Austin Gilliam

2025: A Long March

2026-02-15T00:00:00Z

I try to get my reviews done at the beginning of the year. The last two weeks of December are a great time for me to reflect, and that culminates in written form before life picks back up again in January. I like keeping these records for numerous reasons:

They're good for me to reference — I write them first for myself.
I like to add in details for friends and family who haven't seen me in a while.
Then I add in what I'm thinking. The challenges I'm having. These I write for anyone: you are not alone.

This past year was different for me. I wanted to check-in, but not for me. There was no need. This past year was loud and long, a march to a finish line that I couldn't see and didn't care to reach. I didn't need a recap, I was aware of every ache and pain, every high and low.

If 2025 were a hike, it'd be one part the view, one part the exercise, and a pebble in each shoe.

Out and About

As in recent years, I spent a fair bit of time in my least favorite city in the world: Wilmington, DE. Every time I travel for work I try to love it, but it always reminds me of Polaris, OH. That is to say, a big parking lot — but in this case it's the entire state.

I will admit that some recent travel abroad has made my view of American cities somewhat harsher. After missing our honeymoon during the pandemic, Danielle and I finally got around to a trip to the UK this past May, which was definitely a highlight of the year. I still miss the walkability of London and Edinburgh. Don't even get me started on the public transportation.

1 / 9

A flower stand in Covent Garden.

2 / 9

A cloudy day at St. Paul's Cathedral.

3 / 9

A nifty sign not far from our London hotel.

4 / 9

A view from our brief tour of Oxford.

5 / 9

A lovely cluster of buildings in Edinburgh.

6 / 9

A mix of old and new in Edinburgh.

7 / 9

The Three Sisters of Glencoe.

8 / 9

Some very sleepy cows.

9 / 9

The team and I at CodeMash 2026.

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I also spent some time in New Jersey (but alas, only for work) and since my last update, two runs of CodeMash. If you're in the Great Lakes region and are looking for a technology conference nearby, I would certainly recommend it!

The Content Diet

TODO — I'll get to this someday soon. I promise. ;)

Beyond the Mind

As usual, a lot of my time outside was spent in the garden. I don't think Danielle and I will ever do well enough that the harvest is worth the monetary investment. It's hard to compete with a modern grocery store. But for an excuse to get under the sun and snack on food I grew myself, I'll put the effort in each and every year.

Tabletop gaming dominated free time, and continues to do so 6 weeks into 2026. We've been playing Draw Steel for our regular campaign, and I've returned to GMing a West Marches campaign called The Maelstrom March. We've also played a ton of board games — special shout out to Inis and Nemesis.

This has led to a lot of crafting, but mostly painting terrain. I still have a healthy pile of unpainted plastic, and a number of 3D models I aim to get printing. My main blocker is a good ventilation system in the basement, which I made progress on in 2025, but not to the level I need.

I find myself writing every now and again, but mostly for my tabletop campaigns. I struggle to balance the mental tax of my day job and the mental energy required to write, which is also why I rarely program outside of work. These old hobbies fading bothers me less and less as the years go by. I'd rather focus on a few things, and do them well.

The Seventh Level of Task-Tracking Hell

I came full circle on tracking tasks this year. In college I managed my day-to-day agenda with a piece of paper in my pocket and a detailed calendar. I kept my notes for all courses in a single notebook. My jobs were washing dishes and waiting tables, and I lived in the same house as all but one of my friends. I had very few hobbies and barely enough money to live, let alone try new things.

Now that I have the spare income to fund multiple projects, enough hobbies for five people, three times the friends and family, a mentally-taxing job, and a house full of maintenance to do, you'd think I'd need a more complicated system.

I don't need a more complicated system.

I replaced physical notebooks with Obsidian on my phone and computer. My paper task list has returned in digital form with TickTick. I still use Google Calendar after all these years, but I'm looking for something better. That's it. That's all I need. Everything else is theater.

Constraints and Counterweights

So why I have hesitated to write this past year's review? Well, here we are.

Last year was a lot.

Paying attention to the news often felt like reading a horror novel. That's gotten even worse since the start of 2026. I find I have to pace myself lately, catching up every two or three days, rather than risk getting overwhelmed. I've been disappointed in my nation lately, and in some of the people I share it with.

My professional life was similarly stressed. The rise of generative AI has many questioning the future of software engineering, and a significant portion of my friends and colleagues were laid off. 2025 felt like a year of "just business", in a way I haven't felt in my career so far.

This was also the year we had to say goodbye to Auri. When someone is a part of your life — a part of your family — for so long, it's impossible to fill to space they leave behind. I'm grateful for the time we had with her, and that she was able to go peacefully. But I still miss her every day.

In times like these, I think it's important to stay close to the people you care about. I spent a lot of time in 2025 socializing, which is unusual for me. But that's where the stress and the anxiety falls away. Fight for what you believe in. Do what you need to survive. Try to work a laugh in.

Find your counterweights, and love them with all of your heart.

Wrapping Up

If you've made it this far, thanks for your time, and for caring about little ol' me.

I hope all is well with you and yours, and I'll see you in the next one.

Constraints

2025-07-19T00:00:00Z

When our options are unbounded, we freeze. Stand in front of a blank canvas with every type of brush and every kind of paint, and watch creativity die in the face of an endless expanse. Then limit to one brush. One color. A 1x1 canvas. The number of unknowns decreases. Do we paint the whole canvas in one, solid color? A bold, monochromatic slash? Do we attempt an intricate masterpiece that stretches the utility of our brush?

The limitations provide the ideas we need to find our way. When I'm lost, I search for new constraints.

Personal Constraints

When putting constraints on myself, I like to reference Steph Ango's thoughts on style. A personal style is a set of self-imposed constraints. We all have a style, whether we recognize it or not:

I wear polo shirts, jeans, and black sneakers to work.
Sunday through Thursday, I get in bed at 9:30PM.
I record personal appointments in Google Calendar, tasks in TickTick, and notes in Obsidian.

When I wake up in the morning, I don't put active thought into what I'm going to wear — I pick from a limited set of clothes that match my style. I don't worry about missing appointments or how many tasks I have to do today. I know exactly where to go to find that information.

My style preserves energy. Now I can spend that energy on other things.

Group Constraints

Group constraints allow for asynchronous decision making. My team doesn't need me to be involved if the guidance is listed in our development standards. We don't need to meet if everyone is following the operating model — the work should speak for itself. We communicate when we need to collaborate.

