Performed Well

This is another technical post, so I recommend skipping it if you're not in a technical field... Over the last week, I've been learning to implement Webpack at work.  I've got some mixed feelings about it, so I'm posting them here while they're still fresh in my mind.  Maybe in a few months'/years' time, i'll look back at this post in feel differently. On the one hand, learning something new is almost always exciting, and I love that my job affords me the opportunity to grow like this. On the other hand, I also get this nagging feeling like I could be so much more productive if I were doing something I'm already good at. As for webpack itself, it's a very cool module bundler, and I'm quite impressed at the number of things it seems to be able to do automatically.  At the same time, however, the more things it "just does," the more it seems like magic, and the less control I seem to have with it. Yesterday, for instance, I

The last time I made a blog post, it was three weeks before the November 8 election.  Now it's nearly 3 weeks after the election is over, and to almost everyone's surprise, Donald Trump won and will be our next President. I didn't vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump (though I did vote down-ballot for conservative republicans including Kevin Yoder for congress).  I explained my reasons in my last blog post , so i won't repeat them here. However, as the voting results came in for each state, and we saw more and more of them turning Red (victories for Trump), I couldn't help but feel I was on the winning side of all this.  I am still apprehensive about President Trump, but I am so pleased that Republicans have regained control of the House and Senate, and I truly believe that the country will be a better place in 4 years than it is today. I am still concerned that Trump will only last 4 years and then we'll have another Democrat in the office, but

In three weeks from today, the country will have elected its next President - either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. As a Constitutional conservative, this election is the most discouraging one I've ever been a part of.  I paid attention to political pundits and news stories all throughout the primaries and the general election season, and I wanted so much to root for a principled conservative.  Instead, the choices are for two lifelong Democrats. On one side, Hillary Clinton has been caught in dozens of provable lies involving our national security, and she has used the her position as Secretary of State to accept bribes (through the Clinton Foundation and speaking engagements) for political favors from enemies of the United States. On the other side, Donald Trump is a Democrat running as a Republican, and I feel he has hijacked our party.  He has given more money to Democrats than Republicans his whole life and has always seen the world through the eyes of a pro-choice Dem

Disclaimer: this post will contain technical jargon, so my non-techie readers, I recommend you skip this one. As a JavaScript developer, my favorite working environment for the last 2+ years has been AngularJS -- a framework for building Single-Page Applications (SPAs). Almost as long as I've known about AngularJS, I've known that while the current version is 1.x, the team has been working on Angular 2, which will include many breaking changes.  Well over the past two or three weeks, I've been working to make the transition to Angular 2 just in time for the new release. And last Wednesday, it happened.  Angular 2 is officially out and this is anticipated to become the new standard for JavaScript single-page apps. On the surface, it's extremely impressive and cool.  But it is vastly different.  I never could have guessed just how different it would be.  Angular 2 uses TypeScript (a superset of ES6) which is compiled to JavaScript, so I'm not touching the Jav

Last weekend, my wife and two oldest children, Angel (11) and Tony (10) attended the funeral of 10-year-old Caleb Schwab.  I've known Caleb's father Kansas Representative Scott Schwab since I was a teenager in Clint Sprague's Youth Group (where Scott volunteered), and my wife was friends with Scott's wife (Caleb's mom) for years while we attended the same church. Caleb died instantly in a waterslide accident.  It's the kind of tragedy that no family could prepare for or anticipate.  Tens of thousands of people have ridden the same slide without issue.  We grieve for the loss of Caleb's life and for the years of pain this will cause his parents and three brothers. The funeral was beautiful.  Caleb's uncle spoke of life as a vapor, here one moment, gone the next.  We don't compare the length of one vapor with another because all of them are fleeting.  So it is with our lives.  Caleb lived his 10 years with honor and put his love for Jesus on displa

After enduring the very trying experience of mid May this year (see my June 5 blog post), I determined to be more of a family man and less driven by outside pursuits.  I have been living a less busy life and spending a lot more time with the kids. Admittedly, I've also been spending more time playing video games (usually with them), and it gets surprising how fast the time can fly by while engaged in mindless activities like that. A recent example is that Tony and I discovered we both enjoy playing Pikmin 3 on the Wii U together and working toward personal record speed run times.  I bought a game capture device so that we can record our games and upload them to a site that collects speed run data on various games.  We don't have any delusions of being truly outstanding in challenges like this, but the act of creating the speed runs, I hope, will be a fun bonding experience for us and hopefully teach him a bit about video editing, commentary and confidence.  It's also qu

