Now

March 2026

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

I’m spending my days building actual things. I’m tackling projects that exist for no reason other than to scratch a creative itch.

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

I’m not really a writer, but writing gets my thoughts out of my head and onto something that forces me to reckon with them. Writing helps me decide what I think about something. Words on a page are concrete, even if they are easily typed over or changed.

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.

I’m also not really a coder, but now 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.

But what’s most fun 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.