Not that I was doing a great job of keeping this blog updated to begin with, but the birth of our youngest in 2013 essentially turned over every apple cart in our lives. :) It’s odd how parenthood changes you very little in some ways (your eyes still open the next morning and you are still you, provided your name isn’t Gregor Samsa), but completely changes everything in your life at the same time. Perhaps marriage is the same thing, it is on some level whatever you dedicate yourself to putting into it. While I am reluctant to make generalizations about an experience as varied as the human race itself, I feel safe asserting that it is one of the life events which have a clear demarcation of Before and After, regardless of what a person’s particular lived experience might be under that top-level heading. As we’re expecting our second later this year, this blog will probably return to deep hibernation until early 2017.
For myself, I find my life is filled at once with more worries and more hope. I worry every day about whether I’m doing the best thing I can for my family, but at the same time I see our youngest growing and learning and squealing with glee for the joy of being alive (“What’s this? A ‘dog’? DOGS ARE AWESOME!”), and I have hope that things will be OK. I don’t think anything could have possibly prepared me beforehand for the tsunamis of emotion I’ve felt being a parent.
On other fronts, I have a new job leading up the technical organization for the enterprise code/document review platform, Collaborator, made by SmartBear Software. We’ve certainly undergone quite a bit of organizational turmoil since I started in the fall of 2013 (~70% layoff in the spring of 2014, for starters), but we’re still shipping on a relatively regular release schedule, delivering new things to our customers, and all things considered doing much better than I had expected on some of the darkest early days. Being the-buck-stops-here for dev, docs, ops, qa and interfacing with marketing and sales is enough to keep any three people busy and it’s all on my plate. I probably shouldn’t even be writing this but I’m waiting for a really long build process to finish.
With parenting and a very full dance card at work, I haven’t much to share from an academic standpoint. I took a Coursera course on Automata taught by Ullman at Stanford and did well enough to get a pass certificate, for whatever that’s worth, and made an A in Algorithm Analysis from Oregon State’s eCampus (<3 online programs, for all their flaws). I think I presently have the minimal set of pre-reqs to apply to most graduate programs (maybe modulo an upper-level hardware class, depending on the school), but haven't made any real steps in that direction as it seems foolish to embark on that until the second child is at least into toddlerhood.