The middle of last month (May 2016) gave me the most challenging week I have ever experienced.  I was faced with a forced business decision where I could either make the popular choice or what I believed (and still believe) to be the principled choice, the latter of which would lend myself to backlash from dozens of people. My pastor told me that because I do business in the arts, I would be confronted with decisions such as these earlier than most, but that these things "are coming for all of us here in the church."  Ironically, those who profess tolerance often show absolute intolerance for those of us who hold to conservative values. This spread through the Kansas City theater so fast, and libelous statements were made about me by some who I had trusted for years and had even been on my payroll.  And all of this was not because I changed anything about who I am or the way I had presented myself for years.  It was all because my open, outspoken, unchanged beliefs were f

My daughters Angel and Harmony in the latest DeerAngel video on homeschooling!

Last week, I turned in my letter of resignation and two weeks' notice at my current employer.  I have switched jobs several times before, but probably never with as much hesitation as I've experienced this time around. I really like where I'm working now.  I'm quite happy here, and I really believed I would be at this company for years.  What ultimately enticed me to leave was something I hadn't given a lot of consideration to until recently: the new job appears to offer a very attractive work-life balance.  Most of the employees at the new place--where I'll start in 2 weeks--compress their schedules to accomplish a full work week in only 4 days.  While the days are almost a couple hours longer, this effectively gives everyone a 3-day weekend every weekend. The thought of this is very appealing to me as it would give me more time with the family and also more time to finish many of the extra things I've had on my to-do list.  My Action emails folder is a

I wonder sometimes if I should focus this blog on something specific.  Keeping an open-ended blog (about "whatever I happened to care about at a given point in time") certainly makes it harder to invite readers, and in many ways it makes it harder to write.  But whenever I think about focusing attention to one topic, I struggle to let go of all of the other topics that don't fit.  I suppose this makes my blog more like a diary.  Life is complex and varied, and so are human thoughts. Sitting down to write today, I thought about how grateful I am to be living my life.  I thought of how much I love my wife and kids and my job and extended family.  But just before I began to write, I thought about the upcoming Presidential elections and the angst I've felt recently for our country.  I'm quite concerned about the path the USA is headed down as it becomes more and more likely that we will be faced with a choice of two terrible candidates.  On the other hand, I also fi

About 4 years ago, I read a book called Getting Things Done  by David Allen (NOTE: whenever you see the phrase "I read a book," it's usually safe to assume this really means "I listened to an audiobook").  I read [listen to] a lot of productivity literature because I occasionally get some small piece of wisdom that sticks with me and benefits me for years thereafter. In the case of David Allen's book--written in 2001--the wisdom that persisted was with regard to my email workflow.  Interestingly, David Allen was not even discussing email but regular [snail] mail.  But the advice works even better with email than with physical mail.  I'm very grateful to have been exposed to the philosophy and have felt a bit of a burden to share it with my friends ever since. So here it is... KEEP YOUR INBOX EMPTY It's much more practical and effective than you might think.  Here is the workflow: A few times each day (perhaps every time you're in front

I remember when I was in 6th grade and I told my older brother Robbie “I want to learn chess.  I don’t know how the pieces move or who can kill who.”  His response was “Anyone can kill anyone in chess!” For whatever reason, that seemed fascinating to me.  After learning the game, I was a casual [i.e. occasional] player (never particularly good of course) until the age of 21 when my younger brother bought an Onyx chess board in Mexico while we were on a short-term mission trip together, and I was reacquainted with the game. Coming back from the trip, I was interested enough to read my first chess book (cover-to-cover in one sitting at a Barnes & Noble), and that led to a dozen or more other books, coaching a chess club, and 4 years of being a private chess coach for elementary school kids. But overall, chess and I have had kind of an off-and-on relationship through the years.  I’m either never playing/thinking about chess… or I find myself thinking about and playing it

For the last 5 years, I've directed a musical during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day.  This is always a fun, rewarding, and exhausting experience for me with my company Immeasurable Productions. This year, we produced Disney's High School Musical: On Stage.  My sister Mindy (my choreographer) and I chose this musical because it would be a lot of fun and would hopefully encourage a few more light-hearted, fun-loving auditionees to come out for the show.  We're very glad we went with this choice as this was one of the most fun, up-beat, positive casts I've ever directed. Another new thing that we did this year was ask my wife Christine to be the music director.  Christine did a marvelous job.  Plus, it was pretty cool (for me) to have the core artistic team be all Moritzes.  I was excited to see such a high quality product come from a program we built from scratch. I'm now trying to think of musicals to consider for next year.  There are severa