What I'm doing now

Rejiggering this website

I’ve been bad at getting this started. I kept overthinking it by trying to categorize everything. The activation energy to post was too high because I was writing straight HTML.

No more. I’ve switched to Zola. I have posts and pages. Pretty much everything is written in Markdown. Now I just need to find a groove.

Baking bread

It’s that time of year. I want to bake more consistently, and maybe start tweaking some recipes. I’ve had my sourdough starter for ~15 years. Surely I can come up with something interesting by now.

Riding my bike

On a trainer. In my garage. Usually when it’s 20–30°F, which is actually great once you get going.

Ostensibly training for a trip to Tucson in late February. I’ve ridden Mt. Lemmon once and I’m confident I can do better this time.

Thinking about purpose

I’ve been listening to Mark Manson’s Solved episode on purpose and realizing I’ve bought into a lot of the common myths.

You only have one.

It can’t change.

It’s something you discover.

The science, and centuries of philosophical thought, suggest otherwise. Needless to say, that’s prompted some reflection.

Working

On a few client projects to pay the bills.

But I’m more excited about a side project we’ve been working on.

Thermal system modeling tools are generally clunky, antiquated, fragile, proprietary, and a bunch of other bad things. They’re not pleasant to use or to build.

We think we can do better by, well… actually doing software engineering. Static typing to encode real domain types and catch errors at compile time. Functional programming to make models easier to compose, connect (helped by static typing), and actually test. That kind of thing.

It’s very early, but it’s starting to come together. We’re planning to show it at a conference in a few months, which is a great forcing function to get it into a usable state.