If my team keeps coming back with the same questions, it isn't because they are poor listeners. It's because I haven't set the right constraints. I haven't been clear about what I do and don't want.

I often assess managers by how they handle constraints. Bad managers like to create constraints that give them control. They like to force decision making to become synchronous. When this type of constraint leads to poor results, rather than abandoning the constraint, a bad manager tends to blame the team.

Like personal style, a group constraint should lend itself to efficiency. If you feel like your team is in a flow state, you probably have the right constraints in place.

Design Constraints

When I introduce a design constraint, I'm also making a decision about what my system is going to be bad at. It can't be good at everything, or we'll never finish development — what can we remove? Design constraints tell developers what the vision is, such as file over app (similar to local-first software) or the infamous API Mandate set by Jeff Bezos. They make the mission abundantly clear. Changes to the system that fall outside of these constraints are quick to be rejected.

There are no meaningful design constraints that fit all systems. I like to collect constraints that have worked for other people, and see if they apply to the applications I'm working on. My current project — an enterprise knowledge management system — has several:

Meta over Domain: Backend code should use metamodel abstractions over domain model definitions. This limits the scope of code change when the domain model evolves, which can happen often when pulling from multiple systems of record.
Change over Object: Our database is an event store. History is a feature of the tool. Users can be spoken to in the language of objects, but our backend should speak in the language of events.
Lifecycle over Use Case: We design experiences for the full process, not a single moment in time. What do we require to create a new object? When we edit four months later? When the changes made need to be audited? The user experience should respect all stages of the lifecycle.
Agency over Agentic: We create features that increase user agency, then we consider introducing AI. Our human users should tell us what tasks they don't want to do — that's our opportunity to automate. AI is a solution, not a feature.

Note that this set of constraints is adjustable. I can introduce new constraints as time goes on, or remove them if they get in the way. A good design constraint serves the customer, a bad design constraint alters their experience in a negative way.

Wrapping Up

Constraints offer us direction, which leads to movement. If movement isn't happening, apply more constraints. Self-imposed constraints are just as valuable as those that occur naturally, and should be introduced and discarded with care. A good constraint eliminates the possibility of bad and costly decision making, which increases speed and preserves energy.

Impose limitations to increase the chance of success.

2024: A Failed Project

2025-01-06T00:00:00Z

Welcome to my blog: a place where I put my coherent thoughts and hold myself accountable by publishing quarterly updates on my projects. It has been 7 months since my last entry!

The latter half of this year chewed me up and spit me out. It marked the passing of my father, followed by a series of illnesses and injuries that affected both me personally and the immediate members of my family. I am currently recovering from a 3-week upper respiratory infection, just after healing from an injury in my left foot that took 3 months to figure out — have mercy on my spelling mistakes.

As you can imagine, these events were not great for making progress in the non-critical parts of my life, but they weren't the sole cause of stagnation. As I noted in my last blog, I've made some bad hypotheses about how I should be tracking my day-to-day progress, and have spent months finding something that worked for me (a simple note and task-tracking system in Obsidian). I wouldn't even say that I'm done tinkering, as much of the recent progress I've made hasn't been tested against my usual 9-to-5 routine.

I'll get to more on that near the end, but first, I'd like to recap the year.

Out and About

I got a decent amount of travel in 2024, starting with a Hocking Hills cabin retreat with some friends, a trip to see my brother in St. Louis, and two separate excursions to Chicago and New York with Danielle. This year was also the 20th anniversary of the Expert Engineer program at JPMorgan Chase, a group I'm honored to be a part of and a series of global events that I enjoyed helping put together. When I had to miss my own event in Columbus, the east coast group welcomed me with open arms — they even let me steal some of their swag.

1 / 9

A picture of the trail at Old Man's Cave — a nice blend of nature and manicured paths.

2 / 9

A sneaky photo of my niece at the St. Louis zoo.

3 / 9

A really bad photo I took of the eclipse in April.

4 / 9

We also caught a bit of an aurora in May.

5 / 9

The beautiful lobby of our hotel in Chicago.

6 / 9

A snap of the Chicago skyline I got while at Shedd Aquarium.

7 / 9

I do love a photo of a skyline. This time from Navy Pier.

8 / 9

An obligatory photo of Auri napping.

9 / 9

A photo of the east coast Expert Engineers (and me!), celebrating the 20th anniversary of the program.

❮ ❯

I'll be traveling about as much next year, with an early trip to Sandusky, OH for CodeMash and multiple trips for work. I'd like to get to Europe at some point if Danielle and I can swing it, but it'll depend a lot on work schedules and vacation time.

The Content Diet

I read a bit this year, but nowhere near as much as I have previously. From my fantasy pile I finished Defiant, The Sunlit Man, and Witch King — all of which I recommend. The rest of my reading was in the business and technology spaces, including Meditations, Engineering Management for the Rest of Us, Accelerate, Ultralearning, Switch, and most of The DevOps Handbook. Like most "self help" books, I have a mixed relationship with each. I think they're worth your time, as long as you take the advice with a grain of salt and keep in mind the publication dates.

As I thought back in May, Cyberpunk 2077 remained my game of the year, and was the game I played the most. I did two runs of the game (Street Kid and Corpo background), and earned 100% of the achievements. For single player experiences I would also recommend God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn, and Lethal Company for game nights with friends.

I did 100% complete a game called Littlewood, but I'm not sure I enjoyed it — primarily because you get nothing for all your effort at the end. Maybe I've just been spoiled by games like Stardew Valley.

The Rest of My Goals

I didn't finish any other games, nor did I work on my own. I didn't craft anything for the tabletop games I play in, but we did find time to get together and play. I didn't complete any additional training courses. My AWS Solutions Architect certification will lapse at the end of this month. I didn't do very much writing, neither professionally nor for fun.

Because of some surprise medical bills most of our house projects were scrapped. I think our biggest achievement this year was getting the garden beds in, which I celebrated back in May. Gardening was my primary source of exercise this year, especially after I injured my left foot and was forced to spend a lot of time in Q3-Q4 sitting.

If it isn't clear already, I left my almighty list of goals hanging this year. But that doesn't really bother me? I've never had a parent die before, and although we weren't close at the time of his passing, I needed time to sort out how I felt about it. Then I got injured, people around me got sick, and I got sick. Oh, and I still had to go to work — we have a major deliverable in Q1 2025 that I've been chasing all year.

Don't get me wrong, I spent more than a few weeks moping about my lack of progress. But as time went on, I started to wonder if the time in my life where I get a dozen projects done in a year has passed. I think it has. Then I let that thought marinate through the rest of November and December, and landed at the system I have now.

