Now

March 2026

Three months into semi-retirement and I couldn’t be happier.

I’m spending my days building actual things:

I didn’t realize how boring I had become. Three months ago, I couldn’t immediately fathom how I’d spend my days if they weren’t full of meetings. Turns out that my creativity had been nearly killed by too many years in the corporate world.

I’m not really a writer or a coder or an engineer. I’m just having fun. But I’ve noticed that I am getting faster at it, too. The models keep improving, and my own pattern recognition is catching up. I’m learning to see the shape of a solution earlier, to ask better questions, and to know when to trust the output vs. when to push back.

The feedback loop is crazy as well. I can go from a realization (man, trying to enter this fillup into a Google Sheet on my phone is annoying), to an idea (wouldn’t it be cool to have a dedicated app for this?), to a launched tool in a few hours. This kind of “working” feels fun again.

I’m not yet confident enough in my code to open source it to the world. And I harbor no illusions that what I have built is production-grade or could withstand thousands (or even dozens) of simultaneous users.

But none of that bothers me. The point, right now, is that I’m learning again. Really learning, the kind where I lose track of time and look up and it’s dark outside.

I had forgotten what that felt like. Or maybe I had just given up the hope of feeling it again.