What's Been Happening?
Penelope turned 5 and Ariel came along to her birthday party
Then the next day I flew off to the US to spend the week seeing colleagues and old friends. Luckily my team had budget so I got to fly business class, it was just a funky route Brisbane->Seoul->Seattle. The week was absolutely packed:
- Setting a PB 10k with Cody
- Hiking with Suyog
- Team morale event at go karting
- Team morale event at top golf
- And working a full work-week in the middle of all that
Then later in the year we had Sia's 3rd birthday
And in November we went to Magnetic Island with Joelle's parents
We also had the girls dance concert
Then in January Cas turned 1
In January the girls came up to the Brisbane office for a family fun day, with cookie decorating, face painting and movies. We then got to explore southbank together.
Then at the end of January, Penelope started school!
Then in March, Joelle got a tent for her birthday and since then we've decided that our holidays will mostly be camping holidays.
And amongst all that we just had a bunch of fun just living life on the Gold Coast
One of my random highlights for the year has been doing some app development with the girls. They have described to me apps they want to exist, drawn mock-ups on paper, and then we've basically vibe-coded the whole thing together. It's really fun to let the girls describe their ideas without the constraints of how I might already expect you would build something.
The apps we've built so far are:
- A K-pop demon hunters soundboard for Penelope
- A special day countdown app for Penelope (think, counting down days to peoples birthdays, like a calendar but you "tick" off each day, and it shows you the number of days until a date. We also had fun animated videos for each of the special days.
- A checkout app for Sia - letting you scan real food items from the pantry
- A photo to colouring in app - that lets you take a photo, convert it to a line drawing, then colour it in
Work @ Microsoft
Work has been going well - our team has transitioned to owning the whole SharePoint Search UX, so I've been engrossed in that space the last 12+ months.
I gave a talk during the "Give" month of October at work that was pretty exciting, sharing about the book "The Life You Can Save" with my colleagues. I'd like to do either the same talk or a follow-up one to a smaller audience this year.
Joelle's New Gig
Joelle started a face-painting business this year doing birthday parties and events (GC Face Painting), and it's been growing steadily! It's been really
cool watching her build something from scratch and our kids absolutely love seeing her in action at some of the public events.
FIRE Goals / Life Goals
Following on from last year, I actually worked it out. Reading another powerful book "Money, Possessions and Eternity", I've actually completely decided to abandon FIRE, basically coming to the conclusion personally that not only early-retirement, but any retirement in the Western sense is not really biblical (check in with me again in another 30 years to see if this still holds when I actually hit retirement age).
Instead, the plan is to continue working basically until I physically cannot, and in the meantime focus on (using the hip terms these days) "give maxxing". The primary charity in focus for us is still GiveWell (via Effective Altruism Australia).
There's a lot more to this rabbit hole than I can explain in this blog post section, but Australia actually has a ton of support in place to support living on a low income (FTB, CCS). So even if you artificially create a low income by donating money to charity you end up with a lot of support that makes living on a low income quite doable. This allows you to "give max" in a very unique way compared to other countries.
Fitness
Fitness has still played a big part of our lives. Joelle ran her first half marathon in September which Jackson flew up to join in on. We've also done plenty of family runs and I've done a ton of social runs. I've also really loved the last couple months going for a ride down to Surfers Paradise to have breakfast with Sia on a Tuesday morning.
Primary fitness goal for this year is to run a full-length marathon. I got stuck with some annoying leg ache / potentially sciatic nerve tightness since September last year, but I've almost shaken that and am ready to start training again.
Projects
Holy moly, this was the year vibe coding really took off for me. The models, especially the Claude Opus ones, are really really good. For so many side projects I don't even need to look at the code anymore in 95% of circumstances. I don't even think I can list all the projects here, so here is my new GitHub Pages site with the full directory listing. And here are just the notable ones:
- Joey MCP Client - Chat app powered by OpenRouter that allows you to talk to MCP servers from your phone (Google, Apple, GitHub)
- Better Spelling for Adults - Helping everyone practice commonly misspelled words / helping them get better at spelling without relying on auto-correct (Google, Apple)
- FreelyShared - A tool to help churches foster a community of sharing goods and services within the church (Website, GitHub).
- BSB Plan Generator - Generate a ebook or audiobook of a custom Bible reading plan, completely within the browser (Website, GitHub). I use the audiobook and ebook generated by this literally every day.
Interests
Music
Since Spiritbox was one of the random artists I liked last year, this year might potentially be Maphra. Other than that, I've been really getting back into drum and bass, specifically old-school tracks that hit 180 BPM to get me hyped for running. Something like:
Movies + TV
Just finished watching The Boys. Really rated the show "Pluribus" from this year too.
On the movies front, I've watched a couple of older movies recently, Heat was really good. Scarface was pretty good too.
Books
Highlight was absolutely Money, Possessions and Eternity by Randy Alcorn. It really helped drive home the philanthropy lessons I took away from The Life You Can Save, but from a Godly perspective.
Another good one from this year was "Why Pro-Life" also by Randy Alcorn. Since I really loved what the guy had to say about generosity, I wanted to read another book he had written which was in another area I am passionate about.
Gaming
I still get on to COD every now and again, but lately I've been playing lots of rally sim racing on Dirt Rally / EA WRC / Asetto Corsa Rally. Since I got the racing wheel for Christmas, it's been mounted to my desk, but today Joelle gifted me a proper sim racing cockpit that I've got to assemble.
Tech
Software I Use (New/Changes)
Other than the million and one vibe-coded projects there was:
- Home Assistant - finally up and running on my raspberry pi
- Tailscale - used to allow me to remote into my pi when outside my home network
- MyNetDiary - used for calorie counting
Hardware I Use
The two other hardware pieces I can think of that were notable from this year were:
- Upgrading my Garmin Swim 2 to a Coros Pace Pro watch for exercise
- For Christmas I received a Xteink X4 e-reader, which is a tiny e-reader that attaches to the back of my phone
Turning 30: Looking Back & Looking Forward
So last year my goals from the blog post were:
- 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.
#1 I actually achieved! My published apps just crossed $100AUD/month in revenue. #2 Reasonably good on the running, not so good on the weight training. #3 Definitely achieved. I've got a really good WLB going at the moment, hitting goals at work whilst being around a lot for my kids.
But turning 30 feels like a good excuse to zoom out a bit further than just last year.
The 20s. I moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft, grew my career from SDE1 to Principal. I wrote a ton of open source code and built fun projects throughout. I got married, travelled a bunch with Joelle, then had 3 kids. We navigated COVID and travelled back to Australia during the chaos of hotel quarantines. Adapted to and loved settling into life on the Gold Coast. And somehow went from "retire as early as possible and live our my days writing open source software" to "work forever and lean heavily into philanthropy." That's a lot of life in one decade.
The 30s. We'll see how many kids we end up with, maybe it stays at 3, maybe it's a bunch more. I hope to keep working at Microsoft, that AI doesn't make me redundant (only half joking), and that I continue learning and building fun things even though I barely manually write any lines of code anymore. I want to help grow our family's generosity, instill generosity in our kids, and help evangelize generosity with people from all walks of life. I also want to end the decade even more fit than I start it. 40s used to be the biggest demographic for marathon runners, right? Oh, and long service leave is coming up in January, so that's exciting.
For the more immediate year ahead:
- Carry out the philanthropy goals Joelle and I have, including a major restructure of our finances
- Run a marathon