The Almighty List Is Dead

I will not be checking off a list of goals this year, because the almighty list is officially dead. I thank it for its many years of service, and may it rest in peace. Instead, I have four broad focus areas for 2025:

My Routine: I've noticed a lot of problems I've had lately have to do with the fact that my old routine doesn't match up with my new responsibilities and lifestyle. I'm going to be switching exercise to the morning, forcing myself to take an hour lunch break on work days, and blocking my time more concretely.
Daily Note: Using Obsidian, I've started aggregating information about my day into Zettelkasten-like notes and supporting files. I find I'm more organized when I do this every day, which I'm going to try in 2025.
Housework: I need to focus on house projects this year, and the day-to-day minutia of house maintenance. Blocking time for these activities and completing tasks will be a priority for me.
Reading: The amount I read seems to be declining year-over-year, and I don't like that! I'm going to focus on reading as much as possible in 2025, especially from the massive backlog of books I have at home.

Anything else I get done in my personal life in 2025, I'll consider a "nice to have". Those four objectives are the only thing I'll be tracking daily, and my execution is fairly brain-dead: a checkbox in my daily note, and an aggregator showing my progress on a dashboard.

Anything else at this stage is theater, and any other projects now have a clear priority: below these four. Like I said at the beginning of the article, this hypothesis hasn't been tested against my 9-to-5 routine, but it can't hurt to start simple. I can always do more if I feel like it.

Wrapping Up

That's all I got — a level-headed entry into the year, with a few small goals. I do have some more updates coming to the site, but it's mostly CSS changes and cleaning up old articles. If you're involved in any of my tabletop roleplaying groups, the secret back half of this website is about to get a flood of articles converted from my old D&D notes. If you have no idea what I'm talking about:

I hope all is well with you and yours, and I'll see you in the next one. :)

I'm Not a Robot

2024-05-26T00:00:00Z

Every weekday, I wake up, go to work, and try to create order from the chaos of the gigantic organization that I work in. I clarify what the vision of the project is, refine stories, write documentation, review code, write some of my own code, and go to meetings.

Oh, the meetings.

But it works — ideas become tasks, tasks become software, and that software is (slowly but surely) adding business value. I'm often told that my drive to refine and follow a process is why people like to worth with me, and I attribute that drive to a lot of my professional success. I do this 40-60 hours a week. With some exceptions from when I worked in research, I've been doing it for almost 8 years. It works for me.

But then I come home, and I'm hungry, and I'm tired. There's dishes in the sink and clothes in the laundry pile. I need a shower, I need to pack lunch for tomorrow, I need to get ready for bed. My intuition is to stick to the process. Catalog everything, plan ahead, estimate the work, and then execute.

I think what I've realized this year is that I can't do it. That a lot of my past failures have been taking what works at work and trying to apply it to myself. I'm not the same person at home. My home is not my office. I don't have employees, colleagues, and managers after 5 PM, I've got friends and family. I need to organize and coordinate tasks at work so that my team can collaborate effectively. For my wife's request that I hang up some artwork around the house, a simple checkbox will suffice.

My process isn't my identity. My goal isn't to complete tasks. I'm not a robot.

Embracing Chaos

So why am I talking about this? Look back even a few articles, and I'm talking about giant spreadsheets and a better process. I'd automated my reminders, sized all my work for the year, and was pretty confident that my capacity was in line with my goals. I still think that's true — I'm not here to throw out my goals.

I'm here to talk about why I threw away my spreadsheet.

"How is this helping me?" — I distinctly remember thinking this in late February, sitting in front of my computer screen. I used to manage with a pen, some paper, and a meticulous calendar. That's how I got through all 7 years of college, and it's how I got through the first 2-3 years of work. But this was pretty, and it was efficient. It was also monolithic, complex, and frankly, just not very fun to work with. It made my decisions for me, with no empathy for how I was feeling, or what I wanted to work on. I'd turned my hobbies into a job.

I archived the spreadsheet the next day, downloaded Obsidian, and started dumping my notes and tasks into daily Markdown files. I typed as I thought, with no regard for structure outside the fact that each file was today's file, and I could do whatever I wanted with it.

It felt chaotic, and I almost abandoned it, but I decided to give it a few more days. I downloaded a few plugins, organized my folder structure, and threw Taskido on top of it. I purposefully avoided YouTube videos advocating for crazy 30-50 plugin builds. I only made an improvement if I hit a pain point.

Then I got Obsidian Sync, and I could pour notes in from anywhere — my PC, my tablet during reading sessions, or even my phone while I was on the go. If I had a thought I wanted to keep, it went in there. If I had a task, I typed out the gist of it, and only gave it a due date if it made sense.

That's what I've been doing for the last three months.

It's been great for all the reasons I've turned down similar solutions in the past. I don't have to orchestrate everything in one place — I dump it in a file and it gets organized into a dashboard for me. I don't have to have a complete idea, I make a new file and put what I have. I can analyze the chaos from the graph view, and make links retroactively if I need to. It's a process that feels more like throwing paint on a canvas and refining it as I go. It's art instead of science, and because all I do all day is "science", my brain craves the change of pace when I get home.

In the same way that my drive for a process leads to success at work, this new, chaotic flow is working for me at home. I don't mean that I'm getting more done. I need more time with this change, to figure out what I can query from my data and what I can't. But I know every day I have a list of tasks I want to get done, and I finish them if I can, or I move them if I can't. I don't lose track of things, I don't get overwhelmed. If I forget something, I can search for it in multiple ways. I'm happier, which is what matters.

The list is no longer almighty, it's just my north star.

The Content Diet

I finished my lengthy web design course this month, despite it losing value as it got into the Figma weeds, but completing it still added value in terms of understanding design concepts. Now I can focus completely on studying for my AWS exam, which I'm targeting for late Q4 or very early Q1 (before my current certification lapses).

I read two books for fun in January: Defiant and The Sunlit Man. Then I got completely absorbed in the end of my Street Kid run of Cyberpunk 2077, and immediately (I mean, one hour later) followed that up with the beginning of a 100% completion Corpo run. Where Baldur's Gate III was my game of the year for 2023, I think the rest of the games I'll play this year have some tough competition in Cyberpunk.

After that I got some surprise news from some of my favorite modders, and have briefly returned to Skyrim to try out their latest work. But I'm also being called back to Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV, so I don't know how long that will last.

