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TL;DR - Enjoying the holidays, gearing up for my parental leave, and building where I can.

• High: Thanksgiving with family and friends
• Low: Sleep is still elusive (Health)
• Seed: Got into Recurse Center (Build)

Top Releases

• CinderBlockHtml (my C# HTML DSL) - v0.6.1 released

• Migrated my blog from F# to C# and started a Digital Garden

• Migrated my sites to Nomad

• Got into Recurse Center!

• Why I’m Moving Back to Notion from Obsidian for Personal Notes

• How I Actually Code with AI as a Senior Software Engineer

• An Unexpected Benefit from Quitting Coffee - 10 Months In

Create

Build

Recurse Center

Biggest news this month is that I got into Recurse Center and will be attending a batch in January during my parental leave. RC has been on my radar for years as many of the creative technology groups in NYC have member overlap and a good % of the authors of weird, interesting technical blogs mention RC. I just never found a good time to take 6-12 weeks to pursue non-monetary things until now - whenever I have had time away from jobs, I was usually in the midst of a full-blown job search.

RC is basically a programming retreat (like a writer’s retreat). The goal is to have focused time to explore and collaborate on technical interests, removed from the external pressures and influences of business / money. I’m excited to explore technology from a more creative lens again with tentative focus on web fundamentals, networked games, and applied AI though I’ll probably shift as the batch goes on.

One thing’s for certain - I’ll probably be writing more as one of RC’s values is learn generously.

CinderBlockHtml

I released v0.6.1 of CinderBlockHtml. This adds a bunch of missing, uncommon html elements and a few helpers like single empty node / attributes. These are things I found I wanted while building my sites so figured others would want them as well.

This package remains largely vibe coded and I think that’s totally fine. The code here is not complex, most of it is boilerplate mapping of new attributes to existing foundations. I think this is one of the places AI shines and is a hallmark of using AI effectively by vibe engineering.

If you want to give the library a shot, it’s available on Nuget.

Migrating my blog from F# to C#

I moved my blog from F# to C# for a few reasons:

• Tooling is better - ecosystem and AI
• C# is p good these days

I hate saying that AI is a reason I’m moving but I have way less time / attention to devote to side projects as a new dad and AI is great for getting me unstuck or filling out boilerplate code so I can do smth else. AI is better at coding in popular languages so unfortunately it matters.

It’s already paid dividends - I did a majority of the switch from F# to C# with AI, built out my bidirectional backlinks with AI, and my new digital garden post types with AI. I could’ve done all of this myself but it would’ve taken a lot more time / energy / attention at which point I might’ve just not done the migration.

I’m not done with F# completely but I expect a majority of my projects in the next year will be C#.

Creating a Digital Garden

I have been following the concept of a digital garden for awhile and like a lot of its values:

• Unique websites
• Personal notes
• Build in public

My site has evolved several times over the years and many of the core design choices align with these values - even if I hadn’t discovered the formalized version.

I expect to be writing on my site for decades and while I love blog posts and think they’re valuable, they’re just not the best medium for every kind of writing. Some pieces of writing around concepts are better served in the form of a wiki where they can be updated to reflect my current best definition / resources for them.

So I’m starting that wiki now. It currently lives in my notes folder and will be the home for notes on concepts that I want to be able to link to around the internet. They’re more notes than polished essays (which live on my blog) so expect todos and half-finished thoughts but I think over time this will grow into something interesting and valuable - maybe not for the masses but for me to look back on.

For more on my digital garden and how it works - checkout my note My Digital Garden (meta!).

Migrating my site hosting to Nomad

Last year I switched from cloud to self hosting and then a few months ago from managed self hosting to manual self hosting.

This was nice but I ran into a couple edge cases that were tedious - like how to setup no downtime deploys, how to create healthchecks, and how to efficiently pack containers on my servers. For awhile it was an annoyance but not a big deal (none of my services are very valuable) but I eventually had enough when I pushed a bad change that broke my website for 19 hours and I didn’t know it happened.

