
### Father

Holy hell so much of all the feels.

#### Father First‽ 

I'm starting the "about" page with a section on being a father which clearly makes this non-chronological and for that I kind of annoy myself.  My brain wants order to things and to have things match the expected order.  So I apologize to you and also to me about this ordering but it is the only way this page feels right.   

Being a father is the driving force behind the rest of these roles and aspects of my life.  It is perhaps a bit cliché to say that but that doesn't make it any less true. 

Father


### Nerd

#### Youngster Hack

Growing up I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do &emdash; probably like most kids after we pass the age of thinking we could be a superhero and realize that being a professional athlete or move star is quite the long shot. Got our first desktop computer for Christmas in 1993 and looking back on it I see now it was the first thing that I really felt like I loved to do and was good at. I mean it was Windows 2.5 and seeing what I could do with a `.bat` file injected into the boot sequence on a 386SX running at a cracking 16Mhz but somehow that was _so fun_.

#### Figuring Things Out

As I got into high school I found AOL Homepages and my obsession with building for the internet had begun.  I had my own site but also started trying to make a living with it by offering to make sites for my church and my dad's Goodyear business.  Neither of them turned into anything but it felt like there was something there and I couldn't shake it.

#### College

As I headed into college the two things that seemed most likely to be a successful and enjoyable job for me were something related to youth ministry and something in computers.  Both were pretty vague and I was just a little kid so I figued "why not both!"  By my sophomore year, though, it became clear that the computer science program at Augsburg just wasn't what I really wanted.  It was more hardware and robotics and less websites and development.  As such I dropped that major and started just figuring things out on my own.

#### Early Career

After graduating with my Youth & Family Ministry degree some life events caused me to move away from that as a career so I was doing some short-term work here-and-there while my wife and I got our plans figured out.  During this time I started up a side business doing custom web development and WordPress sites for non-profits and churches.  This never really became anything significant but it was a very valuable outlet for my nerd inside of me to stay engaged while I paid the bills in other ways.

#### Development for Real

FED. Gulp. Grunt. Backbone. Bootstrap.

#### Hitting My Stride

Architect. AWS. Microservices. Leading the team.



Nerd


## Cook

I would hardly consider myself a "chef" but I certainly do love to cook and bake.  

### Early Years

I helped in the kitchen growing up but mostly I was relegated to things like browning the hamburger or making sure the spaghetti didn't get mushy. I loved to help with cookies and assumed that the skill which my mom had to bake delicious, soft, and basically perfect cookies would somehow magically transfer to me.  I learned in college and the years after that this had not, in fact, been the case.  I tried and they were edible but certainly not "good" or "perfection" as I'd assumed they'd be.

### College Community

I did learn in college, however, how much I enjoyed cooking _for people_.  I had a group of friends that had regular "community meals" where we'd take turns making whatever we could buy ingredients for or knew how to make (this was in the time of the internet but before allrecipes.com had become what it is and all the recipes we could ever want were at our fingertips). While I took my turn being the lead cook I really just enjoyed the community that came from a good meal including that precious prep time in the kitchen in addition to the eating of the meal itself.  While this faded relatively quickly as friendships changed and people moved on it left an indelible mark on me that I'd learn to name later as part of my love language (yes I know that's cliché). 

### Pre-Kids Adulthood

During the early days of adulthood my wife and I split a lot of the cooking and food management needs.  We didn't do anything fancy often just eating simple recipes that we'd grown up on scheduled in a loose and often slightly varied loop.  Spending energy beyond the minimum on food preparation and refinement just wasn't where we focused and that was fine with both of us.  

### Kids

While the _immediate_ dietary needs of our children were cared for by my wife once they started to transition into purees and then solid foods I found myself really excited to dive in.  In hindsight I've connected this to that same _cooking for people_ vibe that I enjoyed so much in those college community meals but at the time it just felt like something that I could control in the swirl of chaos that is parenting an infant.  As they grow up that has matured from pureeing and freezing food for them to engaging them in the cooking process and, more recently, into falling into the deep end.  This is where I'm at now: sometimes spending hours making compound butters for morning eggs, or hand-filling agnolotti with homemade ricotta. This all brings real genuine joy to my life and I have no plans to climb back out (of the deep end, that is).

Cook


### Woodworker

Grandpa. Craig. College Desk. Kitchen.

