Happy New Year! My life looks a lot different in January 2024 than it did twelve months ago. In that time, I’ve accumulated more than 1,000 miles of road cycling experience, completed 55 books, marginally improved my pinball skills, played drums in front of a live audience for the first time in over 7(!) years, gave some hand-made gifts that I personally knitted, and started getting regular haircuts, something that is absolutely one of my most disliked parts of existence (don’t ask me why, I just really don’t like the process – it’s much worse than seeing a dentist, for me!).

More importantly, I’ve also survived two significant life changes: my layoff in July, and more recently, the conclusion of my romantic relationship of 15 years in November. I have been on a self-imposed sabbatical since the loss of my employment, and though it hasn’t always felt that way at times, I think the long, empty days have in fact been helpful, as they’ve provided plenty of time and space to process, mourn, and reflect on these events.

I’m thankful to be blessed with a great support network of friends who have taken time to get together to talk, laugh, and distract me from my life’s significant personal happenings. Though these last few months have been difficult and a new year is an arbitrary marker of a fresh start, I’m coming into 2024 with a refreshed sense of optimism and determination to make this year much better than the last one for myself and those around me.

My theme for this year is self-care. This will manifest itself in myriad ways, first and most importantly by securing meaningful employment to stabilize myself financially and provide professional goals to focus on and work toward. Beyond that, I aim to continue building on the good habits I formed in 2023 to strengthen my mind and body through exercise, independent study, creative pursuits, and play. Additionally, I’m going to seek new opportunities to engage myself socially to help forge new friendships, and take steps toward deepening my existing ones. In practice, this means more of the same (reading, cycling, playing drums), but also challenging myself to get out of my comfort zone by taking courses, attending meetups, and otherwise putting myself out there in ways I might otherwise avoid.

I’m determined to make this a great year, and I hope you are as excited about fresh opportunities as I am. If not, perhaps I could be part of your own support network to help you talk through ideas and challenges, because I believe we’re all capable of so much more than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. Let’s stay positive, find those wins, and help make days brighter for one another in every way that we can, because the only way to move is forward.

Here’s to the start of a great year.

It’s Autumn in Minnesota, that time of year when the days get shorter, the sleeves get longer, and patio gatherings start getting much harder to come by. With so few months of truly lovely weather, it’s a little sad to see summer come to a close. We’re just 3 1/2 weeks away from standard time and 5:30pm sunsets.

I’m thankful to have had the freedom and flexibility to enjoy it a bit more than I have in years past. This year, I set a personal goal to ride 1,000 miles on my bike, and by late July I’d ridden just over 400. I’ve more than doubled that in the 2 1/2 months since, and as I write, I have 148 miles left to reach my goal. Strava tells me I’m ahead of schedule, but I don’t think it knows what a fair weather cyclist I am – I’m racing the clock and hoping for the promise of an El Niño winter to buy me some extra time.

Lately, many of those bike rides have been taking me to a little river town called Minneapolis (perhaps you’ve heard of it?), where I’ve been partaking in opportunities to co-work with members of my local tech community. During these gatherings, I’ve been working on updates to pgBoard, a 20+ year-old PHP message board application developed by some acquaintances of mine out east. It needs PHP and third-party library updates, and in particular, developer tooling that makes it easier to spin up a local environment to write new features and bug fixes. Setting up Docker containers, refactoring the application so I can write unit tests, writing database seeding scripts, and working with other unfamiliar-to-me technologies like PostgreSQL and Sphinx has been both fun and challenging. Doing it without any kind of time constraints and only when I feel like looking at a code base has been great for my burnout recovery, too.

Which, speaking of burnout, I realized I was suffering from it, but not necessarily to what extent. I watched a great course on LinkedIn Learning by Emilie Aries called Managing Career Burnout which described the signs and causes and it described me to a T. I’m thankful to be more aware of it now and to have more tools available to me to be able to deal with it better going forward.

