to update this site more, and I’m having a lot of fun making little updates to the site as well.

AI tools have been super useful for programming as a hobby. It has made it so much easier to finish and ship my little projects, and I have already developed a slew of little utilities that I use often. I’m still writing words by hand though, because I think being able to organize my thoughts into communicative sentences is such an important skill.

I also started keeping a physical journal at the beginning of this year, and one month is the longest I have ever kept up the habit so I am hopeful that it will continue. I had always admired people who keep physical journals; I thought it was a wonderful habit. I never could get into it though, and had resigned myself to thinking that I just wasn’t that kind of person. But my wife convinced me that if that is the kind of person I want to be, then it’s worth putting in the effort to make the change.
So far, I am really enjoying it. I’m using the most simple interpretation of Bullet Journal. It’s turning to be a super helpful framework to guide the kinds of information I should keep, and the format for recording it.