Woodworker

<h2>Situation</h2>
<p>While I'm somewhere between AI skeptic and against AI entirely I feel forced to learn about it for my job in software development.  The details of the entirety of my feelings on that tension will get a post of its own here soon.  This post is about my exploration into Cloudflare's Workers AI for one of my little side projects of a Jeopardy-ish game.  I've been using hardcoded categories and clues for development and initial testing but for most users those questions aren't going to work.  Having an option to generate a categories would be pretty useful so I thought I'd give it a whirl.</p>
<h2>Constraints</h2>
<p>Given that this is a low-effort side project with literally no budget I'm limited to using the Cloudflare-hosted free plan-eligible models and usage limits.  Mostly this is fine but it trims down the list to a much smaller subset right off the bat.</p>
<h2>Approach</h2>
<p>As with all of my AI exploration and usage I'm being very intentional in the choices I'm making.  I have no allusions to making the perfect choice nor do I believe my choices are the ones that are right for anyone other than me.  I'm learning and navigating an ever-growing ecosystem with my own history, preferences, comfort-level, and motives.  Everyone should be making their own decisions here but I encourage everyone to actually make those decisions rather than accepting the decisions made for you.</p>
<h2>Models / Providers</h2>
<p>Now to the actual models and providers along with my quick barely-researched decision making process.  Yes I know the <em>truly right way</em> to do this is deeply research these things but in weighing the time that would take to pick a model versus other ways to spend my time I did a pretty limited amount of reseach.  I'm just being upfront about that and caveating everything below with it as it could mean I made a bad decision. I'm making some broad generalizations in the below analysis and I sort of hate that but at this stage in my AI path they're the generalizations that help me through decisions and acceptance of the full situation.</p>
<h3>Chinese Providers</h3>
<p>While I personally am not at all "against China" or feel that they are doing sketchy things there are too many general concerns about data management and usage for me to choose a model that's coming out of China.  Honestly even if China is totally doing things the right way and being innovative in their technology I worry that the current US administration's relationship with China will make the usage of their models problematic. I have little of my own personal knowledge to base this on but given other options I categorically skipped these models and providers.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/models"><code>Kimi</code> family</a> from <a href="https://www.moonshot.ai/">Moonshot AI</a></li>
<li><a href="https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2"><code>GLM</code></a> from <a href="https://www.zhipuai.cn/en">Zhipu AI</a></li>
<li><a href="https://qwen.ai/home"><code>Qwen</code></a> from <a href="https://www.alibabacloud.com/">Alibaba Cloud</a></li>
<li><a href="https://deepseek.com/en/index.html"><code>Deepseek</code></a> from <a href="https://www.high-flyer.cn/">High-Flyer</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Cloud Providers</h3>
<p>I'm generally annoyed at these providers for their role in pushing the entire "AI is the solution to everything" story forward at such an alarming pace at the cost of so much we all hold dear.  They know people will pay for these models as long as it seems like the sales pitch is true and once the true cost hits consumers these providers will be rich enough it won't matter how their customers are impacted.</p>
<ul>
<li><code>Gemma</code> from Google</li>
<li><code>Phi</code> from Microsoft</li>
<li><code>Granite</code> from IBM</li>
</ul>
<h3>US Tech Giants &#x26; AI Companies</h3>
<p>It's hard for me to decide if I am more upset with these giants or the cloud providers in the world of who is to blame for the runaway AI bubble but I don't want to use their models if I can help it even if I plan to stay on the free tier.</p>
<ul>
<li><code>Llama</code> from Meta</li>
<li><code>ChatGPT</code> from OpenAI</li>
<li><code>Nemotron</code> from NVIDIA</li>
</ul>
<h3>Remaining Options</h3>
<p>From what I can tell on the <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/models/">Cloudflare models page</a> that leaves me with two model families for my <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/models/?tasks=Text+Generation">text generation</a> needs.</p>
<ul>
<li><code>Mistral</code> from... well... <a href="https://mistral.ai/">Mistral</a></li>
<li><code>Hermes</code> from <a href="https://nousresearch.com/">nousresearch</a></li>
</ul>
<p>My first option here was <code>Hermes</code> as Nous is an open-source company that at least aligns with <em>that</em> part of my own preference and approach to software.  Anyone training models at the scale these providers are training them at runs counter to many of my own values but that again is a topic for a separate post.  Being an open source company seems at least marginally better than the others listed here. However when I go to actually use this model I get <code>This model was deprecated on 2026-05-30. Please use an alternative model.</code> so that won't work.</p>
<p>While <code>Mistral</code> is quite possibly just another giant AI company burning the world and promoting AI as the solution to every CEO's problems the fact that they are France-based gives me a little hope that they are a little less unhinged in their quest for money.  Perhaps that's a bad assumption but it is sort of all I have to go on at the moment so I'm moving forward with their models.  At least for now.</p>


