After several months off here, I now have the time and the energy to start writing again. I’m so thankful that I intentionally took time away from publishing on this Substack space as well as away from producing my Livable City podcast. Doing so brought me incredibly helpful perspective on what I value and how I want to spend my time and my energy. I encourage others to remember to intentionally take time off from things when you feel like you’re just going through the motions and don’t feel a personal sense of connection to anything in particular.
One major change I’ve made recently is to resign from my engineering director role at CityBase. I did this for multiple reasons, but the most significant reason is that I want better ownership of my time, energy and focus. I’d gotten into an unhelpful pattern of reacting to things around me and this really needed to change. I’m fortunate enough to have saved enough money to do this for a time. And I’ll have some big news to announce soon of a new personal venture that I’m launching - more on this in the coming weeks.
Going forward in this Substack, I’ll still be covering the relational aspects of being an engineer and the importance of developing these skills instead of only focusing on mastery of our technical abilities. Technical ability is of course very important to any kind of engineer, but if you don’t know how to connect it with the people around you in your personal and professional life, then I’ll go so far as to say that you’re cheating yourself and you’re cheating the amazing people that you seek to serve with your technical ability.
But I’m also excited to be expanding the scope here to cover certain technical aspects, like creating tutorials and guides covering the technologies used in fun side projects.
Currently I’m exploring the Rust programming language on the Raspberry Pi Pico. There’s not a lot happening with Rust on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s first microprocessor board, but I want to be a part of helping to change this. So far it seems like a great board that could strongly benefit from solid Rust support. And at $4, it’s a seriously economical piece of hardware to play with.
Please stay tuned for an announcement of the venture I’m launching as well as my first getting started guide with Rust and the Pico. I’m excited to share these things with you my readers and to engage in conversation with you about them and how they’re helpful to you.
Thanks for reading.