now doing
# Raising a cat and a dog with my partner.
I really love these little animals!
Our cat, GameCube, was adopted in early 2023. She was only a year old and had just had her second litter of kittens! We took her in, had her spayed, and taught her to be a baby again. She's a street cat and came in to our home a bit violent, but I'm very proud to say she's learned to be incredibly sweet and loving, in addition to being goofy, playful, and (still) violent.
Our chiweenie, however, was about 10 when we got her in early 2025. Her name is Gravy. She's graying around the muzzle and loves to cuddle and sleep, but she loves to go on walks in the cold even more. She's exactly the same size as GameCube and we had to remove almost half her teeth so we finally feel safe leaving the two together. But we've gotten even luckier than we thought, because they actually love each other.
# Building hella mechs.
Since I rediscovered my old Bionicles in 2022, and was later gifted my first Gunpla kit (HG RX-78-02, which to be honest I don't even like aesthetically, but it got me hooked), I've been descending ceaselessly into the autistic depths of mech fandom.
At this point I'm pretty entrenched. It's immensely odd to me, and a bit sad, that I only realized in 2023 while playing Armored Core VI that I love mechs and always have. I think I just assumed that because I never got into the Gundam IP that I wasn't a mech fan. But my old topyboxes are littered with Z'Goks, transforming beast-robot warriors, and other obvious signs. Even though I actually still don't actually like any Gundam media, I have at least half a dozen Mobile Suit kits to go with my Armored Core kits and numerous customs... so I think it's safe to say I'm a fan of giant humanoid robotic vehicles of war.
I've only slightly dabbled in painting, primarily for Battletech minis. That's mostly because I keep changing my custom builds - I buy batches of 30 Minutes Missions several time a year and tinker/experiment with new pieces almost every day, so painting a build prematurely would kind of get in the way of that. If I get more into painting... I actually don't really like the Battletech aesthetic, and I'll probably eventually start collecting 40k. I have long loved 40k despite not playing the tabletop game, and I'm already so close to it.
# Continuing to read fiction.
Some Discworld, some Eggers, some Lahiri. I still don't enjoy reading long-form nonfiction.
I recently made a Storygraph profile. Still working on backfilling past reads, but I think it gives a good idea of what kind of reader I am (... picky and inconsistent?).
# Growing as a software engineer
I've come around to appreciating my work more and more as I've developed confidence. Over the past few years, most of my closest coworkers have left, which meant two things: First, I felt more liberated to say "I don't know what that is or how it works" when someone asks me about a system that nobody else has experience with. Counterintuitively, this has built my confidence greatly - I have nothing to hide, and people still trust me.
Second, it's forced me to actually learn a lot of technologies, strategies, and philosophy I never really had time for previously. This has the secondary effect of giving me a lot more to teach to my coworkers when onboarding them to projects I've been owning, which I've really loved!
I went through an interesting inverse bell curve of confidence over my career so far. Starting out in a bootcamp, I felt like a prodigy - inexperienced, but well suited to the subject. After my first contract position ended, though, I found myself feeling more and more unsure that I could ever actually be a good developer. It's taken me years now to construct a new idea of what a good developer even is - and to understand that it isn't just one thing.
At this point, I feel very confident that I have many strong skills and the ability to learn quickly and deeply. But that has only come on the heels of learning my weaknesses more honestly - some of which only came from numerous medical diagnoses over the years. Genuinely, I could not feel good about my career if I had never, for example, learned that I have ADHD, and chronic depression, and so on. By learning to navigate the physiological limitations of myself, I've developed acceptance of them, which has led to pride and confidence in the skills I have and the ways that I actually do excel in my role.
I had very high expectations for myself as a late-20's career-changer with close to 0 knowledge of programming. Adding on top of that my disabilities, and the habits I learned in the decades of undemanding work prior to my new career, it's not at all surprising that I didn't straightaway start writing beloved FOSS libraries or working at Google. (Not to mention, I actively avoided the big names initially due to ethical concerns - I had no idea about the prestige and insane compensation of developing for them.)
I've only learned in recent years what it means to "trust the process" as my old 76ers-fan roommate said often (thank you, Jeff!): Focusing on the doing, not the outcome. While it's helpful to at times step back and see if you're walking a path that goes in a a direction you like, I am not obsessed with the destination any longer, and I'm more productive for it.