Now

First and foremost: I'm a husband to Sharon and a dad to Ella. Being a dad is very awesome. Ella is now in grade 2 at school, and is getting very proficient at reading, writing and math. Last night after dinner we sat down and did powers of 2, up to 8192, to practice two-times tables. She's reading chapter books at a rate of knots.

Warrnambool is still providing that peace and tranquility. I still tell the joke that my favourite thing to do in town is to listen to the traffic reports from Melbourne. You couldn't pay me any amount of money to move back.

I occasionally take B.D. (The Bigg Dog, a Spoodle) for walks along the foreshore or around town. She's a huge fan of tennis balls, and the mere mention of the word "park" can send her into an absolute frenzy.

Work

I'm working full-time at Fat Zebra, leading their frontend efforts around design systems, React and TypeScript code. We've recently undertaken a project to uplift the look-and-feel of some design-neglected applications. This is work that I'm feeling very happy about finally getting around to, as it's bugged me for a while that although the apps are all from the same company, they're visually distinct. Not for much longer!

My team (6 in total, now) and I got together a few weeks ago in Sydney. After working at Fat Zebra for 3 years, I finally visited the main office. It was great to travel there and be reminded that, yes, they are living and breathing human beings rather than just a collection of pixels on the screen. We discussed ways of working better together, and had some excellent food and coffee.

Writing and other projects

I published GraphQL for Rails Developers through a collaboration with Pragmatic Programmers. I'm very happy with how it turned out, and I'm looking forward to writing more books in the future. I've got a few ideas for books that I'd like to write, but I'm not sure which one to tackle next. Something less about the code and more about _how I approach working_ is what I'm thinking.

My Magic: The Gathering addiction is still going strong, and I continue to tinker on Magic in Ruby. I'll even be giving a talk about this project at RubyConf AU in a few weeks time. I'm procrastinating on that talk by updating this page.