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3 day backpacking adventure in Indian Peaks Wilderness

Projects are like plants, they live and they multiply and they can die without the required care. Choosing what to focus my time and attention on is the biggest challenge; getting it right causes cascading positive results but getting it wrong leaves me frustrated and feeling out of alignment. The current spread of where my attention and time is going is a bit more evenly spread out than in past years but is full in a way the past couple years haven’t been.

For three days a week I work at a company called Glif, a low-code AI workflow builder for artists and builders as a full-stack engineer. Here’s a fun overview video by MattVidPro. It’s a great team and been fun to get to work on a project with excited people showing up in Discord asking for features and doing unexpected things with the tool.

some pegboard I put a few weeks ago.

Savannah and I spend about a half a day a week doing things in our neighborhood with friends. Sometimes this is hosting a dinner or a potluck, organizing a group hike up the nearest mountain or an art in the park day. I’m also a mentor for Cabin’s Neighborhood Accelerator program where we’re supporting people starting on their own neighborhood-building journeys (and if this sounds interesting, I encourage you to read more and consider applying to the next cohort in January).

Beyond that there’s a smattering of projects I’m helping build including Woven Web (local events organizing and community tooling experiments), Lingonberry AI (experimental multiplayer ai characters), and some experiments around andromeda.computer: CJ’s brainchild answering the question of how to better share compute resources as a community, how to empower more people to build the things they want to see in the world and improve what is already there using technology we already have in our living rooms. And of course the occasional house improvement project, most recently putting up pegboards and improving the organization in our storage closet.

After living off runway for 2+ years, the prospect of transitioning back to a world where I get paid by the hour felt like I had failed; like I was falling back into the all-consuming maw of structured time and limitations and obligations. But when actually talking to prospective companies I was intentional to avoid the places that restricted my ability to build and ship side projects and optimized for the ones where I get to choose my own schedule. So though I’m back in the salaryman world, I feel like I am still aligned with my needs and desires; at least as much as I can be in this world of tradeoffs and exchange.

ergonomic outdoor compute

One of the most frustrating experiences for me is being on a call around 3pm, 4pm, or 5pm as golden hour hits and I want to be outside but am not. Part of this is my own bad planning, part of it is the reality of collaborating with people up to 13 hours away. Cell service is hot garbage in Boulder and the parks don’t have WiFi so I brought my own: I got a Starlink Mini and a Renogy 266wH battery. This setup gives fast, low latency internet for about 8 hours - outlasting most laptops. And to solve that, I’ve gotten a few Anker 100WH battery packs as well.

Being able to sit outside in the afternoon sun, with all of the possible compute I need at my fingertips or being able to join in on a call is absolutely incredible. Or knowing that I can SSH into a server without the roundtrip latency making the entire experience miserable. And getting to share this wonderful thing with friends who bring their own ideas about what ergonomic outdoor compute means to them is such a joy.

I also finally got my Daylight Computer and it has been magical. I’m finishing this post on it as I write and it’s a fundamentally different experience sitting with direct sunlight hitting the screen and being able to use my configured Obsidian workspace on a responsive interface. More thoughts coming soon but the bottom line is between a Starlink that fits in my backpack and more e-ink devices hitting the market, I have this growing hope that we’re about to enter a new chapter of computing: one that is more ergonomic and compatible with the outdoors, allowing us more freedom to step away from the usual configurations we associate with working on a computer.

I’m planning to write up a whole post on everything I’ve learned about computing outside.

online connections & offline connecting

About two months back I went to visit my friend in San Francisco and had a jam packed couple days of walking around the beautiful city, catching up with friends doing incredible work, and getting driven around by a Waymo. I flew back to Colorado feeling a wave of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on yet but I felt was connected to ambition, to seeing and working towards a brighter future with others who see it too, and to seeing the magic of technology in a new lens.

A month and a half later I found myself at the Network Society Camp with Savannah, the Cabin team, and friends old and new. A delightful few days at a kids summer camp, meeting other people excited about the intersection of network states, decentralized autonomous organizations, co-living and co-ownership and better governance. The internet let us find each other and now we were in person: playing catch in a pool, taking a walk along the shore, or sitting around a bonfire telling stories into the night.

There I recognized some of that same wave of energy I felt in SF; that ambitious perspective that looks out at the world and imagines something better, and then works towards it regardless of the established, defined ways of doing it. And I realized how much I missed that energy and clusters of people embodying it. During Covid I, like many people, was quite separate from that. My first 1.5 years in Boulder were very still very internet-focused: I was physically here but socially spread across the planet through the internet.

In the past year I’ve met a good deal of friends here, and in the past couple months I’ve found several pockets of ambitious, intentional tech nerd-builders in the city. It’s lead me to feel a simultaneous deep love and appreciation for being here in Boulder as well as something resembling a grief at all the other places I’m not; all the friends living in different cities that I can only visit for brief moments of time, and still yet the infinitely larger group of people who I am only connected to digitally but who I hope to get to cook a meal with, hike a trail, and make some art together at some point.

There is only one me and so many of you all. And so many interesting, challenging, worthwhile pursuits being explored by brilliant souls.

recent reads

oh and I bought a new bike

I don’t know a whole lot about bikes but I do know I enjoy riding them. This summer my lovely Specialized Turbo Vado 4.0 got stolen and it was a sad day. It was insured so I didn’t lose money but it’s a really unfortunate thing to experience. So I started the search for a bike that I might actually enjoy carrying up the stairs while still being comfortable to ride around, and I went with the Surly Ogre; thanks CJ and Gary for helping me find this one. And it has been an absolute blast riding this thing around.