Thumbnail

Cloudflare Workers AI Model Selection

<h2>IDE</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Choice:</strong> VS Code</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://code.visualstudio.com/">VSCode</a> is my jam these days. I was a Dreamweaver MX guy way back in the day and then moved to Sublime Text. But for nearly a decade I've been a VS Code guy.</p>
<p>I know plenty of devs that love their <code>vim</code> (although the <code>vim</code> vs <code>emacs</code> debates seem to have calmed down) and plenty of others that are on the Eclipse or WebStorm train.  I'm not one that is going to come out swinging on this topic, I just like VSCode.  Perhaps the hot take here is that I don't use something like <a href="https://cursor.com/">Cursor</a> or <a href="https://windsurf.com/account/onboarding?page=editor">Windsurf</a> but let's keep the focus on tooling choices for this post.</p>
<h2>Git Platform</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Choice:</strong> GitHub</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I really struggle here. I currently am using GitHub for work and personal projects but I am a big fan of GitLab and actually prefer it. The reason I'm using GitHub is mostly that it's the standard and I have been working to build up a more public facing presence. Perhaps I'm just furthering the story that you can't use GitLab and be taken seriously but I'm not ready to tackle that problem.  Given the choice for starting from scratch at a development organization I still think I'd lean GitLab but that's not what I'm talking about in this post.</p>
<h2>Framework</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Choice:</strong> React</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I'm very happy to say I think the framework wars of a decade ago are more-or-less over. Or maybe I just am out-of-touch with all the hot takes. But either way I'm happy to just stick with React and not get stuck in the debates of what new hotness might be out there.</p>
<h2>Meta Framework</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Choice:</strong> Vite + RedwoodSDK</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I got started on Redwood after listening to <a href="https://syntax.fm/show/901/js-news-new-react-and-svelte-apis-rsc-updates-redwood-and-storybook">the Syntax FM episode on it</a> last summer. It's been fun to be using something new and running on Cloudflare has been <em>really</em> interesting. I'm planning to write up more on this in the near future so I'll save my soapboxing for that post.</p>
<p>I do still use nextjs for some smaller static sites (like the one you're on actually). I could see changing that in the future to use rwsdk everywhere but where rwsdk shines is leveraging the underlying pieces of Cloudflare seamlessly and this site doesn't need that. So for static sites I still see myself sticking with nextjs' server-side rendering.</p>
<p>It's also worth noting that Redwood started life as a Vite plugin and still relies on Vite as the underlying technology/platform. I had not used Vite before and I'm really enjoying it as a runtime and tooling platform. Since I started with Redwood I have been learning where Vite ends and where Redwood begins sort of backwards.</p>
<h2>Formatter</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Choices:</strong> Biome and Prettier</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I really wish I could just say Biome is the formatter of choice but since it doesn't handle <code>less</code> and <code>sass</code> files (which I still like to use) I use Prettier for those files. For as long as I can remember I have used ES Lint for this but it has always seemed a bit too messy to configure and get working how I want. Biome promises (and seems to deliver) on easier configuration and less bikeshedding on options. I've been happy with it in my first few months of usage so I see no reason to look elsewhere. One of the big selling points they make for it is speed which I haven't really measured since most of my projects are pretty tiny and probably would be fine with other tools as well.</p>
<h2>Release Automation</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Choices:</strong> Commitlint, Conventional Commits, and Semantic Release</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wasn't sure how to really group this one but the title of "Release Automation" I think is important because that is really the goal of the setup. Commitlint isn't really aimed at releases but my inclusion of it in my projects is because it helps create releases in a consistent and automated manner.</p>
<ul>
<li>Commitlint: makes sure that both locally and in CICD commits are following standards</li>
