Hello everyone! I regret that this is my first update for the website, quickly after launch I got busy and within a blink of an eye it's September. The past few months have been full of experience that I am looking forward to detailing with you below! The pressure really set in on me once I checked Cloudflare and saw there were 938 visitors in August! Thank you to all my unique visitors for showing me how much meaning my words can have. I will be putting out several posts just to better tell the stories of what has transpired and give each individual story the room needed to breathe.
The first important thing to talk about is what I've been calling "Starship Manager". Shortly after launch of this site I had an idea for a video game and one that I feel fits a specific niche that is under served. Most space games and just remarkably in depth and dense like Stellaris or very choose-your-own-adventure type games. Being a huge fan of simulation and sports games, I wanted to merge these two loves. A roster management and simulation type experience, putting together a staff and crew that you think can succeed and seeing how they do in the vastness of space. The structure will be similar of that to Football Manager or Hockey Legacy Manager where you make personnel and training choices and see how your squad reacts to the challenges presented. Creating the lore and blending these two genres together has been an amazing creative experience. On the other hand learning to code has been a fun and more challenging experience. I bought a course on C# (Linux compatibility is a big thing for me, so that was my choice there). I have some coding experience for other projects I've done like Project Zomboid mods, this website and fantasy's plus some in my college days so I felt like this was a great logical step with a fair amount of transferrable soft skills. This is easily the biggest project I've ever undertaken so progress will be slow but do expect updates on all aspects of the game!
I will be starting small of course and hopefully building up to a rich world full of lore and exploration. I'm beyond excited to see the progress I make on it over the next year and change.
Personal life wise, I am happy to announce that I am now engaged! The ring I purchased for my partner came in during early August (check out Swank Metalsmithing in Oregon). A beautiful piece of handmade jewelry that was worth every penny spent. The love of my life and I have spent over 7 wonderful years of our lives together so far and taking it to the next level is something we've discussed since early on in our relationship. Despite not believing in a God, we are a match made in heaven. I do imagine writing a longer piece about our relationship, she is the proverbial amino acids that make up the building blocks of my life and deserves to be celebrated as such.
Turning gears to work things, things have been quite eventful and the wheels of work are the partial reason why these updates have taken so long to come out. Soccer wise the summer season ended on such a good note. The group of kids I coached were great kids and we had such a good time. Its such an edifying feeling to know you are making an impact on these kids' lives and being a positive influence on them, through such an inclusive sport like soccer. I got several notes from parents just pouring their hearts out about how great of a job I did and how this season was such an amazing activity for their children to participate in, going from shy kids who crumble in a group space to being an active participant who loves to play soccer with their friends each week. That honestly brought me to tears, when I grew up playing soccer I was often made to feel othered or just generally ostracized and the coaches I had (with the exception of Floyd Snyder and Amanda Laskey) were not very focused on the emotional side of team building wether it be because they were volunteers doing this for the first time or were more focused on winning no matter what rather than building the athlete up. That really turned me off from playing sports as a youth which is such a sad state to be in because if anyone knows me, I adore sports I think they are one of mankind's greatest inventions.
We are in the midst of the fall season right now and the kids I have this season are great too, a lot of weeks are missed because of Labor day and my vacation this fall but I get paid solid money to play soccer with kids who also want to play soccer. You can't draw up a better win-win scenario in my mind.
Full-time career wise things have been very interesting. August was a real turning point for our organization, launching an internally made platform for our hundreds of clients and independent contractors to use (not to mention the internal use) while also launching a brand new website, really taking our business to the next level. Admittedly I did not have a ton to do with the development of either of these platforms, I am maybe scratching the surface of novice as a developer. We have in-house developers and hired a marketing team to do a lot of the heavy lifting. I mainly came in when connectivity between systems, DNS and testing came into play, which did end up taking a lot of my month, 50% of it in meetings it seems! I did wake up at 5:30 in the morning to be the one to pull the switch on DNS to fully move over to our new website, which was a really satisfying thing. I am very much a Swiss Army Knife IT guy, while I might not have a very concentrated specialization I know enough about so many things and can easily pick up new skills to be able to fit the needs of our company as they arise. (my concentration in college was security and forensics which does come up a lot but isn't my whole job by any means).
Otherwise, our computer issues have been various. To be completely honest, we were sold lemons of computers from Dell awhile back. It boils down to bad engineering the computers get so hot and the ventilation is extremely poor. It ruins the components inside after a few months of regular office use. We sent them back to Dell to be fixed, they changed out the motherboard and sent them back. Provisioned them for the users once more and cautiously no issues… for say 2 months. Then it's back to untraceable crash errors and 10 minutes to open a small PowerPoint. A remarkably frustrating thing and it pains me to let down the users I serve. Unlike most workplaces, I do consider myself fairly friendly to close to everyone I work with so having them work on subpar machines really does take its toll on me. Now that the pressure and stress of two separate launches within a week of each other is in the rear-view mirror, it does give me appropriate time to address the laptop issues.
All in all though, work and life are going great. A few other things have happen that are more external personal things that I won't go into now or maybe ever because the nature of them and other people's personal privacy but frankly July and August 2026 have been trying and exhausting yet mentally stimulating and full of experiences I won't soon forget.
← Back to Postings