Where I've Been, and What's Worth Saying Now
It's been a long while since anything new went up here, and I want to be honest about why instead of just sliding back in like no time passed.
The short version: work got heavier, and our family went through a run of losses that didn't let up. My mother passed. My wife's mother had a stroke, declined, and passed. My stepfather passed. Then my father passed. Four losses, one after another, with work still demanding full attention through all of it.
The longer version is that grief like that — stacked, with no real space between waves — doesn't leave you without thoughts. If anything, it leaves you with too many, scattered and half-formed, while the part of you that used to organize them into sentences was busy just getting through each day. So the silence here wasn't the absence of material. It was the absence of bandwidth. There's a difference, and I think it matters.
Now that I'm starting to surface again, I'm looking at this blog the way you look at a garage you haven't opened in a year — half the things in here are useful, and a fair amount is just dust and contents that don't reflect where I actually am anymore. Before I start filling it back up, I'd rather ask the people who might still be reading: Does any of this hold value for you?
Here's roughly what's been accumulating, in no particular order:
Rust and embedded systems. I've spent a good stretch of time down in the weeds of embedded Rust — the kind of work where you're fighting register-level behavior on real hardware, not just abstractions. There's a particular kind of satisfaction in getting something to behave correctly at that layer, and I have opinions about where the tooling is heading.
Alternative history aviation. This is the one that surprises people. I build out plausible "what if" aircraft and engine lineages — not just the hardware, but the institutional and wartime decisions that would have had to go differently to produce them. It's part engineering exercise, part storytelling, and it's been one of the more genuinely fun things I do.
Faith, examined rather than just stated. I've been chewing on pieces of what I believe — not the surface-level version, but what it actually asks of me day to day, and where it's been tested. I don't know how much appetite there is for that kind of writing from me specifically, but it's been on my mind enough that it keeps showing up.
Technology in general — energy especially. Solar, fusion, fission, the whole landscape of how we generate and move power. I find myself pulled toward this less as a hobby and more as a genuine belief that many of our other problems become easier to solve once the energy question is handled well.
Free and open-source software. Long-standing interest, not a phase. The principle matters to me as much as the practice.
AI integration and tooling. Where this is actually useful versus where it's noise, and how it fits into the way I already work and build things.
So — that's the inventory. Some of it is technical, some of it is personal, and none of it was written with an audience in mind, which is probably obvious by now.
If you're still reading this blog after the long quiet, what, if any of that, would you actually want to see more of? I'd genuinely rather hear that than guess.