I got hit with the reading bug again in April, but opted to peck at my non-fantasy reading list instead. I finished Meditations, Engineering Management for the Rest of Us, and Accelerate in between then and now, and I recommend them all. It's also very satisfying to have my notes all in one place and linked together — which has kicked off a Herculean effort to pour all of my past notes (both professional and D&D related) into Obsidian.

The Crafting Corner

I have quite a few lagging house and hobby projects, but make no mistake, things are very busy in the Gilliam house! It's just that some things are seasonal, like planting a garden, or have more bang for their buck, like tidying up the space where my friends come to hang out on the weekends.

I think my next big project will be setting up my workshop, as not having one is a blocker to starting anything new. Paradoxically, that also includes setting up my workshop...

Wrapping Up

From here, I guess there's not much else to say. I'm going to keep going, throwing my paint at the wall and refining it as I go. I'm going to automate the drudgery, but make sure I still get to be human — I get to make decisions, communicate, solve problems.

I hope all is well with you and yours, and I'll see you in the next one.

2023: Tiny Systems All the Way Down

2024-01-03T00:00:00Z

I had to read my own check-ins two times to remember all that happened this year, and I still feel like I'm forgetting something. I visited Delaware for an off-site early in the year, back-to-back trips to New York City and St. Louis with friends and family, and finally a quick trip to Plano to attend DEVUP 2023. I took on new projects, finished some of my longest-running goals, completely revamped my tracking system not once, but twice. I got burnt out, I recovered, and I completed more in a single year than I have since I started tracking my progress in late 2020.

1 / 10

The last big haul from the garden in late August, and some very stunted root vegetables.

2 / 10

A photo of me and some very smart people at Chase's internal tech conference, DEVUP 2023.

3 / 10

A beautiful July day at Alum Creek Lake in Columbus, OH.

4 / 10

Auri taking a very deep nap, right before she got a boop to make sure she was still breathing.

5 / 10

A clay pumpkin I made at a local art class in October, which I never received afterwards...

6 / 10

A fancy, stylized photo of Manhattan taken on our boat tour.

7 / 10

A view of the Statue of Liberty from our boat tour.

8 / 10

A look out to southern Manhattan from Summit ONE Vanderbilt.

9 / 10

A look out to Central Park and northern Manhattan from Summit ONE Vanderbilt.

10 / 10

A picture of the Arch as we arrived in St. Louis to visit my brother.

❮ ❯

It was a good year, defined by the systems I put in place to keep me on track both in the office and at home. The biggest theme across them was automation — if I did a task more than a few times it became a scheduled process with alerts, and I only addressed it again if I got alerted.

This website now builds when I push the source to Github. My backlog tool at work keeps track of our velocity, and beeps at me if the team might be getting overloaded. The goal is to free up the mundane so that I can focus on the things that matter, like going on one-on-ones with my team or making it to dinner on time. I could talk ad nauseam about all the little tools and scripts I've put together this year, but that's not what this article is about.

Some Tyrannical Metrics

This year is a little different than previous years, since I'm tracking goals with a focus on flow over numeric achievements. For a goal to be considered complete, it's a mix between achieving the tangible outcome and/or my own satisfaction with the progress made — subjective but effective for my purposes. For example, I definitely painted some minis this year, but those 3-4 minis don't offset my shelves full of unpainted plastic.

I completed 382 tasks, up from 260 in 2022, and 178 in 2021. Some of the metric growth can be attributed to better estimation year-over-year and making sure I'm tracking what I should, but not enough to negate the upward trend. My average velocity was 7.35 tasks/week, largely driven by the first three quarters before I needed to take a break and focus on some things at work.

Above is a bar chart of tasks I've taken on per week in 2023, and whether they were completed (green), carried over (blue), or cancelled (yellow). The red X's mark where I broke my own rules, and took on more tasks than I should've. Weeks surrounded in parentheses are where I took a vacation or had a work trip.

My goals that suffered fit into one of two categories: those hindered by my lack of an efficient workshop (painting and 3D printing) and those that required a similar kind of energy that I was spending elsewhere: storytelling vs. GMing, programming at work vs. at home, long days at work vs. my physical energy to get around.

My system for 2024 is hopefully going to address those gaps, but I think achieving my health goals is more about getting my priorities straight over anything I could put in a spreadsheet

The Content Diet

I spent a lot of time chewing through my educational courses backlog this year, but I didn't complete any of them. I had to hop back and forth between topics depending on what was going on at work, and the courses I pursued this year were pretty large (30-50 hours of content each). Still, the point of the goal was to learn, and I definitely did that!

The same is true of the educational books I read this year — an astute reader may observe that this list is no different than the one I showed in Q2. I have started a few, notably The Living Soil Handbook by Jesse Frost and Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner, but after Q2 I had switched most of my learning energy over to the courses, so finishing them will have to be a task for 2024.

My social reading list tells a similar story, with all of these books being addressed in my Q3 review except for Gosu, but only because most of the reading I did in Q4 were manga/manwha that aren't complete yet. I've recently caught up with both Jujutsu Kaisen and The Player Who Can't Level Up, and am keeping tabs on the latest from My Hero Academia as it rounds out its final arc.

My guilty pleasure this year was definitely video games — according to my 2023 Steam Review and Nintendo Switch statistics, I spent close to 500 hours playing games this year, a.k.a. roughly 1.4 hours/day. A third of that was spent in Elder Scrolls Online earlier this year, but once I hit my Aldmeri Dominion run it was time to try other games. Kingdoms of Amalur and Tears of the Kingdom made up another third of that playtime in the early months of the year, played in between ESO sessions. After that I did two runs of Baldur's Gate III (a lawful good Tav run, and a sinister Durge run) and am currently working my way through a Street Kid run of Cyberpunk 2077.

I highly recommend BG3 to anyone who's curious, it is without question the game of the year for 2023. I can also recommend Cyberpunk 2077 after the 2.0 update, I haven't faced any of the problems encountered by others during the infamous 1.0 release. In addition to the two incomplete games above, I plan to pick up more indie games next year, and have decided I'll probably give Starfield a pass.

The Crafting Corner

As discussed in my Q2 review, my biggest hobby achievement this year was finishing The Centurion's Riddle — the final saga in a roughly 12-year campaign that I've been telling with my close friends since highschool.

It was a bittersweet ending, saying goodbye to the characters and places that have lived in my head for so long, but on the other hand it feels good to be moving onto new things, and new ways to tell stories. I finished up content creation for it just this past week with Tragedy, a borderline novella-sized story that encapsulates all the plot points I couldn't fit into the ending at the table, and hints at a happy ending for my player's characters.

