Performed Well

I'm in Wichita now for Thanksgiving with my whole family in the car.  The whole 3.5-hour drive--with 8 of us in the car--as well as the large Thanksgiving dinner and hangout time afterward have all been delightful.  The kids are consistently kind and considerate to each other and express sweetness and joy throughout the day.   My wonderful wife is such an enormous blessing to me.  My heart is full of love and gratitude.  Christine is the best wife and mother I know, and it just floors me to think that I get her all to myself.  How in the world did i ever get this lucky?

 A Canadian doctor named Dr. Charles Hoffe recently said "Covid-19 seems to cause people to lose three senses.  They lose their sense of smell, their sense of taste, and they lose their common sense." This doctor sent a private letter to his superiors sharing with him the actual side effects that his own patients experienced after receiving the COVID shot.  The side effects are concerning for sure, but more concerning was the reaction from the superiors.   Dr. Hoffe's medical board threatened to take away his license for sharing plain, observable facts even without giving his own commentary on them.  They were concerned that sharing such first-hand information would lead to "vaccine hesitancy" (their words). This kind of "You can't handle the truth!" attitude makes it difficult for me to trust the things we're shown about the COVID shot.   When i try to look up basic factual information like reported deaths in order to make an informed decision

 One of the things I love most about Software Development as a career is the ability to be in the mode of continually learning. I love being able to take on a task that will involve new challenges and then settle into the work of figuring them out one-by-one.   I also take a great deal of satisfaction (perhaps even too much satisfaction) from writing beautiful code.  TypeScript is one of my favorite ways to do that because there are inherently many new ways to improve existing code with strong typing. But i also find myself with a nagging feeling that I'm doing too much.  That all the additional typing isn't helping people very much and the additional time it takes to roll out new features will never be sufficiently compensated by the faster problem-solving or editor awareness.   I have certainly seen many benefits of course.  But it's hard to quantify the unseen: what features would've already been written by now had I or other devs not bothered with strict typing?   T

 Several years ago a friend of mine went through a divorce. The circumstances were common I suppose but they really caught me off guard because I had spent many hours with this friend and had no idea he and his wife were unhappy.  It was sad for me to realize that our conversations were all superficial enough that somethings like that wouldn’t even come up.  So I’ve started trying to intentionally deepen my friendships. I’m trying to set regular remote lunches and dare to ask about personal struggles and things I can pray for. It’s uncomfortable at times. But I want to be there to help if/when another friend finds himself in a similarly serious hardship.  We’ll see how this goes. 

We are coming out of a 14-day quarantine at our house. 2 weeks ago, Christine was exposed to a friend of ours who had the virus COVID-19. She tested positive so the whole family needed to quarantine ourselves for a couple weeks. Honestly, I think we all expected that most or maybe all of us would catch the virus. But surprisingly, nobody else caught it.  For Christine, the virus manifested itself with many uncomfortable symptoms such as fatigue and nausea. Thankfully, she never ran a fever. The most distinctive symptom was her loss of smell and taste. At one point, she actually bought some celery to eat because she could not taste any of the delicious food anyway. We are all very thankful that this was overall a pretty mild experience. I am amazed that nobody else in the family caught the virus as far as we know.  But more significantly, I am grateful to God that I am in a family that enjoys each other's company so much. This was not a rough time. It's hard to even say that it

Hard to believe it's been over 6 months since my last blog post. Since I last posted, the world has experienced one of the most fundamentally impactful events of our lifetime: the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic.  A highly contagious virus has spread all over the earth and this has led most world leaders to mandate a quarantine. The stock market has taken a dive and many people lost their jobs, including me.  I was a contractor at VMLY&R, and many of the contracts dried up, leaving me without a job.  But by God's grace, I actually got a job immediately afterward with Success Vision Express. So that's what i'm up to now.  I'm working full-time as an employee with Success Vision Express, and I'm so blessed to have this work.  I'm building an e-commerce website with my brother David using Ruby on Rails and Vue.js. Meanwhile, life has changed a little bit for us.  I personally love working from home 5 days per week and spending evenings with my lovin