Hello everyone! I’m back after several months of silence on my personal website blog. Let’s talk about what I’ve been up to.

Life Updates & Health

A lot of great things have happened. I’ve been honestly just continually recovering my health. Hands are good, ears good, enjoying the simpler things in life. Still working like a dog, still practicing the power of now, working on those relationships that really matter. So, feeling great about all that.

I guess if I had to find a topic for this blog, it would just be checking in.

Technology & Work

Let’s focus on technology first. I’ve been enjoying using model context protocol with Cursor. I switched over to using Cursor and honestly, from just raw work output mixed with accessibility, it’s incredible. I’m leveraging that to enhance a lot of my moonlight side projects as well as my day job.

I’m actually an advocate for a lot of AI technology at work and I’m open about what I’m using. I’m not ashamed. I think early on when I would talk to some developers, they seemed to be beating around the bush about using AI-assisted stuff, but now everyone’s on the bandwagon. Sorry for being a couple months late, but you know, life goes on and maintaining this personal blog is not the highest priority, although I do truly love it.

Currently, my role has switched more to a senior backend developer. Still doing some frontend stuff, but mainly just assisting them now from a different, business-logic-driving perspective – changing database models, migrations, and all that wonderful stuff. Making sure not to swamp all the resources out of our servers, writing things efficiently. So yeah, that’s a good little chunk on things I’ve been up to.

Side Projects & Personal Growth

Other things: my studio started to have a couple of artists come back through again, getting back up doing music production. I’m really enjoying doing music production with my partner; she is amazing, and we have a new song we’re planning on releasing sometime this year. Can’t wait for you to hear the guitar solo!

Yeah, I’ve been reading a book called “The Brain’s Way of Healing” [by Norman Doidge], which has been awesome. Just connecting that with all these other things… you know, there really are just so many things Western medicine is just absolutely failing on, and it’s honestly incredible. Not only that, just… it’s not necessarily Western medicine’s failing, it’s the application and our current system. Same with education – as you all know, I’m a former educator. Basically, a lot of anything that’s run by administrative people from a higher level that aren’t down doing the actual work just gets, you know, butchered and everything gets lost in translation. But sadly, the people that are affected most are the people at the bottom that actually need those services, like myself. So, you know, this has been a really great book. Norman Doidge, “The Brain’s Way of Healing” – check it out.

Also reading Moshé Feldenkrais’s “Awareness Through Movement”.

Speaking more on the technology side, I read “The DevOps Handbook” – absolutely loved it. Also read the new “Platform Engineering: Applying Technical and Product Thinking to the Developer Experience” by Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones – absolutely loved it. So I’ve grown a lot as a developer, and not only that, just my resiliency at managing and leading teams.

Looking Forward & Final Thoughts

So just looking forward to continuing to build products that leverage AI but are focused on solving real-world issues. Because that’s what I see the problem with a lot of companies is that they’re chasing… [thought trails off] but they’re not really getting to the fact that these technologies are supposed to make people’s lives easier, not take their jobs. So I will always continue to be an advocate for leveraging the latest technology, however, it needs to be ethically and morally balanced.

Yep, so I will pause there. That was a giant word dump, but hopefully, we can structure this and do something worth sharing online with you guys.

Oh yeah, I need to update my portfolio site. I built it using just basic HTML pretty much with the Astro framework, but now that I have the power of Cursor, I really need to just ham it up here and really make it look like a super developer website. But honestly, I’ve always loved the laid-back aesthetic because it lets you know that I’m more focused on driving real change than just showing you another crappy marketing website.

Anyway, I’m done. Peace out, love you guys, talk later.