2023

Abroad

I visited Vietnam in January and had the chance to also travel to Singapore and Thailand on the same trip. It was the first time I travelled to Asia on a non-work trip. I was there for 3 weeks and worked every Friday to keep on top of email, messages and address any issues holding up projects. I was surprised by how fast and stable internet connections were as I travelled between countries and even a few hours away from any major cities.

We visited during the Vietnamese new year (also knows as Lunar or Chinese new year),and the entire country was in celebration mode. Eating mung bean sticky rice every single day, which I’m apparently addicted to now. Fireworks on the eve of new year’s and I got to (illegally) drive the motor scooters around town (10/10 experience). It helps to visit a country where your spouse natively understands the language. We had such a good time that by the time we left we were already planning the next visit.

Home Projects

Right after our trips abroad we had some construction work on our home’s foundation, which seemed to go well until we noticed water leaking it the next week. After a ton of dramatic back and forth we finally settled out of court to get it fixed and replace all of our damaged flooring. We then redid all the floors by leveling them followed by laying down LVP.

Soon after, in June we had Sarah’s parents come visit us and they began renovating our backyard. It’s hard to describe just how good that went. The backyard went from an eyesore to a place that I want to spend time everyday. After making it look nice we proceeded to build a covered deck, which we completed in 3 days. It involved every single member of the family to come over and do the build and painting.

At REI

The year had a lot of promise. I began as the lead engineer for REI’s Observability Platform, which is Enterprise speak for all things monitoring. It was fascinating trying to teach an old enterprise new tricks.

I had an opportunity to have an interview with a company that I had been eyeing that would have given me an opportunity to work on robots, and sustainability but because the appeal of being in charge, leading a team and having the final say in all matters was far too difficult to give up. REI is also a company that I’ve enjoyed working for, tremendously.

I switched to work for REI because I didn’t want to work for a soulless company, and that was true, for the most part. What I didn’t realize is that at heart, I am an engineer who wants to work on difficult and challenging problems and any job involved with retail, marketing, or logistics just isn’t going to fulfill me in a sustainable way.

2024

Abroad

We’ve already booked a 3+ week trip to Japan where we’ll visit the northern half of the country including: Tokyo, Kyoto and some of the surrounding cities. We’ve talked about going to Japan for some time, and shocked how much more expensive it will be compared to Vietnam.

Home Projects

I’m, very slowly, building a shed from scratch with nothing by wood, and Youtube. I’m hoping this year is light on projects as last year was quite exhausting. The only major issue that I want to fix is redirecting roof water to go around the house rather than under it.

Career

I plan on spending some serious time looking around. I want to be able to spend my energy and time on something where I can be creative and proud of my work. I’ve already started putting in some time to refresh on C/C++ and completed AoC.

Positions that I’ve seen so far that interest me:

Nvidia DCGM: Software Engineer

I find this to be sustainability-adjacent. A CPU maxed out will use about 300 watts and a graphics card maxed out will also use about 300 watts. The major difference is the 300 watts from the graphics card can complete about 50x+ of work than the CPU (if optimized correctly). It’ll be interesting to see where that technology goes but ultimately the more workloads that can move to GPU’s will be better for the environment. Not only will the watt usage be lower but the amount of raw materials required to setup and leverage GPU’s are lower. The only thing that remains constant is cooling.

FirstMode: Software Engineer

This company is why I started learning C/C++ in the first place. Even though I’ve been coding in Python and Java for 5 years now, I saw that their Software Engineer position is in the embedded space so I picked up an Arduino and began tinkering on some small projects.

It turns out that they are also in cloud and their cloud role for Software Engineer is also something I could excel at on day 1.

This has been a company that I’ve been eyeing for a long time, and combines both my passion for technology and sustainability into a single awesome package.

evGO: Software Engineer

I’m far more excited about this company. It would be a dream to help bring the electric revolution to the world. I could see myself at this company for a very long time. I was surprised to find out that I already have all of the skills required to fulfill their Software Engineer role which is doubly exciting.

LevelTen Energy

They work on renewable energy and any role in that industry is where I want to be. Their software engineer position isn’t too different from evGO’s so I have and I think that this would be an awesome place to work.