My Goals and System for 2024

After switching to my flow-focused approach earlier this year and getting critical about my tracking system, I had four problems with the way I organize tasks:

There was no concept of story points in my system, everything was sized so it's roughly 1 "point".
Most of my goals ran through the whole year, meaning I couldn't finish most of them until December — a.k.a. they occupied a bit of my brain space all year.
One week started feeling too small for a cycle, as any planning I did was easily undone by illness or an emergency.
The spreadsheet I use required a lot of manual labor to maintain.

I had opted for simplicity when putting my tracking system together in late 2020, and through my revisions I've tried to honor that design constraint. However, now that this is something I'm keeping an eye on pretty much daily, a few minutes of manual labor each session adds up fast.

It also meant I spent a lot of time breaking tasks down into their smallest components, even when that didn't make a lot of sense. I can break down a 3-pointer about reading a textbook by assigning 1/3 of the book to each task, but doing that to a house repair task with set cure times and contractor engagement is a little more nebulous. The new system I put together tweaks these three things:

I'm allowing tasks to have 1, 3, 5, or 8 points.
I have two kinds of goals, those that run all year (usually a habit-forming goal) and those that are definitively done by measure of a tangible objective.
My cycles are now two weeks long, ending on Saturdays.
I made a new spreadsheet with macros and helper sheets that automate all the repeatable tasks I was doing each day.

In other words, I've created Jira with fewer bells and whistles, and a UI that doesn't make me pull my hair out.

When I finished setting everything up, it just clicked for me. It was easy to start planning out my goals and assigning tasks to them, and I spent about 8 hours over this vacation building up a backlog. I bet future me is really going to appreciate it...

I'll see how I feel after a few more weeks back at work.

Wrapping Up

And that's a wrap! Sorry for the long one, 2023 was jam-packed.

I hope all is well with you and yours, and I'll see you in the next one.

Recovering After Burnout

2023-10-02T00:00:00Z

Back when I was getting my Master's degree, one of my professors joked that while a picture says a thousands words, a good graph can say millions! While he was speaking in the context of writing academic papers, and with far better graphs than any I've put together in recent years, I think I can sum up Q3 2023 with this:

Some quick context on what we're looking at: this is the number of tasks I completed (green), didn't complete (yellow), or carried over to the following week (blue) by week, for every week so far this year. Week numbers surrounded by parenthesis are weeks I had to take a break for work trips or I took a vacation, and any red X above a given week is to mark where I broke my rules, and took more tasks than I was supposed to given data from the prior week.

I put this together on week 30 or so, after I noticed my numbers were starting to slip, and I just couldn't get out of the 6-7 task range. This was around the time that I got put under some serious pressure to deliver at work, sometimes staying at work until 6-7pm, which only got worse in these last few weeks where I was staying up until 10pm-2am to make a big due date. In retrospect, I have to ask myself — what the hell was I doing on week 34 and 35?

Brute forcing it, I suppose. But then I started to run out energy, and it all started slipping until the crash, resulting in me taking a break in week 38, and then trying to dive back into it last week only to fail miserably. Things were going relatively fantastic at work, and everyone was happy with what my team had delivered, but as a result I had no energy to do anything for myself...

I was 100%, absolutely and thoroughly burnt out.

Burnout & Recovery

In the past 7 years I've had a lot of students and mentees ask me how to avoid burnout, and I stand by my stance: it's different for everybody. Some of us have children and full-time jobs, some live alone and could decide to travel the world on a moments notice. Some of us are responsible for critical functions at work, others are in training, others purposely seek low-stress roles. When recovering in the short-term, some people (like myself) regenerate on time alone in a dark, chaotic basement workshop. Others like to workout or do house chores, others go to parties and socialize.

Generally, I would say the best way to avoid burnout is realizing your personal constraints and "microdosing" your personal cure, but that's not catchy advice, and thus often falls on disappointed ears. What I've realized recently is that it's actually more nuanced than I thought: avoiding burnout is different for everyone, but I also think every burnout is different.

In the particular case of Austin Gilliam in Q3 2023, I would say that my constraints shifted a lot faster than I could cope with short-term recovery. I decided to roleplay the productivity overgod — who could complete all of his work tasks, all of his societal obligations, and the goals that he had set for himself. But I couldn't play that character for as long as I tried to play it, and as a result my body decided to say "Fuck You".

So this burnout was a little worse than others I experience year over year, it was a total show stopper. I took a long weekend off work, didn't look at my messages or email — I didn't even look at my hobby board. I slept away whole afternoons, and I didn't look at the clock... And it still hasn't been enough. I need more rest, more time. My team needs it too — for every day I was putting in the extra effort, they were right there with me. "Deep rest" is going to be on my mind a lot in Q4, both at home and at work, and will be my priority as I round at the year.

I think that's the only way to really recover, and like my advice above, it's un-catchy as it is simple: if all else fails, turn everything off, cancel everything, get help from the people you trust, and take a nap.

But all of this to say, I didn't do nothing this quarter. I just did less, and I'm fine with that. I'm probably going to do less next quarter too, and I'm fine with that. It's not about the cards still on the board — it's about the gaps where the others used to be.

The Content Diet

All my reading in Q3 was for fun, which I don't mind at all. Brandon Sanderson's Kickstarter continues to deliver with The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. I also finished the Wilderwood Duology by Hannah Whitten, and after growing tired of waiting for the anime to come out, devoured the whole of the Demon Slayer manga. I haven't finished a manga/manwha series in a while, but now that I've started I've caught the bug — I'm reading Gosu right now, which completed this year and is good so far.

While Elder Scrolls Online remains a constant in the background (25% into Aldmeri Dominion faction quests), Baldur's Gate III has absolutely dominated my playtime, with 50 hours under my belt for my first play through (just starting Act 3 on a goody-two-shoes Tav run) and sinister Durge run on the horizon. After that I'll probably move onto Cyberpunk 2077 now that the v2.0 release it out, and maybe Starfield if I can't wait long enough for the modding kit to come out.

While I don't usually talk about TV shows I watch, I think special mention has to go out to Mr Inbetween on FX, which I binged in only a few weeks. If you liked Barry on HBO (a mix of silly and sadistic), then I highly recommend it.

Wrapping Up

In the next few months I'll be doing a bit of traveling and taking some vacation time, so updates will likely be few and far between. But I hope all is well with you and yours, and I'll see you in the next one — when that next one comes.

