Alive

(still)

Last time I updated this blog, it was 5 years ago-ish and I was recently married. It was hosted on a completely different server running bare metal nginx and a bunch of cronjobs. I worked at Tripadvisor, had recently gotten married, and was in the middle of an MBA.

Tripadvisor suffered heavily in the pandemic and I left ahead of some "reductions-in-force" I was fairly certain would affect some of my friends and colleagues. I worked briefly at Hubspot but it didn't work for me in a fully remote world or with the new information I had from my MBA. The MBA mostly made me angry, and since Hubspot is a company that more or less exists to serve the interests of tech folks with MBA's, I had to leave despite liking the people I was working with.

After a stint at a medical device engineering company, and a data engineering startup, all of a sudden Katie was pregnant while the pandemic was still in full force. I decided to make the change to become a stay-at-home dad full time while our daughter/future children were too small to talk. My mom stayed home with my siblings and I when we were young, and I wanted my kids to have the same opportunity to feel safe, secure, and attached. I also wanted to support Katie's career since she loves to work in large organizations and I want to work in small ones.

So I pivoted to spending 100% of my time making the house "safe" for our kids, including redoing almost all of the electrical and plumbing, and making the house infrastructure "smart" because I like having data. Oh yes, we also moved out of Somerville up to Westford, because the pandemic in Somerville was horrible. I dunno if it was the horriblest place to have the pandemic because there were entire regions of the country that FAFO'd the whole thing, but it was pretty bad for MA. Couple of the first cases in the country were registered in the school a couple streets away from our house, and while I appreciated that the city took public health seriously the crackpot residents started to make me question why I lived there. I'd be outside walking/running in atmosphere and people like 20 feet away would yell about masks. I was super pro mask and vaccine and all that, I just wasn't interested in crazy people.

So now it's been 17 months of stay-at-home dad, and to be honest it is hard as hell. I still have a strong passion for computing and work, and I manage to to a fair amount of both, but the social isolation of being a non-working parent is real and difficult. Being a male primary parent has also proven more challenging both practically and emotionally, since it is not the expectation. In parenting settings other people almost always talk to Katie about Josephine, but not me. When we are out together, I have been corrected by others about how to parent, questioned whether I was her parent, and also am constantly told she is a boy and not a girl. The best is when I correct people and they get offended, probably because they're trans panic type people. "She's a girl, she just doesn't have long hair" works most of the time but not on the people who need better hobbies than being mad about everything.

Partially I'm posting to see if everything still works, since I've fully Dockered (Dockerized? Docked?) my host infrastructure and using the software I'm running on it is a good way to end-to-end test it. However, I'm also hoping to update more regularly with posts about family, home projects, and technical stuff that I figure out that isn't just copypasta'd off the internet. Guess we'll see.