Changelog 2024-04-18

Almost exactly one year after the last update I am proud to report that I did in fact find a new job. A new daughter and a new job in 2023 left little time for blogging but it’s been a hell of a lot of fun.

I had lined up my current role by the middle of June and my last day with the previous company was during the first week of July. I didn’t start my new job until August so I had an amazing three week break. I traveled back to the US for a brief visit to Vermont, and then spent one week in the resort town of Bük and another week with my wife and mother-in-law in a village by the Balaton lake during a wine festival. While we were there we visited a nearby arboretum and purchased a small juniper tree that we planted in the yard of the church that my wife attends (our daughter’s middle name is Boróka). July 2023 was a much needed break from the world of work and a set of core memories I hope I can hold onto for some time.

Speaking of diversion and taking a break from work; the first Calice Cup in ages is happening right now. Hadn’t heard much from Dent4F in almost a year, to the point of getting worried about him, but like a glorious phoenix he returned and started running tournaments last summer. I’ve been attacking the project of rewriting our tournament software from a couple angles. It’s an old Symfony application (still configured to run on PHP 7.2) and I’ve learned a lot since I first put it together. I think it could benefit from a modern front-end, and I would definitely be happy spending less money by having our low-traffic site go serverless. Developing new features is hard: the current application isn’t containerized and the git deployment scheme I cooked up is now something of a hassle. But full rewrites always take time - time that is hard to justify when you have a working product already in front of your users.

Work was busy at the beginning of this month. I work at a non-profit and our funder set a hard deadline for a demonstration of our team’s biggest project to date. It’s not controversial to say that I carried. It feels good to have developed the capacity to do so over the last 5 years working in tech and to be recognized for the achievement but my back hurts and I would like my co-workers to get up off of it.

My wife is keeping a list of words that our daughter knows and it is long. She has been walking for a while now. My days don’t truly start until I hear the pitter-patter of her little feet in the morning. She loves reading, but she’s also active and gets upset if she doesn’t get to go out during the day. She’s a lot like her mother in that way. One of the first things I noticed about being with my wife was how much more often I went out, because she simply wouldn’t allow us to stay in. As a filthy gamer I could easily go without leaving the house for days on end, but she demands that we go places and do things. Both of these girls truly make a better man out of me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about family since I found out that my grandmother died. It took about a month before someone finally told my cousin, who then broke the news to me. My cousin has lost his father, his brother, and now our grandmother over the course of a year, but he seems too busy himself to dwell on it. He has work, three kids, and an upcoming wedding to plan. He’s the last of my family back in the US that I really talk to. I hadn’t even spoken to my grandmother much since my grandfather died in 2017. I don’t know why her passing bothers me, except to think of how alone she must have been. I worry that with enough time I’ll alienate myself from my family, too. That because I also struggle with mental illness I share a similar fate.

I have to think about my family in part because soon, when I do an interview to apply for Hungarian citizenship, I will have to recount my family history in the Hungarian language 🥲