Games & Gardens

2023-07-09T00:00:00Z

I've been using my new process for tracking everything I'm working on, and it's working well. I don't feel like I'm getting as much done as I have in the past, but my output is now fairly predictable, and I'm not as stressed once I finally get to the end result.

I've also dropped one of the rules I held in the past, where I only gave myself four weeks "off" from tracking my goals — my birthday, my wife's birthday, Christmas, and a wildcard. I might have needed that in 2021 as I built the habit, but now it's more of a hindrance than a help, especially in the face of two back-to-back vacations I took in early June: one to New York City with friends, and another to visit family in St. Louis.

1 / 5

A fancy, stylized photo of Manhattan taken on our boat tour.

2 / 5

A view of the Statue of Liberty from our boat tour.

3 / 5

A look out to southern Manhattan from Summit ONE Vanderbilt.

4 / 5

A look out to Central Park and northern Manhattan from Summit ONE Vanderbilt.

5 / 5

A picture of the Arch as we arrived in St. Louis.

❮ ❯

It was refreshing to get out of the house for a while and away from all my projects (and my work email). Once I was back, I felt more motivated to pick them back up than I have in vacations past.

The Content Diet

In addition to the educational books I finished in Q1, I completed Learning Domain-Driven Design by Vlad Khononov, which has been critical to understanding some of the new challenges I've faced at work.

I also finished Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, and started on the rewards from Brandon Sanderson's recent Kickstarter with Tress of the Emerald Sea. I also read through Crossings by Alex Landragin (in the chronological order), and was enamored with What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, a sort of "modern horror" retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.

Moving on to video games, I finished Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning after years of sitting in my Steam library, and I would say overall it was a blast. I personally didn't like the Fatesworn DLC, but I would recommend the base game to anyone who likes fantasy RPGs.

I also devoured Tears of the Kingdom, sinking over 150 hours into it in the month or so after its release, and picked up Elder Scrolls Online to scratch that MMO itch. I've only completed the original main quest with the Ebonheart Pact, and am working my way through the Daggerfall Covenant, but I think its a good game for anyone who likes the Elder Scrolls franchise.

The Crafting Corner

I've had a hard time with my crafting hobbies lately — finishing The Centurion's Riddle drained every ounce of creative energy that I had, and I struggled to focus on unrelated artsy projects as we brought the campaign to a satisfying end. It also meant that most of my time on the computer outside of gaming was spent preparing, so I let studying my online courses fall to the wayside. But yes, you read that right:

I finished the The Centurion's Riddle!

The Centurion's Riddle

This was the culmination of a story I'd been telling and collaborating on since 2011, split across 11 years-long campaigns and multiple GMs — a high fantasy drama with mystical godheads, reality-breaking magic, and a timeline best described as a pair of "entwined infinities". I have two email inboxes dedicated solely to this purpose, which share thousands of back-and-forth messages with my fellow players, and dozens of wikis and Trello boards containing lore from games past.

Not all of the stories I told were my best work, but I am fond of all of them. I started playing TTRPGs to escape the world that surrounded my late teens, and through them I have found some of the best people I have ever known. Even when the story I was telling wasn't my best, they were great because of the people playing in them. If you have ever had a hand in these stories, thank you. And to my fellow Storytellers:

Glory to the All-Father, and to the legend of the Carter. Seek the Star Scribe for knowledge, and the Sculptor for creativity. Follow the Shepherd to family, and let the Dreamer guide you home. Give Names to the Nameless.

Beware the words of the Liar God.

Touching Grass

Despite evidence to the contrary, I've also been spending a lot of time outside. Summer is here, and that means yard work. But it also means I have a yard big enough for a proper garden — something I've missed since moving out on my own, with apartments where I had no outdoor space. While I still hold aspirations of tearing all the grass out of my yard and replacing it with useful plants, I was convinced to start small with a 4' by 12' plot.

This proceeded to blow up over the following weeks:

Although not all survived the weeks after their planting, I think we're doing pretty good. It's also a great excuse to get outside every day, breaking up the monotony of the car-to-house shuffle. Accompanied with a worm bed I picked up to begin vermicomposting food scraps, and the roller compost bins we picked up to recycle yard waste, the slow change in the amount of trash we produce is becoming noticeable — a change I would like to continue across the rest of the house.

To the Deeps

Then it was back into the basement, for I am a Dwarf at heart, and to the rest of my motley crew of hobbies. There was some tinkering with modding that I'm not ready to share, and some tweaks to the guts of this website, which I've switched over to generating via a Java "compiler". I know there are other solutions for this that work out of the box — I'm just having fun playing around.

Wrapping Up

I think the end of Q2 marks a big shift in my process, as I'm finally free to pursue other hobbies now that The Centurion's Riddle is complete. I look forward to painting, 3D printing, and writing, but also to playing in other games. As always, I hope all is well with you and yours, and I'll see you in the next one.

Measuring Success

2023-03-13T00:00:00Z

"Why am I not sticking to my goals?"

I've asked myself this question often over the last few years, especially as I became serious about tracking both my overall and weekly progress. Some weeks it was just because I was traveling for work, or I got sick, or I had to drop everything and handle a genuine emergency. But more often than not, I found myself just... deflated? Unmotivated? Tired? I didn't want to do the tasks I'd assigned myself, or I'd fallen out of love with an idea, and—

Suddenly it was next week.

The Problem with Metrics

This phenomenon hit me last year, as the way I was living during the pandemic had to change, return-to-office reared its ugly head, we moved into our first house, and an additional 8 hour/week commitment popped up at work. At the time, I kept thinking of the problem in terms of me — my energy, my discipline, my priorities — that I blinded myself to every other possibility.

I was setting extremely detailed, metric-driven goals to achieve by the end of the year, with no room for the unexpected or a slip in the process. Write 750,000 words, finish these 10 games, paint 50 models, walk 7,000 steps a day. But that means 6,999 steps is a failure. There is no difference between 48 and 49 — it has to be 50, and has to be by the end of the year, and that means I need to do ~1/week or fail.

I'd essentially recreated the Waterfall model, designing everything up front and throwing down a deadline that I would never be able to meet. Recently, I started reevaluating my process, pushing for an Agile-like approach instead. I'm about 10 weeks in, and I'm liking it. I've had to travel for work one week, I got sick another, but I don't feel like I'm failing to achieve my goals.

Shifting Away from Deadlines

I think the three biggest changes to my process are:

Tasks I failed to complete in a previous week don't stay with that week — there is no longer a concept of "going back" to a task, it just returns to the backlog.
I've made a distinction between repeatable tasks — the only thing that used to be on my board — and one-off tasks that I need to do but take up my time.
If I assign myself N tasks in a week and I complete N-1, the following week I'm only allowed to take on N-1 tasks.

