Four Years

Four years. It’s been four years since I last posted on this blog. Four years since I shared a hiking story “around the campfire”, a (hopefully) insightful tip about programming, or meandered into personal life. Part of the issue, honestly, was that my old website had become difficult to maintain… a maze of import scripts for images, complicated links to add to a relational database, and a triage nightmare for spam comments. Most of the delay is that I’ve had a tough journey over the last four years.

From 2014 to 2022 I worked at Shutterstock, and had built a great routine around my job. I would work normal hours (they were east coast), then take the late afternoon off for working out, maintaining the house, hanging with the family, and catching up on my personal projects. Then in 2022 I left Shutterstock and went to a web3 startup that folded after six months. Scrambling, I joined a Salesforce consulting company, built some seriously cool things there, and then my mental health crashed and things got really messy. It’s a long, personal story, that is best left off this blog. After that was contract work, then a short stint at Basis Technologies, and now I’m in an AI / agentic startup… It’s been a chaotic, mentally challenging journey.

Hiking adventures have been tough during this unstable period. I had a few epic adventures in the Galiuros that I cannot wait to share, and will post those over the next few months. Also, my kids and I have started doing trail maintenance, a truly fun family experience, in the Mazatzal Wilderness. There’s also a small detail about a serious hiking injury that resulted in a helicopter evacuation… My second time! So yeah, there has been some hikes, though definitely not as much as I wished for.

Even with a chaotic job situation and sporadic hiking adventures, things on the personal side have been great. The kids are growing, quickly, and my love and respect for my wife over this tough time has never been stronger. We’ve also been doing a lot of fun stuff around the house, like building a tortoise enclosure in our backyard, that has challenged my diy skills. Digging fence posts in caliche is insanely hard. I miss the normal issues of digging fence posts in the midwest, like mud and glacial rocks. Caliche is another level. All that aside, the family is doing great and I’m really enjoying watching the kids grow into their own personalities.

Where does this leave things? I mean, this entire website and blog is revamped from the ground up, and it’s much, much easier to maintain. All my content is now in markdown, rendered as a static site in hugo, served (for free!) by cloudflare, so I ‘should’ be able to post more often. Also, the /hiking area is all brand new and really fun to play with, and I have plenty of hikes over the last few years to share, and even more on my plate to tackle this fall. Hopefully the career stuff will settle soon and I’ll be able to settle into a new routine, sharing things often, because this journey is just too fun not to share.