It has been over twelve years since I last wrote to my blog, ending with a letter to my recently deceased brother. While my writing frequency had already dwindled during graduate school as depicted in Figure 1, Daniel’s death ended my blog writing. I had little desire to write for pleasure, and frankly didn’t want the letter to my brother to fall below the fold. However, with the recent leaps in how people work via generative AI, and how such tools have impacted my work, I finally feel like I’m ready to get back to writing. This post will serve as a reflective transition from where I left off, to where I want to go.
My brother’s death impacted me greatly. Despite being recently engaged with a wedding less than a year away, I felt like I was just a passenger going through the motions of life. If it weren’t for my incredible fiancée, and her family who lived in town, I may have fallen into an unrecoverable depression. Don’t get me wrong, I was very depressed. However, with their encouragement and the resources provided to me as a graduate student, I was able to promptly find and utilize mental health services. Moreover, I was fortunate to be able to step away from my responsibilities without worry about my personal finances.
In all, it was 11 weeks between my brother’s death and seriously getting back into finishing my Ph.D. In August of that year I was married, in September I defended my Ph.D., and that October I started my first full-time Software Engineering job, with AppFolio. Through AppFolio, I continued to educate others by teaching an annual graduate class at UC Santa Barbara, Scalable Internet Services. AppFolio used this course as a recruiting pipeline, and it was this class, which I took as a student, that led me to discover AppFolio and the amazing people who worked there.
AppFolio provided me with ample opportunities to mentor others, where, among other things, I developed and led the Ropes Program, which was backronymed into “Radical Onboarding Program for Engineering Success”. Upon reflection, I believe these teaching and mentoring opportunities satiated my desire to share things with others, thus giving me less reason to turn to my blog as an outlet. Furthermore, with a full-time job and a growing family (I did name my son after my brother), my “me” time shrunk drastically, so I likely wouldn’t have had enough time to organize my thoughts into cohesive writing.
At the end of 2021, I left AppFolio and joined Netflix. While I love the work I do at Netflix, my outlets to share things with others on work-time have drastically decreased, yet, nothing changed to result in more “me” time. For the most part, I’ve been okay with that as I didn’t feel like I had anything that valuable to share beyond my team. Nevertheless, I’ve felt like part of me was missing. However, over the last few months, my perspective on having valuable things to share has drastically changed due to Generative AI. In my next post, “Who Am I?”, I’ll discuss the anxiety I had around Generative AI, what changed to reduce that anxiety, and how I’m embracing that change.
Now, I am a husband, and a father of two wonderful, though often challenging, children. I’ve been with Netflix for over four years, and recently had an opportunity through work to explore Generative AI. This exposure has opened the door to resuming some long abandoned hobbies, most recently resuming work on my BBoeOS operating system (redundant I know). With Generative AI, I am working in a way I never had before, so I want to once again share things with the world through my writing, and hopefully find that missing part of me. I want to reiterate, as the disclaimer states, that 100% of the text you are reading here is and will continue to be my own. In future posts, I’ll detail how the sausage is made, both in how I work on my Operating System, and how I leverage Claude to help me outline my articles. Stay tuned!