I started looking into ways to fix and realized I’d have to roll my own versions of a lot of cloud primitives to get the protections I wanted and then I’d be stuck maintaining those builds forever. That didn’t really seem like how I wanted to spend my time / energy so I started looking for off-the-shelf options.

I eventually landed on Nomad as a nice cross between the capabilities of a full-blown orchestrator and the simplicity of a batteries-included solution. So now I orchestrate my multi-server container deployments with Nomad.

Now I’ve got:

• Health checks
• Blue/green deploys
• Auto server packing (which means easy scaling to n servers, containers)
• Dashboards + monitoring
• Auto restarts
• Push-based deploys

My Shares are falling off a bit. Views / watch time / subs are down and so is my output.

Some hypotheses are:

• I switched thumbnail styles to be more aligned to my current design system / brand which ppl might not like
• I’m not leaning into topics that viewers have shown they like - mostly just writing ab whatever I’m building
• People are using AI more and reading / watching videos less which means less traffic to me
• My content is not the most friendly - it’s just me reading off a blog post - which has a high bounce rate which the algorithm doesn’t love

Not sure what it is (probably all of them and more) but most metrics are in the red.

Largely that’s fine - I’m in this for the long term because I enjoy writing and it still helps pay for my project costs so we’ll keep chugging.

Profit

Work is going well! I’m feeling good about the company and team and really excited for a couple months off to recharge and focus on the baby.

Reflect

Health

Walking and exercising less over the holidays / colder weather.

We’ve been trying to eat more healthy as I got some cholesterol readings that were borderline high so want to get ahead of that.

Sleep continues to be elusive with the baby’s sleep schedule. She’s turned into an alarm clock that goes off at 6am so there’s really no room for sleeping in anymore.

Wealth

Keeping on with the The Simple (, Long, Short, Boring, Probable) Path to Wealth.

Happiness

This is the first month that having a baby seems "normal". I’ve forgotten what it felt like day-to-day to not have a kid and now the daily cycles of feedings, play time, and naps feel like just another part of my day.

I’ve also been able to find a balance between my other pursuits - like seeing friends, exploring places with the baby, and finding time for my side projects. It’s much different from what it was like without a kid but I think we’re hitting our stride.

Observe

Connect

A lot of family time and a few hangs with friends. We’re trying to get out 1-2 days a week but sometimes we’re just tired lul.

Explore

Places: Avalon in Alpharetta, downtown Roswell, Himitsu in Buckhead

Reading: A bunch of tech blog posts and book 10 of the wandering inn, though I think I need to take a break from the story after this one.

• On sustainable art: How to make a living as an artist. Aligns with a lot of rought theories I’ve had where good art is also fiscally sound art, in whatever domain your art lives in.
• Small batches: Think Small. I like the idea of atomic cycles - do the simplest version of the thing that is reasonable. Compound these on top of each other. I also like this interpretation of a digital garden.
• Rigid + Flexible: Live a disciplined life, spontaneously. Hard agree with this idea and is a concept I come back to regularly. Will probably write an essay on it at some point but this one gets the gist.
• AI + Software Engineering - LLM’s and Smaller, Less Popular Programming Languages. Interesting to think ab how AI impacts the software industry. One outcome may be that small langs have less AI support so fall behind. A significant factor in me moving away from F#.

Watching: Dancing with the Stars (Alix should’ve won), chick flicks / holiday movies Megna likes, and Megna’s family vlogs

Listening: My First Million and Pragmatic Engineer podcasts

Playing: Making my way through Kingdom Come Deliverance 2

Improve

Been playing a lot with AI and trying to find simple prompts / systems to improve my coding / writing / diagrams. You’ll see a few of these in action in my various blog posts.

Next

That’s all for November.

Looking forward to December:

• Holidays and time off
• Advent of Code 2025 in functionalish C#
• Reflecting on my year

Thanks for reading!