Forgive me, Reader. It’s been five months since my last vibe check. That’s a lot of ground to cover and it’s not possible to get into everything that happened. Like in real life conversations, instead of telling you how I’m doing, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing these past few months.

A trip to Seattle

a large outdoor sign of the microsoft logo on the microsoft campus
An underwhelming, low-res photo I took on my Kodak Charmera

In March I went to Redmond, WA for “Meetup Week” at work. This was my second visit to the mothership in two years of working at Microsoft. Ideally, I’d go up more… but not too much… so this is fine. We’re a high-functioning remote team even though nearly everyone on the team has been RTO’d.

Speaking of my team, the people I get to work with are super great. Talented, friendly people I’m lucky to work with. We’re a scrappy bunch punching above our weight.

The people in my broader design studio are also great. I spent a good chunk of my time helping folks with their vibe-coding setups. Ever since the mandate dropped earlier this year, a lot of my job has been helping to onboard our ~200 new junior designers developers and their agent buddies to developer tools. I will say… it’s real easy to get your computer into a borked state when installing a lot of new tools. Chatbots and emergent AI tools make it worse. Getting comfortable with the terminal was a multi-year process for me and we’re asking “normies” to hot-drop in and approve hundreds of minified bash commands per day. I feel for everyone who is having their boat rocked by all the change.

Meetings and roadmap discussions filled my week. We had a couple memorable team dinners and bar conversations.

My week was super busy but I was able to sneak a couple moments to catch up with some old friends and colleagues in the Puget Sound area. Spent an afternoon with Adam, shared a beer with Kyle, and talked accessibility with Aaron. Good times.

My flight back to Austin got caught in a minor snowpocalypse. My 6pm flight got delayed until midnight which means I didn’t get home until 6:30am. Woof. And my seatmate next to me on the plane –the one with the crinkly bag of food who liked to have full volume conversations with her husband in the seat in front of her– was… ahem… less sensitive to the lack-of-sleep situation we were all in. Oh well.

A trip to Tampa

My daughter’s cheer team made it to the big end-of-season competition in Tampa, FL. We took the whole family and turned it into a mini-vacation. Her team did great and “hit zero” (zero deductions) but so did eight other teams in her division and only seven advanced. I’m proud of my little athlete and she continues to amaze me.

While not in the thundering jock-jam confines of the civic convention center, we took a trip to the beach, saw some movies, and went to Universal Studios Orlando. We aren’t a super theme park family but I was feeling a bit of parental guilt that my kids would be telling their future therapists about how we never took them to theme parks. Knowing my kids don’t love rollercoasters or waiting in lines, we stuck to the main park which has rides for the Minions, Diagon Alley, and the Simpsons. I splurged (read: paid double) for the “express pass” so we could skip the lines whenever possible.

Diagon Alley was the biggest highlight. That comes with some regret because JK Rowling sucks now. But the experience they crafted there is so meticulously well done you can’t help but feel immersed. I admired all the theme park tricks they do to make everything seem bigger. Slanted walls to make it feel fantastical and disorient you combined with how the windows get progressively smaller on the upper stories of the buildings so they seem taller. I spent a good amount of time marvelling at a set of stairs that went to nowhere; there to create an illusion that the town keeps going on forever. I love those details. Then on top of that they add in these immersive wand experience gimmicks (we didn’t buy wands but watched a others cast incantations). Very thoughtful experience design and that’s what I think I liked about it.

I will say that 4D experience rides are not for me. The “DO NOT RIDE IF…” warnings they give at the beginning of each ride are basically a printout of my medical conditions. I know theme parks are doubling down on these because the cost per square foot is too good to pass up, but I’d almost rather sit in The Hall of Presidents and watch animatronics talk to me instead of buckling into a vestibular torture chamber.

Aside from a bad case of ride-induced nausea, I think we had a fun and memorable day.

Another birthday

I turned 46 at the end of April. Huzzah. Another year on this rock, orbiting a star, in the arm of a spiral galaxy with a massive black hole in its center. Birthdays of course lose their sentimentality after you’ve had enough. But I had a nice relaxing day, not too many tickets on my desk, with some gloomy weather to preserve a chill mood.