<li>Conventional Commits: commonly used and well-documented convention for commit messages</li>
<li>Semantic Release: leverages the work of these other two in order to determine release versions and creates release artifacts</li>
</ul>
<h2>Testing</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Choices:</strong> Vitest and Playwright</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For most of my front-end life I've been a Jest user. I never really got into Chai, Sinon, or any of those libraries (mostly because I was not much into unit tests at the time those were the leaders). Getting into proper development (ie development with unit tests as a key ingredient) was all about Jest. As ESM became a reality the team that maintains Jest seems to have <em>really</em> dropped the ball. In contrast, moving to Vitest has been seamless and really enjoyable! It works very similarly to Jest but does the things that Jest can't seem to get working. The parity/similarities with Vite also makes this experience smooth and easy.</p>
<p>Testing rendered UI always has its struggles and problems but also has some real value if you can find the right balance and approach. I've just recently started playing around with Playwright for this purpose and it has gone well so far. I don't plan to have an enormous amount of tests as they are fragile and can be tedious but the workflow with Playwright is really nice. Specifically I've liked the ability to use their component-level testing where I can pass in some props and take a snapshot of what that'll look like. Being able to do this sort of testing at the component-level seems really powerful and far less fragile than tests that visually compare a full UI page.</p>
<h2>Styling / Design System</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Choices:</strong> Less and Radix</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As someone that does this sort of development on the side these choices probably don't make any sense. I should probalby write plan CSS to avoid compilation steps and use a full-featured design system to avoid making my own components and managing styles. But I'm not one to just do what's expected.</p>
<p>While compiling Less to CSS is another step the build tools make it so simple I really don't see it as the burden it was back in the grunt/gulp/webpack days. Both nextjs and vite make compiling Less to CSS trivial. While I don't use a ton of the features it's nice to have them available if/when I need them.</p>
<p>In looking through design systems I spent a good bit of time chatting with a UX friend about some other options, pros and cons, and just the general vibe of things. We both had this inexplicable pull to Radix. Perhaps we're both masochists or something but when it comes down to it these side projects are meant to be fun and building out components is something I enjoy. Certainly bare Radix primitives aren't for everyone and I would not suggest it for all projects/people.</p>
<h2>CICD</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Choices:</strong> Husky, Lint Staged, and the integrated CI of your Git platform</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a platform engineer and as a technology leader I very much believe in pushing things "left" (although I hate most talk tracks that focus on that phrase). Keeping developers in the flow and giving them feedback as early in their process as possible is very important. During development this involves things like the Vite dev server, Vitest's UI mode for continually watching tests, and Docker for running things locally that would otherwise be very tedious. Once the development changes are ready to go having Husky installed let's me really make sure everything is clean, consistent, and standardized before getting it into a commit.</p>
<p>A new tool for me that pairs well with Husky is Lint Staged that exists to run some commands (such as linting and formatting) just on the staged files and is designed to run as part of a git hook (like what Husky does). This gives more control over those processes and how to handle results and most importantly manages the messy bit of allowing those commands to run just on the staged files instead of the whole project.</p>
<p>Once things pass through Husky's territory I think using the CICD tool that is baked into your Git platform is your best bet. I spent years using GitLab's pipelines and now am heavily using GitHub's workflows and they both are more-than-adequate for the vast majority of projects, especially these side projects that I'm talking about here. I really like GitHub's reusable and shareable Actions and I see now why GitLab was so aggressively playing catchup on that when I last was engaged in their roadmap.</p>


