What I've been doing since I quit my job

This note is a stream of consciousness - excuse the scattered nature please!

Since I’ve stopped working, I’ve had more opportunity to slow down and think about what I’ve wanted to do. I’ve spent my time on a bunch of deferred things, plus some new bucket list items. I’ve focused on my health, probably trying to be active for 1-2 hours each day, eating better, things like that.

I’ve also been learning to sail at Modern Sailing in Sausalito, which has been a fun experience. I’m not yet sure I’ll pursue it as my main hobby, (seasickness can be rough) but it is a great way to experience the SF Bay from a different perspective. There are also a wide variety of people who are doing it, and so I’ve met some really cool people. I’m not yet sure it will be my main pursuit, but so far I’ve appreciated it and have gotten to see what it feels like being under the Golden Gate Bridge, dock at Angel Island for lunch and heave-to outside of Oracle Park.

I’ve taken a few trips, notably fly fishing in New Mexico which was fun (if not a bit hot!)

I’m also continuing to learn to draw and play music. Both of these things are interesting in that they are very much activities that you just learn by doing, rather than by reading the theory. That’s always been hard for me; I resort to reading and thinking sometimes when I should just be grinding away and doing it. That said, there’s a bit of a merge of thinking and doing. While I was working, I would do both things, and find myself plateauing a lot. So, with guitar, what was frustrating to me is that while I could play music and read music, I could never hear it and play it by ear. So I have been able to slow down and focus on that. I’ve been reading Harmonic Experience by W. A. Mathieu, and he has a focus on singing / humming, to connect the sound you hear to your voice. I have a terrible voice and vocal range, but the act of connecting these things has been very valuable. I’m also learning to memorize songs, which ironically, I never bothered to do since I could read music. But it has been a good learning experience.

Things have also been very quiet. I’ve been reading a lot of books - mostly SF and Fantasy stuff, but I’ve found I’ve got more attention to spare and enjoy things that take a bit more thought, whereas when I was at work I would resort to short-form or sort of plot-oriented books since reflecting on it was tough.

Time is a luxury - I really enjoy being able to burn my minutes and hours and not worry about the payment due tomorrow.

And yes, I am doing some vibe coding things as well. One was a sailing game, which got to a certain spot and then I put it aside because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it. The other is an ongoing exploration of data platforms and distributed systems, and is a place for me to think about some of the frustrations and missed opportunities I see in existing systems. That has been surprisingly fun and interesting and I have burned a lot of tokens on various experiments. Nothing worth showing yet but I would expect I’ll talk about what I’ve learned and built more later this year. It’s really nice to be able to build this stuff without a relentless focus on commercialization. I think this is one of the lessons of the AI revolution - there seems to be 2 categories of success. One is indeed - relentless growth and commercialization - companies that were an idea on Jan 1 and a working product on Feb 1 and generating meaningful ARR by March 1. I love to see the ambition and creativity of these companies and I hope that they can be successful.

The second area is kind of just bespoke side projects that would never have seen the light of day. Taking a few bits of hardware and building your own photo album; a video game just for your kids, some software that you use to solve a real problem in your own business that never made it into the SaaS you use. These are really great and an antidote to AI Slop.

I don’t think AI Slop is as malevolent as people think. It seems that it’s a lot of people who are just starting to learn a new skill. Learning new skills starts mostly as copying. That’s how I learn to draw and play music. But over time, you learn to master it, and the things you produce are original and useful and produce real value in the world.

I haven’t been playing too many video games recently - nothing has seriously held my interest since Arc Raiders and I’ve put that aside for a while.

I spend a lot of time on my backyard deck, watching the hummingbirds and lizards and drinking espressos. I’ve also grown a beard, so I guess I’m in my old-man era atm.

It’s also been very quiet for me - I’ve been pretty anti-social and see people maybe once a week atm. I expect in 2027 that will change and I’ll start socializing a bit more. But for now, I’m happy to just spend time with my wife, dog and books (and occasional doom scroll on YT or Reddit)

I do continue to get interesting inbound interest from recruiters about new jobs, but I’m still pretty far from considering anything like that.

I assume if you are reading this, I assume it’s because you know me! Please get in touch, I would love to hear how you are doing.