
It's been almost five years since I set up this website and published my first post. Not much has happened since then, really.

### Technology

AI wasn't yet a big thing at the start of 2022. Now, in the last quarter of 2026, I'm dusting off my website and looking at Vercel's documentation for upgrading to the latest version, and their [recommended method](https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/upgrading/version-16) is to just let an agent do it. I wasn't sure what to make of that, so I decided to write this post.

I've been working as a software engineer for a company building an FDA-regulated medical device with proprietary clinical algorithms that is backed by a HIPAA compliant backend infrastructure. Within our small company, we have have the full spectrum of AI boosters and doomers, and we have respectful conversations about how we incorporate it into our work. Our engineering team has been generally cautious about incorporating AI tooling, given the nature of our systems. We all use it regularly to some degree (e.g. Claude), but we have not pushed the agentic development workflow into our primary projects. I personally have not been eager to replace our manual workflows with agents. In our work, implementation has not been the bottleneck, and we have not needed to introduce new risks to security, maintainability, and reliability for purported boost to speed of development. That, along with environmental and moral concerns that should not be ignored, have left me with little experience with agentic development.

That all said, it is blindingly clear that the software industry is changing. So while I brush up on the latest on web development to get this site up to date, it is probably a good time to get my hands dirty and get more experience with these new tools.

### Life

With my birthday this year, I hit a major decade (don't want to be specific, but it starts with a three). I trained for a marathon in the first four months of the year, ran the marathon under my goal time, then stopped running altogether. I'll get back into it some day, probably. It takes a lot of time, and puts a lot of strain on the body. I've also been playing badminton again. I had started a local group with a couple folks pre covid, abandoned the group during covid, and came back many years later to find that it's been booming (at least for Maine). It's a healthy mix of competitive and beginner players, many of whom happen to be around my age. It's been fun and interesting to establish a new friend group as an adult.

Nearly two years ago, we fostered a dog from the animal shelter the night after we picked up a Christmas tree. Her name is Ray Ray, and we decided to keep her, name and all. She is incredibly sweet and loyal, has many goofy quirks, but also came with some challenging behaviors that we've been learning to correct. We don't know much of her history, but she was about four years old and had six teeth removed by the shelter upon arrival, due to some crate related trauma. Last year, on fourth of July, with perfect summer weather by a seaside cabin, she was off leash and had a bout with a porcupine. They were in the bushes for all of maybe thirty seconds. After some comical rustling of the bushes and intense hopeful screaming on our part, Ray Ray emerged covered in quills. We don't know how the porcupine fared, but to spare the gory details, we had to leave our friends behind to drive off into the sunset, towards the nearest open emergency vet a mere two hours away. She's fine now. I think she's living a happy life. She likes to start every single morning with a huge smile and some light partying.

![She can also get down to business](/images/drive/1ShXlYDnVdWHFtDzBnwYuX6-GkOVy8SCs.jpg?width=400&size=xs)

Just over two years ago, my partner and I drove across the country from Portland Maine to Seattle Washington, in my small but capable and gas efficient hybrid car. We bought a national park pass and intended to visit as many as we could. Our first stop was Indiana Dunes. It was my first time seeing a great lake, and it was eerie to realize it was not the ocean. The Grand Tetons are as grand as they look in pictures. Though Mount Rushmore also looks exactly like you'd expect, it was weirdly underwhelming. The Wind Caves were closed off that day for some reason, so we just walked on the praries above, watching diligently for rattlesnakes and unfortunately missing the poison ivy. We camped most of the nights along the way. It was peak summmer, so it was hot and gross, and we weren't allowed to light campfires to make smores, and we had to set up camp late and pack up early. While fun in its own way, we were relieved to reach the city. Seattle felt very familiar, kind of like a big, hilly Portland. We spent one week in Freemont, a few blocks from the troll, and another week by the University of Washington. We worked remotely during that time in the city, starting real early to align with Eastern time, which left us with most of the afternoon and night to explore. It made for really long days, but it was an epic adventure.

About three years ago, I published a couple baking recipes to this site. I realized it was a nicer alternative to sharing a long bulleted text message (sans heavy backstory). As I write all this, I'm wondering who my intended audience might be, and I think it's mostly me, and maybe family and friends whom I share the recipes with.

Four years ago, I bought a house with a friend. We had a joint mortgage and everything. That kickstarted my DIY homeowner phase, in which I've learned so many things about a house. I've lived in one house or another my whole life, yet I never thought much about how it all works. Heating, electrical, plumbing, insulation, ventilation, water. I walked through doors every single day yet hadn't thought twice about what makes a door, until I had to replace the basement entry door. It's been interesting learning about this physical thing that I live in, and all the little parts that make up the whole. The house also came with a spacious unfinished basement. My friend's dad acquired a lot of wood from their old highschool gym bleachers. That combination sparked my woodworking journey, and I've accumulated many tools and projects over the years. I might make dedicated posts about those some day, though I need to get better about taking pictures. Anyway, my friend has since gotten married and moved out with no drama, and I've had to find other suppliers of lumber.

