We live life day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, breath by breath. There’s no way to change that. Sometimes though, we wish away time, looking forward to the next thing: the weekend, the party, the trip. When we do that, we shift from living into enduring. The time still passes the same way, but it’s no longer valuable time to us. It is simply time that we need to get through in order to arrive at the moment we actually care about.
That’s a recipe for regret. Do that enough times and you’ll look back at weeks, months, and years spent wishing away the present for a future that simply came and went.
Back to the grind. Back to enduring. Back to waiting for time to pass.
Instead I’m trying to value every breath I take, living every moment with intention. In the moments I find myself wishing for a better future, I will come back to the present where I will find a life being lived.
Update: This post is out of date, as I decided to return the Air and keep my 16" M1 Pro MacBook Pro instead. When it came time to mail my trade-in, I couldn’t part with it, it’s still such an awesome machine. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll revisit the Air. I’m leaving the post up because it’s still accurate information, but I no longer have the machine.
I side-graded my 2021 16" MacBook Pro to the 15" MacBook Air. I’ve been doing a bit more travel lately, and I’m getting tired of lugging the bigger 16" beast around with me. The smaller machine is a tradeoff in a few areas compared to the Pro, but it shaves 1.4lbs (0.59kg) of weight off, is significantly thinner, and slightly smaller.
The 15" Air stacked on top of the 16" Pro to illustrate relative size.
I haven’t had the opportunity to take a trip with it yet, but in some trial runs throwing it in my backpack, the difference is already feeling nice.
It’s been about a year and a half since I wrote my last home office post and while much of it has stayed the same, I’ve updated and moved things around quite a bit and felt it was time to write about my current setup and share some new pictures.
A photograph of the desk and surrounding art in my home office (October 2023).
I’ve been working remotely since mid-2016 – now in my eighth year. The majority of that time I was working for Bleacher Report/Turner Sports, then remotely for Apple1 before joining a startup named Commonstock. After a little over a year at Commonstock, we were acquired by Yahoo2 where I now work as a principal software engineer on the Yahoo Finance iOS app.
as we approach the first birthday of our dog Dutch, i wanted to look back on our time with him as a puppy with fondness and appreciation for what he’s taught us and the many fun things we’ve done with him.
A photo of Dutch and I at Del Mar dog beach in southern California.
in june of last year we decided to bring a puppy home. we had been talking about getting a dog at some point, then one day i ran into an old friend at the gym who had some puppies available from their litter of goldendoodles. we really weren’t planning on getting a puppy right then, but we saw this cute little ball of fluff with his unique silver and black coat and we fell in love. after a lot of discussion over a couple days we decided to take the plunge into puppy fueled depression and sleep deprivation.
the first days were predictably up and down. one minute he was amazingly cute and adorable, and the next we were at our wits end trying to meet his needs while also satisfying the other demands in our lives.
days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. at some point i forgot to set my 1am, 3am, and 5am alarms and i woke up at 6am panicked that he probably soiled his crate. after rushing to let him out, it was clear that he had slept through the night without an accident.
it’s easy to look back on our time with Dutch with a focus on the things we couldn’t do, but the reality is that there are many things we did with Dutch that we wouldn’t have done otherwise. days that we were tired, but we still went on a fun hike in the hills. afternoon trips to Dutch Bros to get him a pup cup. cold evenings this winter when we went outside to run around in the snow together. all of these little moments brought so much joy and silliness to our lives that we may not have had otherwise.
it’s been a growing and a learning experience to raise a puppy (and we’re not out of the woods yet), but Dutch has been the best addition to our little family that we could have asked for and i’m grateful for him in our lives. here’s to many more wonderful and silly adventures with him hanging his tongue out the car window and wagging his tail emphatically.
i haven’t written about my new app Albums on this site, which is a little bit intentional and a little bit of an oversight. let me explain.
i don’t know who reads this blog. intentionally. i have no analytics, no email subscription list, nothing. if i had to guess, the number of people that read any given article is more than five and less than one hundred. i’m not sure if that’s me being dismissive of my own reach or trying to be somewhat realistic about the deluge of content we wade through every day.1
so back to not writing about my new app here. it’s a bit of an oversight because this is my “official” website. it’s the one that bears my name and the one that has some reasonably important announcements on it. it should probably contain at least some reference to my first indie iOS app in over a decade. as for it being intentional, i don’t consider the app to be “finished” yet. it’s still missing functionality that i desperately wanted to put into the first release, but somehow convinced my perfectionistic ADHD brain to push below the line. i stubbornly didn’t want to announce the app in a long-form post until it was “ready”.
but that’s kinda silly since as we’ve established: i’m not sure if any significant number of people read this blog and even if they do, is an app ever truly finished? i may be waiting a long time.
so without further delay: i shipped version 1.0 (and 1.1) of my first indie app in over 12 years. it’s called Albums, and it’s one of the things i’m most proud of building.
Some screenshots from my new app ‘Albums’ displaying a portion of my music library.
