• Tour Alberta Success!

    10 min read

    So first, a belated apology to my supporters as this post is coming a full week since the event, but in short: great success! But there’s certainly plenty more to say about this year’s tour.

    #cycling #TourAlbertaForCancer
    A photo of The Hue Crew

    As we were coming down from the big Tour weekend, Lenore reminded me of something I hadn’t really thought about: this was my fifth year participating in the Tour Alberta for Cancer.

    It’s odd because, on the one hand, the Tour has become a yearly ritual for me, something that in so many ways sets the tone and structure for the first half of any year as I (and now we) focus on training and fundraising efforts. July and August then become this rush as the year pivots on the axis of the Tour, the August long weekend, and the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, after which we begin the slow but inexorable march toward fall, with it’s many chilly nights and mornings, gorgeous days, and final gasps of summer activities before the wind up to ski season and the depths of winter.

    And yet, on the other hand, as much as the Tour has shaped my life for the last five years, it also feels new and novel, every year bringing its own joys and challenges.

    In part it’s probably because each year the Tour has often been marked by something unique: 2023 as my first ride of my career break; 2024 as my first ride without any corporate support, forcing my to work even harder with my supporters to hit the fundraising goal.

    And now, in 2025, riding with my wonderful wife Lenore for the very first time!

    As a result, every Tour has felt special in its own way, and this year is no exception.

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  • Back to work

    12 min read

    Yup, it happened. Over nineteen months and two eclipses later and the career break is officially behind me. I still can’t believe that time came and went so quickly, but I can say honestly that I’m excited to start something new.

    #CareerBreak #Sabbatical #Work

    How do nineteen months fly by so quickly? In some ways it feels like just yesterday that I made the difficult decision to leave my old role and, after over twenty long and fruitful years with my first and only real professional role, simply stop for a while.

    In the over year and a half that followed, the world around me changed dramatically. The AI hype cycle truly took off with an investment bubble that has seen untold billions sunk into startups, large established players, and the picks-and-shovels companies that underpin the industry. In parallel, we saw increasing evidence of a white collar recession taking shape, with the software industry no exception. While I don’t personally believe the former trend has played much of a part in the latter, these parallel trends have seen the software industry disrupted in a way it hasn’t been since the dot-com crash of 2000.

    Meanwhile, the political landscape has been utterly transformed. As the alt-right continued to rise and eventually take power in our neighbour to the south, we’ve seen sustained pushback against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and practices, and a decline in support for investing that takes into account environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, with some of that pushback taking the form of real changes to the legal and regulatory landscape in the US.

    As if that weren’t enough, in the first quarter of 2025 we’ve seen a sustained attack on Canadian sovereignty, as the new American administration has begun to wage an economic war on this country while cozying up to strongman dictators across the globe.

    I genuinely don’t remember the last time the world felt this… precarious.

    As you can imagine, given this context, I was more than a little anxious about beginning the hunt for a new job.

    So imagine my surprise, back in late November, when a former colleague reached out after noticing I was open to work…

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