I signed up for a year of LinkedIn Learning about a month ago. Most days, I’ll work through a full course in the morning, then take a break for lunch, a walk, a video game break, or whatever, then set off on a bike ride somewhere. Sometimes I worry that the courses I’m taking will seem too rudimentary to others who have been working as a software engineer for as long as I have, but I post them to my profile when I’m done anyway. It’s about the journey, not the worry.

So what are those topics? Essentials, really. AWS. Docker. Laravel. Postgres. React and NextJS. But, though I’m coming at them with the idea that I need to know them deeply, what it’s really more about for me is having the tools I need to be able to take a project from ideation to launch, and feeling equipped to help others reach the vision they have for their projects. It’s about rightfully reclaiming my identity as a full stack engineer, as someone who can help solve problems and make knowledgeable choices and decisions.

And, again, I’m thankful. Though I’m giving my days some general structure, I’m also leaving myself lots of space to heal through other activities.

Just over two weeks ago, my partner and I grabbed a pair of tickets to see the Minnesota United play against the San Jose Earthquakes at Allianz Field, our first time there even though it’d been open already for 6(!) seasons. I went again last Saturday when she was out of town with her family and saw Teemu Pukki score a team-record four goals in one game.

I’m trying to draw more. I’m rediscovering my love of pinball and am planning on visiting LITT Pinball Bar at its new location this week. A second guitarist joined our band a few weeks ago and we’re starting to talk about playing a show, possibly as early as next month. I’m rediscovering my record collection. And though my pace has slowed a bit, I’m still reading a lot.

I’ve heard about a few employment and possible contract opportunities, and what I’ve learned from this time so far is that I need more of it. There’s still a lot I want to do that I haven’t gotten to yet, including some travel. I still have questions that I need to answer for myself. But, compared with the end of July, I am feeling closer to it, and the more I put in the work and play with this downtime, the better prepared I’ll be to hit the ground running. The great thing about the shorter days and the indoor vibes is that it’s easier for me to focus.

Summer may be over, but the best is still yet to come.

Four weeks ago today, several of my peers and I were let go as part of a company restructuring. I mentioned it in my last update, but after taking many beautiful, wide-open summer days to process, decompress, and think about my future, I’m choosing to be more explicit about it now.

I’m not looking for a new gig; I’m not looking for contract work. Not yet, anyway.

In the spring of 2020, I was interviewing with a company about a role that would have been a major shift away from the day-to-day that I knew. At the time, my engineering experience was centered on the WordPress agency space, and this potential opportunity offered a chance for something new: working on a product team with languages and tools that aren’t part of the WordPress ecosystem. I was eager for change, and interviewing was going well, so I put faith in myself and gave notice at my then-current job.

The week after my last day there, the entire U.S. economy started shutting down in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. I had a half-day onsite interview scheduled with the new company, which became a half-day Zoom call, which became, “I’m sorry, but our company is no longer hiring for any roles.” I understood, of course. Those were scary times.

Since then, I’ve taken on a variety of roles, always with the larger goals in mind: moving into product, moving toward other technologies, or both. In June, my latest efforts were finally starting to pay off as I transitioned onto our broader backend team and began contributing to our parent product. Then I got the news.

I was so close.

What’s Next?

When I enrolled in the CSCI program at my local community college in 2011, my passion at the time was absorbing all the computer programming information that I could. Then, as now, I saw my future being one where I work collaboratively on a team with really smart people, designing and building really cool software that provides real value to the people who use it. There wasn’t a programming language or a framework that I wanted or felt that I needed to adhere to. Nor did I realize at the time that there would be implications for making a choice, or how difficult it would be to branch out into other areas after that initial decision.

Each subsequent choice I’ve made seems to have taken me further and further from that early vision. What I need is a reset.

My plan for right now? Enjoy the rest of the year. Recharge. Be proactive about putting myself back on my desired path. There’s way too much out there in the world to be typecast to this thing or that. I’m capable of so much, and I intend on demonstrating it.