Coming up

We’re barreling towards the end of the school year. I’m going back to Redmond again. Then to South Dakota to see my nephew graduate. Then my son will play his 80’s rock show. We got grandparents coming into town. A busy month for sure. Then summer officially begins.

Stats

Ok, perverts. Here’s the numbers.

🧠 Health and wellness

Still working on untying the knot of ADHD, anxiety, and weight in my life. I feel like I’ve done well on managing the ADHD. The weight could be better (considering how much I’m spending on GLP-1) but I am seeing progress. The anxiety though is hard to shake.

I watched some Dr. K videos about engineer burnout that resonated with me and another one about ADHD and anxiety where your brain reinforces itself into a state where you feel like there’s always a tiger in the bushes. That’s how I feel. No acute anxiety, but ambient.

Anyways, I’m under doctor’s orders to power down devices at 10:30pm and go to bed. It’s 11:52pm right now. I’ve also resumed going to therapy again (after a bad experience) and hope it sticks this time.

📖 Reading

Dungeon Crawler CarlA Libertarian Walks Into a BearHow to Blow Up a PipelineThe Art of Spending MoneyBLAME! Vol. 1CreativityThe Science of StorytellingIn This Economy?BLAME! Vol. 2Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Vol. 4High ConflictA Good Man Is Hard to FindMobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Vol. 5Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Vol. 6

  • Dungeon Crawler Carl [In progress] - This is my going to bed book, I’m reading it one page at a time. It’s taking so long.

  • A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear ★★★★½ - The story of what happens when Libertarians take over a town, deregulate and defund the town with lawsuits, get their small government wishes, and how the local bear population took advantage of the situation. An good story and foreboding allegory on how quickly you can ruin a place with small government.

  • How to Blow Up a Pipeline ★★★★ - This book is about violence in activism and the lackthereof in climate activism. It argues that violence has a historical track record of being effective against oppression. It even takes another step to say that non-violence is more effective when there’s a violent alternative (e.g. “There’s no MLK without Malcom X”). I’m not running out the door to commit crimes, but it does make me think about opportunities for “Good Trouble”.

  • The Art of Spending Money ★★★ - This is the book I wanted The Psychology of Money to be, but that one just made me mad about billionaires cheating the system. This is a good book with a lot of practical takeaways you’ve probably heard before. It does seem like it ran out of steam and they chucked a few blog posts on at the end, but would still recommend.

  • BLAME! Vol. 1 ★★★½ - Confession: I read this in the worst possible format on my iPad Mini. Blame! is about a young man on a mission to traverse the “The City”, a thousand layer megastructure that’s plagued by hoards of assassin robots. A dystopian sci-fi hyperdungeon of the ultimate magnitude. And while I enjoyed it, I think the iPad Mini cheapened the immersion and I may need to re-read this on paper.

  • Creativity ★★★★ - Learning about creativity from one of the greats. It’s a really short book and worth your time.

  • The Science of Storytelling ★★★★★ - On its surface this is a great book about crafting compelling narratives, but this book digs deeper and looks at the human psychology of why we like stories, mythos, and religions. I rarely pick books up a second time but I might with this one.

  • In This Economy? ★★★★ - Kyla Scanlon is one of my favorite economists, with the uncanny ability to breakdown the economic system into simple, understandable, and relatable terms. Being in my 40s, there wasn’t much new knowledge to be gained in this book but this is a book that I wish I read in my twenties. It would have helped me make sense of the larger picture of how all the systems and economic levers are connected.

  • BLAME! Vol. 2 ★★★★½ - I was hesitant to read this because I sort of struggled through Vol. 1, but this book was incredible. Action-packed and the way Nihei creates enormous worlds and plays with that sense of scale leaves you with a sense of awe.

  • Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Vol. 4 ★★★★★ - The story of the most consequential battle of the One Year War. The death of a loved one, an intrusion into a secret base, a vulnerable Earth, an incompetent general, and the introduction of my favorite mobile suit, the RGM-79 GM.

