Life

As the break continues, I’m more and more grateful for all the time I’ve been able to spend with family and friends. We fail to talk enough about how hard it is to maintain healthy human relationships when we’re busy working five days a week and trying to maintain a household the other two.

I’m also now finished my 2024 Enbridge Tour Alberta for Cancer sock queue and have already started on the first pair for the 2025 campaign! Though I have to confess I haven’t been working on them as hard as I should be…

Work

I continue to be off on a planned career break which started last June. While I planned to start spinning up the job hunt flywheel in September, for various reasons that didn’t quite happen. But I’m happy to say progress has begun here in October, with focus in three main areas:

Warming up the network and building more contacts in the local industry,
Ideation on what I want my next role to be,
Working through my professional reading queue.

Somewhere in there I also need to spend more time actively exploring the potential of modern AI. While I don’t buy the hype that LLMs will render humans obsolete, it’s a given that these technologies will have an impact (some good, some bad, some large, some small) on the world going forward and it would be silly to ignore that.

Projects

I finally got around to converting an old china cabinet into an indoor grow op for herbs and so forth.
I’m on the verge of rebuilding our deck/sunroom after a years long saga that will eventually be the subject of a lengthy blog post.
I continue to act as maintainer for the jekyll-webmention.io gem, though I haven’t cut a release in a while…

Learning

I’m two days away from completing my last driving lesson, with my class 5 test scheduled for November 8th!
About half way through Cagan’s Inspired¹

Not a lot of new insights after over a decade of product management experience, but still a worthwhile read (though I question its applicability to companies that aren’t archetypal internet-delivered B2C businesses). ↩