In February 2020, I migrated this blog from WordPress to Gatsby. Using Gatsby also allowed me to switch from hosting my site on a paid plan on SiteGround to a (usually free) plan on Netlify.

The migration made sense to me at the time: static-site generation was all the rage, and Gatsby was the exciting new thing. It promised better performance and improved my authoring workflow with Markdown and React. Saving a few dollars a month on hosting didn’t hurt either.

To this date, schema-dts is the only side-project I have that achieved better-than-moderate success. It took several hours between the time I had the idea for schema-dts and when I had a reasonably working v0.1. I pulled an all-nighter—something that I hate doing and would never recommend—not out of sheer passion, but because:

• I knew how rare a moment of inspiration is, and
• I knew that if I went to sleep, I would never finish this project; there’s a graveyard of unfinished projects haunting me.

Six months in, I still hate my work from home setup. I can’t be the only one with problems, but my inability to figure this out makes it feel like it. This is either a rant or a plea for help; I can’t decide which.

Of course what lies ahead is a collection of complaints about good problems to have: the fact that I find switching between a home/personal setup annoying is enabled by the fact that I still have a job, and I can work from home. But my wrists seemingly cannot read a room, and still want to complain. So here we are.

I had been working in New York City for just over a year when I sat down at one of my favorite cafes in my neighborhood to write a personal journal entry. I gave it the title “On the crossroads between goal-oriented and process-oriented” and I wrote down stream-of-consciousness reflections on my life, career, and how I wanted to do things differently.

It was October 2015, and I had finished grad school and moved to NYC to work full-time as a Software Developer in a fin-tech company. I was having what I have come to see as the seminal quarter-life crisis many folks go through when they finish their formal years of education. I had been chasing goals all my life up until then, and now I had the luxury and privilege of deciding whether I should set another goal or do things radically different than what I had done so far. Goal-oriented versus Process-oriented, I called it.

How helping on a film set led to me down a serendipitous path, publishing a new open source library, and getting an IMDB mention.

About a year ago, a friend asked me—along with some others—to help as extra hands on set filming the second season of an absurdist comedy mini-series she was working on called Look it Up.