Nearly five years ago, I spent a couple weeks in the winter setting up this website. I had genuine ambitions to keep adding to this. My friend found my first post amusing, because he felt the same way when he set up his own website, and then it sat untouched shortly after. I thought nah, that won't happen to me (spoiler, it did). In my wisened age, I've come to realize that's just how these side projects go, and I'm now comfortable in that reality.

But this year, at this moment, I have some free time and a strong motivation to make some progress. So we'll see where this goes!


Second Post


Key is the maple cream cheese frosting. Bake in a **9x13 pan**.

## Instructions

1. Set oven to **350°F**
1. Grease and flour pan

1. Into the food processor, process until carrot pieces are small:

   - **1 lb bag of carrots**
   - **1 cubic inch ginger**

1. Whisk together in large bowl:

   - **1 1/4 cups vegetable oil**
   - **3 eggs**
   - **1 cup white sugar**
   - **1 cup brown sugar**
   - **2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract**

1. Dry ingredients, mix in a separate large bowl:

   - **2 cups flour**
   - **1/2 teaspoon salt**
   - **2 teaspoons baking powder**
   - **2 teaspoons baking soda**
   - **2 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon**

1. Mix wet and dry ingredients together

1. Mix chopped up carrots into batter

1. Add in **1 cup walnuts** into batter

1. Bake until not wet in the center, about **30 to 35 minutes**

1. Let cake cool in pan for ~5 minutes, then take out of pan to cool on rack. Let cool until not so warm before applying icing.

### Icing

1. Mix in medium bowl until smooth:

   - **8 oz cream cheese** (warm)
   - **1/2 cups butter** (warm)

1. Add in sugar and maple syrup and mix until nice.

   - **~1 cup confectioners sugar**
   - **1/3 cup maple syrup**

Let cool in fridge so it’s not so droopy.


"you should open a carrot cake food truck"

Carrot Cake


Can fit 12 cookies in a **9x13 pan**. Makes 24 cookies total (2 batches).

### Instructions

1. In medium bowl, mix until soft and fluffy (?):

   - **1 cup butter, softened**
   - **1 cup brown sugar**
   - **1/2 to 3/4 cup white sugar**

1. Then mix in:

   - **1 egg**
   - **1 teaspoon vanilla**

1. In a separate large bowl, whisk together:

   - **1 1/2 cups flour**
   - **1/4 teaspoon salt**
   - **1 teaspoon baking soda**
   - **2 cups rolled oats**

1. Fold in medium bowl contents into large bowl. Mix until combined, but not too much.
1. Add in **6 oz chocolate chips**, or however much
1. Set oven to **350°F**.
1. Put dough in fridge until oven is ready. Put balls of dough on parchment paper.
1. Bake for **~12 minutes**, until cookies look good.


Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies


**Hello there!**

I've always wanted to build a personal site. As a software engineer, it appealed to me as an interesting technical exercise with a very tangible output. Most of my work experience revolves around mobile applications, so it's a convenient project to diversify my technical knowledge.

I also considered it as an avenue for writing practice. Much of the writing I've done since college has been of the technical sort. I'd like to do more of it outside the scope of my job, and I'd also like to branch out from the engineering mindset. As a fairly private person, this is additionally an exercise to get more comfortable sharing my thoughts in a public forum.

So, I finally decided to start this endeavor, riding the wave of motivation that comes with the turn of the year. My plan for this project is to share random thoughts, stories, and experiences, technical or otherwise. I also want to use this site to showcase some photography, as well as some projects that I deem worthy.

I've spent much more time than anticipated setting up this site and publishing the first post. I must remind myself to fight my perfectionist tendencies, so I will leave this aphorism here:

> [Perfect is the enemy of good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good)

## Technical Details

To wrap up this first post, I wanted to include details around the technical effort and learnings with this project. It's been a fun experience diving into frontend development and deploying a fully featured "modern" website.

The basic infrastructure was largely taken care of by [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/) and [Vercel](https://vercel.com/). I was truly impressed by how quick and neat it was to start up and deploy a website. Next.js provides the framework to build a website using [React](https://reactjs.org/) and completely handles bundling the app for deployment. Vercel integrates seamlessly with the Next.js project to deploy the app through their servers. This project is my first direct experience with these tools, and it is clear why they are so popular. For anyone looking to get into frontend development, it's an excellent place to start, especially since it's all free (for hobbyists)!

For the contents of the app, I initially thought to make use of a template or starter, of which there are many available online. However, I ultimately decided to take on the technical challenge of building it out "from scratch" to better understand all the components involved. I used a variety of starters (e.g. [blog-starter-typescript](https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/master/examples/blog-starter-typescript) and [https://github.com/colinhacks/devii](https://github.com/colinhacks/devii)) as reference. I'm familiar with [TypeScript](https://www.typescriptlang.org/) and the React framework through work, so it was simple enough to build out the components on top of the concept of Next.js pages. For styling, I opted to use [tailwindcss](https://tailwindcss.com/) because I was drawn to its convenience.

At the time of writing this post, I've developed a simple home page, an about page, and a basic setup to display a list of posts. Next up on the plan of features is to build out the pages to showcase pictures and projects.

I fully intend to achieve my goals with this site, so stay tuned for more content!


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