Last updated: 2025-08-11

Hi, welcome to my now page! You can see previous versions of this page here.

Now

• We have a new puppy! He's a 2 months-old border collie and is surprisingly well behaved for a puppy. Of course, he misbehaves when he's bored and has bouts of zoomies wherein everything becomes a toy (even my kids). Though he tends to be calm most of the time.
• I'm finding myself recovering my habit of writing morning pages! I actually only missed one day last week, which is saying a lot considering that for the past 2 or three months I did at most 2 days a week. I think part of it is the puppy, who wakes me up early to take him out to pee (again, surprisingly well behaved).
• Thanks to my wife and her campaigning against LLMs I realized how over-reliant I was on them for my self-expression and work. I wrote a bit about it in this post. It's been a week that I'm not even giving myself the chance of using them to correct my grammar and I've found that words now flow much more easily, and my self-confidence has improved.
• Recently I discovered The Moth and the concept of personal storytelling, which I fell in love with. Well, I was already doing it a bit of it here in my blog, though I didn't really know it. I plan to do more of it hopefully!
• Related to the above, I recently started reading a book called Storyworthy. In it the author suggests an exercise which I started doing yesterday. The idea is that at the end of every day you take 5 minutes or so to write down one or two things that happened that day that might make a good story. I think this is an awesome way to both be more grateful with what goes on as well as more observant and attentive.
• My oldest is adapting well to going back to kindergarten after a bit more than a month out, which I'm really happy about.

Reading

(you can also find me on Hardcover)

• On Writing by Stephen King
  • Man I really need to get back to reading this! It's been a while that I don't touch it but I do want to finish it. There's just much good stuff in it.
• Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks

Watching

• My wife and I started the new season of Wednesday last week!
• While talking with my wife we also realized I had never seen Prison Break. She was scandalized at the idea and so now we're also watching Prison Break.

Projects

• I'm trying to teach myself the Gleam programming language (it's awesome, with tight functional flow but still feels familiar, and has one of the most healthy and positive and overall loving communities I have ever seen formed around a language).
  • To do so I'm making a forum very much like https://forum.status.cafe/ .
  • I don't know if I will end up publishing or hosting this anywhere though. It's mostly for educational purposes.
  • I've also given myself the challenge of not using LLMs to write it, and it's been a lot more fun! I realized that much of my disillusionment with programming at work came from how I was using LLMs, and how I really spent most of my time waiting for it to come up with a solution rather than coming up with a solution myself. Also, given that Gleam is not a mainstream language, LLMs perform really poorly on it, which is an added bonus.
    • Well, I'll probably use LLMs, but only for busywork stuff like filling documentation, and the initial set of styles (I'm not really good with design stuff).