Javascript Development Tooling

<p>In November I had a company meeting back that talked about the concept of an "integrated life".  I had some deeper internal processing than I expected coming out of that meeting that started the wheels churning on this post.  Then last week my mom shared a post from Kate Bowler about celebrating "limited agency".  This is my reflection on those two ideas, how they have merged together in my mind, and how I'm working on incorporating them into my life.</p>
<h2>Come Together</h2>
<p>My still new employer, <a href="https://www.improving.com/">Improving</a>, has a series of meetings every month under the title "Come Together" as a way to share topics as well as build community in ways that aren't normally exposed internally within a company. Past sessions have covered individual countries where we have offices, the concept of playing games to build teams, and even just "pets".</p>
<p>November's topic was tied to men and male health, which I'll be honest, it isn't my favorite. It feels a bit cringe. Not that I want to ignore it or dismiss it, quite the opposite actually. I think men's health is important and often men ignore it and pretend they're invincible. It's just that my first impression was part of the pushback on things like the #metoo movement and the "reverse sexism" talk track.  But I'm still getting to know this new place so I did my best to not jump to conclusions.</p>
<h3>Initial Conversation</h3>
<p>The specific session I'm writing about was on being leaders in a global company, the challenges they face and tools, tips, and techniques to deal with the stress and balance therein.  I'm not entirely sure what about the description caught my attention and made me dial in without multitasking and getting distracted, but I'm glad it happened.  I was still doing some multitasking, but I just can't imagine myself ever sitting there watching some talking heads for an hour without doing anything else. At the beginning of this session, I felt a bit guilty about what I was doing, but as you'll see through my processing and analysis, it turns out I shouldn't have felt that way. I always have plenty of projects going in the garage and I decided one of them could keep me busy while allowing my brain to process the discussion that was happening in the meeting.</p>
<p>The initial parts of the meeting were mildly interesting although in a superficial sense and what you might expect from a company meeting on the topic. They talked about ways to deal with stress and how long they had been doing jobs like this, and that type of thing. The speakers were our CEO and the leaders of some global offices -- all of them are successful men that fit a stereotype I often roll my eyes at (middle-aged successful men running technology companies worth tens and hundreds of millions of dollars). These particular individuals are not cringe, but it's hard for me to listen to them talk about how they manage life stress without feeling that my life is very different from their life. That is probably true, but as the talk went on, it was good to hear what they had to say and see them as more level-headed and relatable people than I gave them credit for.</p>
<h3>Integrated Life</h3>
<p>What caught my attention was when the CEO started talking about the idea of an 'Integrated Life.' That name made me cringe—it sounded like corporate-speak for 'always be available for work.' Given my history with poor leadership, particularly around how development organizations are treated, I was skeptical. My initial take: this was just another way to say 'work overtime without payment' and 'be at leadership's disposal whenever they need you.' However, as I listened to him explain what this concept actually means to him, my cynicism faded. He talks about this topic regularly and is clearly passionate about it—this wasn't just a talk track tailored for this particular audience.</p>
<p>My interpretation of what he calls the integrated life is actually very well aligned to the kind of lifestyle I was after in my job change and something that I believe the pandemic taught us was possible.  The talk track of "work life balance" is tired and beaten down to the point it has become mostly a punching bag for something to refer to when griping about work or looking for a new year's resolution.  A recap I sent a friend afterwards was this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If the kids have a thing in the morning then go do it.  If you want to go for a walk with your wife or go shopping for the kids at 11am then do it.  Maybe that works best for you and you’re fine working later so you are still getting your job done.  8-5 workdays aren’t for everyone and don’t force yourself into that if you don’t have to.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In our modern world -- particularly in the development space -- we're connected to our job far more than we would like to admit.  Even if you don't have Slack notifications on your phone or you have setup do not disturb rules there is always a sense of someone being able to reach you if they really "need" to.  For some that's a pretty firm wall they aren't willing to cross but in reality that's almost expected of people nowadays.</p>
<p>While that feels <em>new</em> to say we're always connected and expected to be on-call for anything it's nothing new.  Doctors have essentially forever been on call and available in one way or another (picture the community doctor taking a carriage to a sick person in the 19th century or whatever other historical reference you like).  Car shops have 24-hour call lines for towing and emergency services.  Journalists are ready to jump into work when a story starts to break.  Even for jobs that have been around since before the industrial revolution we have farmers that literally live on the job with hours around the clock, pastors that live in parsonages often connected to their church and get visits throughout the day, or teachers that do lesson planning at all hours of the day.</p>
<p>In some ways it is made up and silly to say that jobs need to be cut-and-dry with the 8-to-5 hours that nicely start and cut off. Certainly some jobs have set hours and should stick to that (retail, hourly positions, etc) but a good portion of the jobs in society don't fit into that pattern by definition.  Pairing that with the lessons that the remote-only life-and-work-smashed-together patterns of the Covid pandemic taught us about how effective development organizations can be doing work remotely and asynchronously it seems that forcing that development into the 8-to-5 mold out of habit is at best just poorly justified.  To me it's convenient for the command-and-control patterns of old-timer business leaders to keep their false sense of security in place around development teams.</p>
