What I'm Doing Now

SunPower

Since July 2022 I've worked at SunPower, a consumer solar panel company serving the US. I worked for six months on a team that manages the data pipeline between panels and the consumer mobile app.

I jumped in February 2023 to a new team spun up to reimagine the customer onboarding pipeline that takes place between someone saying "I would like some panels please" and actually getting the panels bolted to their roof. This is a complex process involving permitting, panel placement design, electrical work, and shipping the right parts to the right place, among sometimes-exceptional circumstances like roof replacement.

The team's goal is to take this process from the current ~months down to ~days. It involves a lot of learning and has been super fun so far. I'm working with two people who are also ex-Twitch, which has been a fun bonding experience.

Obsidian

After about six months full-steam in Emacs and Org Mode, I grew impatient with the subpar mobile experience for Org and accidentally stumbled upon Obsidian. It honestly has handled 80% of the crazy Org superpowers for 20% of the effort. The plugin ecosystem is fantastic, and synchronization of config, plugins, and themes to all platforms—including mobile—"just works".

I've moved my notetaking from a mix of Apple Notes and Org completely to Obsidian, and am back on a mix of VS Code and Vim for coding.

This Website

Somehow after a dozen attempts over two dozen years I finally have a website that I've stuck with for a while, twos.dev. The secret sauce turned out to be building a static site generator myself. I often want to try some new way of writing (e.g. writing in Org during my Emacs kick) and owning the generator is the only way I can be sure those cravings don't lead me to switch from this engine to that looking for the right set of features instead of actually writing.

(For more information see Inside twos.dev, or the documentation for the generator.)

Autism

I found out in 2020 that I'm autistic and it's been a fantastic and eye-opening experience. Every ~month (at first every ~day) I learn that some weird behavior about myself is attributable to autism, and that there's a pool of people I can talk to about it. These vary from having been mute for 9 years as a child, to spending multiple hours per day preparing and retrospecting conversations I've had, to not liking hot weather, to sometimes feeling like every little noise is far too loud.

I wrote about it in an article titled Anonymously Autistic.

Mastodon

I've mostly jumped ship from Twitter and have switched to Mastodon: @[email protected].

I self-hosted Mastodon and Lemmy instances for a year or so and I don't regret it; I know a lot more about the fediverse than when I started. But the benefits started to flatten and the costs were high, so I recently moved to Hachyderm. Their code of ethics and governance model is impressive.