What's Been Happening?
Our big girl turned 4
I ran a half marathon with a terrible pace. Just left home, ran to Sea World and ran back.
Probably one of the kids highlights of the year was Disney on Ice
After much convincing from Joelle, we added a pool to our backyard! We even have a couple songs to go along with it thanks to Suno.
We travelled to New Zealand in July and got to visit the snow with the kids for the first time.
We also did a fun little weekend holiday at Bribie Island, courtesy of my friend John from work.
Sia turned 2 and had a picnic at the rockpools
We had some friends from Geelong come up and stay with us.
In December we had a blast doing Christmas Carols on the Beach!
One of my highlights was a "Santa's Workshop" that was hosted at the Brisbane Microsoft office for the families. Not much work was done that day, but me and the girls had a blast travelling on the train together.
Then not too long after Christmas, Caspian came along!!
Then from Jan->May I covered the whole of paternity leave in a separate blog post! But I'll drop some of the sections in here just for continuity.
We got hit by a Tropical Cyclone on the Gold Coast, resulting in 4 days of no power, and a couple nights bunked in with the kids for the heavy wind and rain. But otherwise the biggest persistent change to the Gold Coast is the beaches that were eroded:
Following that, we took a holiday driving up to Yeppoon with a 2 month old!
And since then there hasn't been too much notable, just returning to work in May and going back to the usual daily life on the Gold Coast.
Work @ Microsoft
Still chilling as a "Principal Software Engineer" (level 65 still) in the SharePoint Team. I did a bunch of work last year on the Viva Amplify product that our team owns. This year I've been assigned a new product area to work on that I'll hopefully be able to share more about next year, but it's still very much within the SharePoint platform.
I've also been loving remote work this time of year, the weather is perfect for working outside at the park or the beach, and I've got all the gear to make it viable (more on this later).
FIRE Goals / Life Goals
Everything shifted around a bit this year, as I thought more about FIRE and what it looks like to balance work @ Microsoft and whatever else I want to do outside of Microsoft.
I learned a few things like:
- I really can't stop coding. I was on paternity leave for 3 months and built 5 different software projects from the ground up. So if I stopped working at Microsoft, I would still very much be busy coding up different ideas.
- Giving is actually really important to us. We upped out giving to take full advantage of the Microsoft employee giving match this year. Donating primarily to effective life-saving charities via GiveWell. A terrific book I read on this topic of philanthropy was "The Life You Can Save".
- Reading another book "A Good Return", helped me shape my understanding of what ministry looks like for people like me working a full time occupation. With the reality being that there are millions of people equipped to evanglise to people on the streets, but there are few people that are called to reach software engineers in Big Tech.
All of these things boil down to me somewhat shaping what my goals look like in the future, but in a sense they are a lot less clear than when my goal was a simple "retire in 10-15 years". A lot of this thinking was born out of the onslaught of questions from people about "but what will you do when you retire". I feel like I have a better answer to it now (coding, giving, reaching people in software), however what it practically looks like in 10 years is still a little unclear. But hey, in my favorite words from Mr. Incredible:
Fitness
No huge updates on fitness, I dropped the Planet Fitness membership in favor of doing BODYPUMP classes from home with just a bar and a bench/step. But I've honestly only done 4 so far, so I need to pick up my game.
The main thing I've actually been consistent with is running. I've turned almost entirely into a social runner, running with the Tuesday morning men's group every week, and for the last ~6 weeks with the Hillsong young adults on Saturday morning (@the47runclub).
The only goal I've got coming up in this area is to run another half marathon, this time with Joelle as part of her post-pregnancy fitness goals.
Projects
Loads of personal software projects this year. Biggest learning has been just how easy it is to work on small/new software projects with the help of AI/LLMs. A single dev can get something up and running in a day that would have taken a whole week before (at least for me).
- Kids Video Player - App to play offline videos, used on our trip to Yeppoon for kids' tablets. First time developing in app in Flutter, loved it. Available on Google Play, source available on GitHub.
- AIBiblePlan.org - Tool to help Christians create dynamic Bible reading devotionals with the help of LLMs. Written in Ruby on Rails; source available on GitHub.
- FlickGPT - Tool to generate movie recommendations from LLMs. This is in early development, but you can already use your IMDb rating exports to suggest movies and TV shows! Source available on GitHub.
- SMS-an-LLM - After the cyclone, I wanted to build a free service that let you send a text message and get a response from an LLM. I ran this on an old phone for a month. Full blog post about it.
- Population Percent Visualization - Inspired by the meme of "50% of Australians live in the red area" showing a tiny amount of Australia colored in, I made a tool to dynamically change the percentage. I added US population data to the tool too. Source available on GitHub.