Until then, I’m on break. If you read this and it resonates with you, let’s grab some coffee.

In lieu of concrete goals this year, I instead set three general guidelines by which to live my life in 2023:

• Be Smarter
• Be Healthier
• Be Hotter

Previously, when I’ve set measurable goals, I would wind up feeling bad about ones I didn’t achieve, even if I achieved some or most of what I’d set out to do. With these general guidelines, I’m shifting my intentions to instead ask myself whether and how a given choice or activity fits into the bigger picture. By being intentionally vague, the result becomes a positive feedback loop when a choice I make aligns with a guideline (alright, I finished another book!), and an opportunity to reflect on a choice when it doesn’t (do I really need to eat another grocery store apple fritter?). This is a much better psychological vibe for me than taking stock during the year to find out all of the ways I’m behind, or at the end when I didn’t measure up.

Of course, this isn’t to say that there aren’t measurable goals behind the intentions. After all, I still want to accomplish things! For example, last autumn I purchased the first multispeed bicycle in my life because my partner got really into cycling earlier in the year and, using my single-speed, I couldn’t join her on the long rides she wanted to embark upon. The new bike let me ride further, and riding further meant feeling better because it’s good exercise. I rode 350 miles in September and October last year, so I turned that into a mileage goal of 1,000 for 2023, or approximately 142 miles per month for the seven or so nice weather months we get in Minnesota. I’m currently just above 400, so I’m behind, but every time I go on a ride I know I’m working toward at least two of those goals (healthier, because cycling is good for you, and hotter, because feeling stronger and more capable will no doubt grant me more self-confidence).

In the smarter category, I set a measurable reading goal as I do every year. Last year, I aimed to read 15 books but only managed 8, so I thought it made good logical sense in the spirit of my three guideliness to increase that amount and make up for those missing books. In 2023, I aimed to read 30, and I accomplished this goal in May! I don’t know whether I’m smarter for having read 30 books in 4 1/2 months, but I can tell you that I feel like I know more things and knowing things is hotter, right?

One of the books I finished recently is Imanigable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything – Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal. The author is a designer of alternative reality games and researcher of future scenarios, especially those which may seem far-fetched from today’s perspective. Imaginable comes packed with scenarios to imagine yourself in and exercises to practice to help you prepare for them so that if these scenarios become reality, you are ready for them and are better equipped to take action.

Imaginable resonated with me, I think, because I felt that it validated the sort of thing I already intrinsically know: anything can happen, and it can happen to us. By imagining yourself in these particular scenarios and thinking about what steps you will take when actually experiencing them, you take some of the panic out of the situation. You’re ready for it, almost because you knew it was coming.

It’s been almost a year now since the tech industry has been signaling signs of a recession. It seems that I can barely go a couple of days before I read news about another big company cutting staff, or someone I know or someone they know finds themself stuck looking for their next gig. Because it’s all around, and because it’s so possible, it’s extremely easy to imagine that the bad news will come around.

Last week, unfortunately, it was my turn to receive the news. Thankfully, because I could imagine it, I’m prepared to tackle whatever might be next.

In the short term, this means focusing on my mental and physical health. Smarter and healthier. There’s a lot of summer left, so I should have an easier time catching up on my cycling goal, and maybe I’ll just take a good book along with me and read it in a park or by the lake. I can be more intentful about keeping my Duolingo streak alive (98 days!). I can take more walks and spend more time connecting with my friends, loved ones, and community.

Longer-term, I have a lot of studying to do. Toward the end of my tenure in my last role, I was finally getting to do development work outside of WordPress. I want more of that. It’s time to dig into personal projects and side gigs and other networks to prepare for my next role, in whatever form that takes.

I don’t know what’s going to be next for me. I do know that despite the circumstances, I’m grateful for the opportunity to become a smarter, healthier, and hotter version of my current self.