Still Director of Product Engineering at SOFware. Still passionate about the mission and as fascinated with the problem domain as ever. Who could get bored supporting the efforts of some of the most important institutions in our military to assess, select and promote the best people? I love that I have the opportunity to work on FORGE.
Enterprise software companies are hard. Being a bootstrapped, small business selling to DoD clients is Insane Difficulty mode! Trying to manage a roadmap with limited resources, ludicrous communications bottlenecks and appeasing stakeholders with, um, lots of different opinions while keeping FORGE a product that makes sense to prospective customers is ... challenging. I don't know what's wrong with me but I like it. 😅
I've been updating my websites, LinkedIn, resume, etc. No plans to actively look for the next gig just yet but it will be good to hit the ground running if I need to. DoD contracts are fickle. I'll be writing more, working more in public, and maybe even getting back on Twitter/X 😬. I'm putting more thought into my career's next steps while simultaneously hoping things keep growing at work. 🤞
Biggest change: I shut down sketchingwithcss.com and redirected everything to Sketching with CSS. That was emotionally tough to let go but writing that was cathartic.
I'm going to keep working on Spyglasses, my AI-powered research assistant, which to date has been a fun excuse to mess around with various AI capabilities and get used to the ergonomics of putting this stuff into products. If I do have to get a next job I want it to be in a leadership position and working on something to do with AI as that's obviously where this is all going.
I'm going to focus more on shipping now and working in public.
I think that AI will compress time on UI improvements to zero. Most UIs will be generated on demand for users. I want to build a business around this but I'm not sure exactly what yet. I'm in the thinking and research phase. This occupies a lot of my headspace at the moment.
Isaac's in fourth grade now, Ada is almost walking and Beth is changing careers to become a landscape designer! Isaac and I have taken up rock climbing and have a lot of fun doing that together. Ada sucks at sleeping lately but Beth has been taking one for the team and waking up with her at 5am. ❤️