<h3>Trust</h3>
<p>From the business side of this the lesson here is trust.  There <em>has to be</em> trust between workers and their leadership in order for any of this to work.  However, I'd argue that even in the old school model of making development teams come in 8 to 5 every day you have to trust them -- physical location and set working hours are not a substitute for trust.  On our company swag t-shirts it says "trust changes everything" and it really does.  If sales people can be remote and work non-standard hours then why can't development team members?  But this post is about my approach to my career and life, not about what's wrong with the software industry.</p>
<h2>Limited Agency</h2>
<p>The integrated life concept helped me rethink my relationship with work. But it was a post my mom shared from the wonderful <a href="https://substack.com/@katecbowler">Kate Bowler</a> about <a href="https://substack.com/home/post/p-182092988">celebrating limited agency</a> that helped me rethink my relationship with life itself. I had been slowly working on this post about the integrated life and Kate's post seemed to complete the picture for me. While the integrated life is about the career vs life connections, her post gets into setting good expectations and a healthy approach to life from another angle.</p>
<h3>Midlife Evaluations</h3>
<p>From Kate's post:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Over and over again, the message is the same: the only limit is you. If you could just overcome the mental block, the laziness, the lack of discipline, then the “real” version of your life could begin.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whether it's the career mess and subsequent transition I went through in 2025 or the fact that I'm in my mid-40s there is a lot of reflection on life in my head these days.  And this idea of "the perfect life is just over the horizon" poisons my mind daily.  I sometimes think about Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise line "too much television watchin' got me chasin' dreams" as there is a lot of truth in that.  Society and social media paint pictures that are just not real.  And the forever chase of those unrealistic goals causes us to miss out on what is amazing right in front of us.</p>
<p>Throughout my career up until last March I definitely was overly ambitious in how I approached work and what it could get me.  I did well and got a pretty comfortable life out of it as a result.  But I also missed out on other things and focused on work more than I should have.  As Kate mentions, the problem with focusing on optimization is that it's never enough to get to that goal.  Just like the idea of removing the blocks making your "real" life possible, if you get more work done then you just are given more.  There is always more work to do and the business world isn't structured to keep that work even.  Some professions work in ways that allow for you to get a benefit from really getting after it where you have a preset amount of work but that's not how most "corporate" jobs work out.</p>
<h3>Life's Interruptions</h3>
<p>Kate goes on to talk about interruptions to life being "spiritual and psychological resets".  These interruptions are sometimes planned and sometimes not, they can be positive or negative, long or short.  But they are important times to reflect and learn from instead of being pissed and beat-down.  The work environment change of last March initially did both of those things and I can't say I particularly know how I managed to get past that relatively quickly but I'm glad I did.  Recently my brother had some unexpected health things come up that triggered some deep reflection for me and my family.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Interruption is how we remember we are not machines...they arrive with unexpected mercy: snapping the illusion that we were ever fully in control.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The integrated life approach to the work-life-balance discussion is along these same lines.  We aren't in control and should stop pretending we can do 8-5 work and 5-8 life.  We can't schedule our sicknesses, when friends have babies, or when our car might need some work.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Limited agency is the humility to admit, <em>I don’t get to steer the whole story</em>, paired with the courage to say, <em>but I can still choose something</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Just like the integrated life accepts the reality we're in for working in this modern world the limited agency accepts life will throw us curveballs and we should do our best to take them as they come.  Nobody will take them without a stumble or human reactions but we need to stop telling ourselves that there is a way to prevent them or be resistant to them.  To do that would be to isolate yourself entirely from literally everything else in the world.</p>
<h2>Takeaways</h2>
<p>This is a lot of words (by far my longest post to date) so what am I getting at? It really boils down to approaching life with a more realistic mindset - and finding work that supports that approach.</p>
<p>Changing jobs last year wasn't explicitly about "integrated life" or "limited agency" - I didn't have those terms yet. But the feelings driving that decision were real: I needed to work for an organization that trusts me to manage my own time and do my job well without micromanagement. Remote work and flexible hours aren't for everyone. But if that's what works best for the employee and the job allows for it, trust them to manage it. Let them do their job within their life, not the other way around.</p>
<p>What does that look like day-to-day? It means taking time for life when it comes up naturally, not just when it's "allowed." If I have a home project occupying my mind during work hours, I can go tackle it and come back to work after dinner when I'm more focused. Or maybe a friend who also works remote wants to work alongside each other while catching up. The point isn't rigid 8-to-5 boundaries - it's the flexibility to manage work and life in ways that make sense for me, while still delivering for my customers.</p>
<p>I'm not claiming this is easy or that I have it figured out. Life still throws curveballs, and I still stumble. But I'm done pretending that with enough planning or discipline I can control everything. I'm also done accepting that a job needs to control me -- there are better and healthier ways of working out there.  With all of this the goal isn't perfection - it's finding a sustainable rhythm that acknowledges reality instead of fighting it.</p>


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