I also changed the flow of my spreadsheet, cutting about 60% of the content in favor of a simple flow.

Don't let the goal status on the far right confuse you — I'm not expecting to read 5 textbooks in 2023, the bars just help me visualize what I've gotten done so that I don't have to continuously parse the task stream. My priority in this new setup is flow. I've found I can comfortably get about 10 tasks done each week, and so my focus is to keep that number more or less consistent (i.e. N=10). This has been helpful in terms of keeping my motivation up, because each week I'm able to predict what I'll get done, plan for it, and get the dopamine hit of checking all those boxes.

Since I started including one-off tasks in my backlog, I've also stopped underestimating my work as much, and even when that does happen, the work from a previous week no longer spills into the next. It's a subtle difference, but psychologically it's a major shift — instead of feeling like I'm constantly playing catch-up, each Saturday I can focus on the next week with a clean slate.

Wrapping Up

Now that my little experiment is done, and I'm pretty comfortable with the new process, I'm finally ready to commit to my 2023 goals. And from there... We'll have to see how it goes! As long as I keep focusing on flow over the numbers, and avoid hard deadlines that don't stand up to the entropy of life, I think it's going to be just fine. But only time will tell — until then, I hope all is well with you and yours, and I'll see you in the next one.

2022: The Year of Side Quests

2023-01-01T00:00:00Z

Ahh, the bell toll of shame. At the start of 2022 I'd made a promise to myself that I'd write more, and that lasted exactly four months. What I didn't fully appreciate was that I was about to be smacked with two massive life events:

My wife and I's first house, a giant move, and all the maintenance/remodeling that would follow.
My acceptance into an "Expert Engineer" program at work, which would go on to claim ~10 hours/week of my time from June-December, and 3 weeks of travel.

Put a bout of COVID-19 on top of that and we've got an entire month, plus the 2-ish hours of hobby/training time I get on weekdays, entirely gone. I also drastically underestimated the amount of time I would spend working on the house this year, with my initial estimate being around 100 hours, and my current running total at ~250 hours and change — in particular a massive basement remodel.

1 / 5

A picture of the before stolen from Zillow, because I failed to grab one...

2 / 5

Post painters and basement contractors adding wall straps and a french drain.

3 / 5

Where I got my hands dirty installing a subfloor.

4 / 5

Adding a protective layer over top, also helps with noise.

5 / 5

Finally adding the flooring, the trim and decorating would come later.

❮ ❯

However, that is not to say that the year was a wash. I love owning a home, and I learned a tremendous amount this year in my training program. With a few sacrifices to my sleep schedule, I still found time to play D&D with friends and hide away with some books and video games. Contrary to previous years, I also went outside!

Out and About

I got the opportunity to go to both Seattle and Los Angeles for some quick vacations, the former of which was the first vacation I'd been on with my best friends — and also the first time I've ever had a flight crew timeout on a red eye, forcing us to spend the night in an airport.

1 / 7

A view of downtown Seattle from the ferry.

2 / 7

Kubota Garden in Seattle — a bit of a drive from downtown but the views are amazing.

3 / 7

A lovely photo of Gas Works Park in Seattle — highly recommend.

4 / 7

Liz's Antique Hardware in Los Angeles.

5 / 7

Overlooking the Huntington Japanese Garden in LA.

6 / 7

A quick snapshot of the beautiful altar at a friend's wedding in LA.

7 / 7

A view of Manhattan from across the bay in New Jersey, when I was traveling for work.

❮ ❯

It was a rough experience, but it didn't take from the time I spent, or this refound ability to travel across the world. I look forward to more travel in 2023, assuming the funds and time.

The Content Diet

I completed all the training courses I assigned myself in January, but not the two extra I thought I'd pick up after Q1 (this is what I get for adding scope creep). I also passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam, which has been a boon both at work and in my projects at home.

Out of my technical reading pile I read Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin... And that's it. As with my goals around novel writing, taking the time to sit down with a textbook is a commitment I didn't have the capacity for. I did get some social reading done during my flights, but nothing like what I completed last year.

I was able to play video games this year, but not in the way I expected. I thought I would be catching up on FFXIV and other multiplayer games, but I found it very difficult to play any game I couldn't immediately pause and handle something else.

This lead to Skyrim being my #1 game, because one can save and quit mid-combat, which I had to do on several occasions. I had an amazing time working through a variety of mods I'd never played before, and was delighted when several of them began to weave together into a larger narrative.

It was without question the greatest video gaming experience I've had, and all the more special because I put the major pieces together myself.

The Crafting Corner

Moving over to tabletop games, I've climbed up from 415k words in WorldAnvil at the end of Q1 2022 to 493k this week — a far cry from where I wanted to be, but in hindsight I think the number goal was a bit arbitrary. What I focused on was getting articles out of draft, which was a lot more satisfying. Just before year end we completed Season 9 of The Centurion's Riddle, a game I thought would complete in 2022, but rescheduling and some narrative twists got in the way of a satisfying finish. I see that wrapping up in the first half of 2023, but I've clearly been wrong before.

Then comes the lowest hobbies on the totem pole for 2022... 3D printing and miniature painting. Several months after the move and I've yet to setup my printers again, and I cracked open my paint palette for the first time in 6 months just this past week. I think this is a hobby that won't truly flourish until I'm done GMing the The Centurion's Riddle, as most of my tabletop-time is going to actual prep instead of painting.

Wrapping Up

I'm struggling to sum up this year. So much happened, a plethora of which is not even mentioned here, on the full spectrum of good to bad. I think out of all of it, two lessons stick out about the work I'm doing, and what I want for myself year-over-year:

The way I currently track my goals and tasks (a big Excel sheet) isn't working. It adds up the numbers nicely, but it leads to a Waterfall-esque process where one task must be completed before another, leading to progress gridlock.
How much training is too much training? While it's certainly helped me at work, it sometimes comes at a detriment to my goals at home. Finding the balance is something I'd like to start doing this year.

No goal promises just yet, or hours spent organizing my spreadsheet before vacation ends. I'm going to think a little bit about the what and the how before I get started, maybe try some things out in the background, and see where that takes me.

I hope all is well for you and yours, and I'll see you in the next one.

