Now Update - 2026-05-20
This is a now page. It's a short summary of what I am currently up to. To see all the past and present entries, visit the then page.
Home
Home life has been busy, but fun and rewarding. Currently, we’re in the middle of two travel events.
In April, we traveled to Montréal as a family. My wife had 2 overlapping conferences, and my son and I tagged along to explore during the days, and have family time at night, in a new city. It was an exhausting trip for everybody, but a great experience. I already look back on it fondly.
At the end of the month, we’ll travel up to PA to celebrate my son’s 4th birthday and enjoy some time with my extended family.
When home, we’ve continued to watch the chickens (not really chicks anymore) grow and explore. They’ve encouraged us to spend more time in our backyard, which helps to motivate work on the endless list of projects we have for our outdoor space.
Over the last few months, we’ve established the chickens’ outside home, set up our gardens for the summer, and this past week I stained our two decks. It’s getting hot now, so I hope to focus less on outdoor projects for a bit… (at least past the morning hours).
Indie Dev
Since the last Now update, I’ve shifted my priorities here a bit. I haven’t been developing weekly and don’t list it as a top active goal right now. This is for several reasons:
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First, I need to take advantage of the nice spring weather to work on outside projects, before the unbearable central North Carolina summer hits.
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Second, I’ve realized over the last few months that my ideal solo business likely isn’t as a pure indie developer anyway. There’s a lot more thought behind this assertion, but this isn’t the time or place to expand on that.
(In short: I love development, but probably wouldn’t like the business of it. Most of my time wouldn’t be spent doing old-school development anyway, especially with AI in the picture now. It would be spent on the business/marketing stuff).
“Most full-time artists I know only spend an hour or two a day actually doing their art. The rest is spent on the boring work that comes with trying to make it a full-time career. So skip the art career and just do the art.”
Hell Yes or No, Derek Sivers
- Lastly, while reading the “How to do what you love and make good money” chapter of Hell Yes or No by Derek Sivers, I realized that, at this “season” of my life, my “job” really is family support and house projects. My dev work can be an “art” (or a skill/tool to do the real job, but as needed).
So I’m leaning into that a bit more. I’m learning home maintenance. How to build physical items. Repair them. Essentially, doing in the physical world what I loved about coding in the first place. It’s fun to be learning something completely different.
All that to say: I’m still using and debugging parenlists, but I don’t feel pressured to release it now. It’s an app for my family, and we’re already using it. I’ll probably try to polish and release it this summer, but mostly for completeness.
Reading
I’ve been reading much more since that previous update. I finished the Apple in China book, along with several others. I just started Apple, the First 50 Years by David Pogue and hope to finish it before it’s due. I swear not everything I’ve read has been about Apple or China.
Conclusion
A bit of a longer update, but I’m also using this as a medium to get out some of the thoughts that have been in my head 🙃.