- I built a comical website for showing AI generated pictures of only fans.
- I've kept Stretto alive for another year (website). The chrome extension depends on Manifest V2 which is being deprecated by Chrome, so I may have to either switch it to v3 (if possible) or resort to browser that continue to support Manifest V2.
- One of the Raspberry Pi's I have running in my house had it's Micro SD card completely die out of the blue. As a result I reinstalled the OS on a new one, but even took it a step further and setup the OS to boot completely in read-only mode! Pretty cool from a technical perspective, and since writes are what wear out SD cards, it should last a lot longer.
Interests
Music
Couple of kids bangers make the list this year, including:
And a bunch more normal songs, still super varied genres:
- Elephant in the Room - Fran George
- The Substance (Hard Techno Remix)
- Circle With Me - Spiritbox
- IFTK (Vibe Chemistry Remix) - Tion Wayne
Movies
I want to the cinemas to watch the 20 year re-release of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith with Nick which was epic!
Apart from that, there were a couple movies I watched that were particularly notable:
- The Count of Monte-Cristo (2024) - Just a great 3 hour epic.
- The Substance (2024) - Honestly was unsure going into this one, and it's quite a lot of gore (be warned) but it was an awesome movie.
Books
As highlighted above, the two most influential books this year were The Life You Can Save from a philanthropy/giving perspective and A Good Return from a faith-based purpose perspective. Highly recommend both of them to anyone (the latter obviously more relevant to Christians).
Some other notable books were:
- Everybody, Always, focusing on just showing love to everyone around us
- Getting Real, talking about building lean software, even more relevant now in the era of AI.
Gaming
Still playing Call of Duty, although I've played a lot less of it since Caspian came along, maybe only ~5-10 hours. These days it seems like I'm more likely to pick up my Quest headset and play some random games on that, like Walkabout Mini Golf or Beat Saber.
Tech
Software I Use (New/Changes)
Mobile
- Audible - For audiobook listening when not using Smart Audiobook Player.
- Mises browser - Had to switch to another Chrome fork for extension support on mobile, since Kiwi Browser is gone now.
Desktop
- Although I was already using GitHub Copilot last year, I have now become a heavy user of it, it's so good!
Web
- A lot of LLM tools, from Google Gemini to Deepseek, and a bunch of pay-per-use LLM/AI services like fal.ai (image models), fireworks (text, image and video models) and deepinfra (open LLMs, competitive pricing).
- Aliexpress - I've actually spent a bunch buying stuff direct from China through Ali. From "lego" to tech and random other things like reusable straws.
Hardware I Use
Biggest change was jumping into the VR world and buying a Meta Quest 3 (along with Kiwi K4 Boost strap). And honestly it's been such a fun device to use! You can connect to your laptop and go from a tiny laptop screen to 3 giant virtual monitors, super useful. It also has a bunch of fun games, but admittedly I'm still getting my "VR legs" in that anything more than a "comfortable" rated game can start to make me feel nauseas. Because of that, I tend to stick to games where your movement virtually is 1-1 with real life, and there's no "joystick to move forward" kind of dynamic that throws my stomach into a spin.
The other hardware changes were minor ones for the remote work setup, including a laptop stand and an Apple Magic Trackpad. Allowing me to fully raise my laptop stand to eye height, and use it with my trackpad + slim mechanical keyboard.
Other hardware purchases that honestly ended up being pretty clutch were:
- Moondrop Space Travel - wireless earphones for ~$40 that sound awesome. I honestly use them more than my Sony XM4s these days since they're just so easy to carry around in your pocket.
- A power tool battery -> 65W USB-C adapter - Useful if I want to run my remote work laptop setup for a long time I can just bring along as many power tool batteries as I need.
- Some small controllers from 8BitDo for travelling with the steam deck. And even one of the tiny ones.
- Joelle gifted me blank white ceramic keycaps from Cerakey. Super nice to type on, but I even had to replace (i.e. solder) the switch for my spacebar to a heavier one because the space key weighed so much!
The other notable upgrade was my phone, was finally time to move on from my broken screen Zenfone 8 Flip to a more vanilla Pixel 9 Pro XL. Absolutely no complaints about the phone and believe it or not, this is my first phone with a camera notch.
To Come!
Well that wraps my last birthday blog post from my 20s! My goals for the next 12 months before I turn 30 are roughly the same as last year:
- Make some more progress on my side projects, maybe even turn one of them into paid software.
- Stay fit with running and a bit of weight training
- Continue to focus on maintaining a good WLB, spending healthy amounts of time with Joelle and the kids while also doing some great work at Microsoft