  • High Conflict ★★★★★ - Incredible book. It’s about how conflict arises. How even conflict experts can struggle to reduce conflict. How we become entrenched in gangs or partisan warfare. And how we get out.

  • A Good Man Is Hard to Find [In progress]

  • Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Vol. 5 ★★★★★ - This book is a prequel on the original Mobile Suit Gundam storyline. It dives into the origin story of the Gundam universe’s most dashing and daring antihero, Char Aznable. This storyline is what makes me love Gundam even more.

  • Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Vol. 6 [In progress]

📝 Blogging

A pile of posts. I’m proud of some of these. Even wrote a series on a new CSS property. And a lot of thoughts about AI.

📺 Media

Caught some movies on a plane and in a theater.

Movies

  • Rental Family (2025) - Brendan Frazier stars in a movie about connection (and lack there of). Touched some deep memories of loneliness and “otherness” from my time living in Japan. But also has some harmonic notes on the need for human connection.
  • The Running Man (2025) - Everyone should watch this. A remake of the 1985 Schwarzenegger movie but hits all the notes harder. It’s about how media and our screens lie to us… and the money that’s behind it. An antifascist story for the ages.
  • Parasite (2019) - I need to watch more Bong Joon Ho. It’s horror, but also a comedy, but also a story about trying to live in a world where the rich have everything. I love how the house is like a character in the film and they dedicate a lot of footage to the perfect home.
  • Project Hail Mary (2026) - I loved the book and the Ryan Gosling movie lived up to everything I remember and then some. It’s a story that sparks hope about humankind is capable of if we work towards a common goal.
  • The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) - The second movie in the Mario series was pretty good in my book. Delivered a lot of small nostalgia bits while also weaving a compelling little story.

🎙 Recording

ShopTalk blasted past our 700th Episode 🎉 and it keeps going. We’ve had a nice little run of guest episodes which is nice.

I was also on a St. Patrick’s Day episode of Whiskey Web Whatnot podcast (my second time on the show).

🧶 Hobbies

  • Puzzles with the family
  • Music with family and friends
    • Bought some vdrums
    • Jamming with my son
    • Learning FACGAE turning
    • Building out a set list with my wife and friends
    • Taking my son to see a ska band (The AuSKAnites) at a dive bar.

🌱 Digital gardening

  • A big, big redesign for my site pots of small tweaks to type and tags made over time.
  • Made my logo view transition a little bit juicier
  • Used @jimniels’ Netlify Image CDN trick to add image optimization.
    • Homepage image weight went from 229kb to 112kb (-52%)
    • Homepage average image load times (on fiber+wifi) went from 125ms → 71ms (-44%)
  • I made a /hire page, a different take on a résumé - Not looking for work but economic anxiety is high, so catharsis.
  • Moved ~70 drafts to my “Deadpool” and feeling much more focused on what I want to write about. Still 109 drafts tho.
  • Added a “Other posts in this series” module to my post template. I don’t have a lot of series… but perhaps now I’ll have more.

⌨️ Open source

  • Been active in standards in the background, giving my thoughts to people who work on Edge. Don’t know if I have the heart for it full time but it does feel good to gather concrete examples of problems and make reduced test cases.
  • Fluent Web Components v3 is in Release Candidate nearing release… but also finding more bugs as it rolls out. I got the good news that Fluent Web Components are now deploying in the largest Angular app in the world. Neat.
  • Assisting and giving my team feedback as we gear up for a release of FAST v3.

👾 Video games

  • Arc Raiders - Played Arc Raiders with the boys and had a great time with this game. The game loop gets repetitive but the moments are so cinematic. There were times I was genuinely spooked to be in an environment with unknown threats (PvE or PvP) lurking around.
  • Good Sudoku by Zach Gage - Got utterly addicted to this old game. It’s probably been five years since I last played it but the replay-ability of Sudoku is bonkers. Same damn numbers, same damn boxes and rows and columns, but I’m hooked. Kudos to Zach Gage for adding “juice” to Sudoku and helping me learn along the way. So addictive I had to uninstall.