The Power of Collaborative Storytelling (At Work)

2022-03-22T00:00:00Z

This past weekend I played 10 hours of Starfinder with my friends across two separate sessions, I am scheduled for a 4-hour finale on Thursday evening, and I have another game in a completely separate D&D 5E campaign this Saturday. Needless to say, tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) have been on my mind lately.

I've also been back at the office 2-3 days a week, and collaborating with my teammates in person — if you can believe it, we used an actual whiteboard! A ritual so mythical to me at this point, that it belongs in D&D more than my work life. But it's in the mashup of these events — coding by day, D&D by night — that I've come to fully appreciate something you've likely read in dozens of catchy business articles, but which to me is still profound:

What's good at the table is what's good at the desk.

No, But...

When acting as the gamemaster (henceforth simplified as GM), there's a lot we can take away from the formal disciplines of storytelling and improv. Both give this same advice, but in a slightly different context — try to follow a "Yes" with "And", and if you have to say "No", follow it up with "But".

No, you cannot seduce the raging demon into abandoning his centuries-long plot to destroy the heavens. But you might be able to seduce the cultist trying to summon him, and distract him long enough for your friends to foil the ritual. Yes you have killed the wizard, and now the magics holding his lair together have faded, and the tower is crumbling around you!

In my humble opinion, getting this right is one of the first steps in being a good GM, because it keeps the story engaging for the players. But the real magic happens when you start to rope in your players, or (ideally) when they do it among themselves.

No, you can't pull that rusty lever down by yourself, but if you regroup with the party, one of them might be able to help you. Yes, you now know the dragon's weakness, and if you shout it out to your friends, I'll give them a +2 on the attack.

What I'm describing here is a form of collaborative storytelling — where two or more people work together, bouncing back and forth between events, to tell a story. While this happens innately anytime you sit down to play a TTRPG, the quality of the back-and-forth will vary from table to table, and I think it's a key indicator of what makes a session great.

Bringing Your Dice Brain to Work

I think my previous point also applies to the workplace: while collaboration happens innately anytime you form up a team (ideally 4-6 people, also the sweet spot for a gaming table) the quality of collaboration will vary.

Great collaboration is not two or more people pushing code changes to the same repository. It's that same group of people working together on a philosophical level — exchanging ideas via healthy debates and info sessions, and deciding on not just the tech stack, but the spirit of what you're all trying to achieve. It's about sharing both the blame and the credit, and it's about admitting what you can't do, and putting your trust in the team.

I don't know, but Jane does. Yes, my team can help you with that, and you're in luck, because John is an expert. No, I don't think Typescript is the answer for this application, but I want to hear your thoughts.

I think we've all been on a team where the second half of all the sentences in the above paragraph were missing. Where the subject of the sentence is the all-possessive me, and the story begins and ends there. It's damn subtle, but once I started paying attention to it, it changed how I look at the team dynamic. For me, it's what differentiates "power teams" from product teams, and when looking back, is a great summation of why I've left teams in the past.

Tell a Story About "We", Not "Me"

You don't need to be a roleplaying guru or an improv veteran to start applying this principle to your day job. When you unmute yourself on that Zoom call (even though 90% of the people in the meeting are now adjacent to your corporeal form), take a look at how the story you're telling ends.

Are you leaving a hook for others to grab on to, or do you begin and end the story with what's on your mind? Hopefully, if you sit in enough meetings with collaborative storytelling on the brain like I have, you'll see what I'm starting to. That the best roleplaying groups have many things in common with the best teams.

That what's good at the table is what's good at the desk.

2021: Looking Back

2022-01-03T00:00:00Z

It should come as no surprise to anyone that 2021 was a hard year. The pandemic is still raging on-and-off — enough said. Personally, both Danielle and I had surgeries this year (all is well!), with lengthy recovery times and some draining post-op medications. Stack this on top of the "Great Resignation" causing massive shifts in our workplaces, the tumultuous nature of recent politics, and the mundane stresses of modern life...

I find myself very tired at the end of 2021.

Some of the goals I set at the end of 2020 fell apart in the wake of these changes, as did the time and energy I had to complete them. Even when I did have the opportunity to tinker, I felt a general apathy about doing it, often opting to turn my brain off instead. In other words, I wrote very little code for fun this year (the majority of which built this website), and ended up consuming a lot of TV, movies, and video games. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that (Auri appreciated all the lap time), but it's not what I'd set out to do.

All this lamenting doesn't mean that there weren't any positives in 2021 — far from it. Danielle and I celebrated our 1-year wedding anniversary this past September, and our 10-year anniversary on New Year's Day. Despite the pandemic, I found more opportunities to visit my close inner circle, and get outside. Setting perfectionist dreams aside, I doubled-down on my hobbies and personal learning goals this year. While I didn't get them all done, I organized and made conscious decisions about how I spent my time, and I think the year was better for it.

The Content Diet

I read a lot of books. More than I've ever read in a year — 26 books, one for every other week. The reading list is summarized nicely below, mostly picked from the library pile, with a few recommended ad-hoc by friends. My favorites had to be the third novel and surrounding novellas of the Skyward series by Brandon Sanderson, the Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, and The Forever Sea by Joshua Phillip Johnson. Special shout-out to Eric May for recommending Walkable City by Jeff Speck, which changed the way I look at my neighborhood.

I played some of the critically-acclaimed MMORPG FFXIV, with a big gap in the fall after Danielle's surgery. MMOs are an old love of mine, starting all the way back when I was in fifth grade, and the social grind of it has felt like coming home. I also took some HTML/CSS courses in preparation for this website, which is increasingly becoming relevant for me in my professional life. At the very least, I'll have a few things to tweak when I get back to my work environment...

The Crafting Corner

I did a lot of writing this year, but not as a cohesive body of publishable work. I put over 300,000 words into the WorldAnvil wiki for my Starfinder campaign (a.k.a. <span class="reference"

The Centurion's Riddle</span ), greatly aided by the ~90 short stories I needed to write to bridge a time skip in-game (I did it to myself...). We also completed Episode 54 this year, which I prepped, ran, and wrote the reports for.

In preparation for all that glorious DMing, I also did a lot of painting, in an effort to utilize the backlog of models I printed in 2019-2020. You can see one of my later terrain pieces above, with a sneak peek of some of the minis in the background. While tedious to setup and teardown a space for in the apartment, this was one of the few relaxing activities I had left this year, and I found myself coming back to it consistently.

Wrapping Up

And that's a wrap on 2021. Good riddance, you will not be missed. While I don't have any grand hopes for 2022, I do have grand ambitions — hopefully the world will calm down a little to suit.

I hope all is well with you and yours, and Happy New Year!