This is a now page.
I've made my annual pilgrimage out to Nebraska for the NFL draft. Since my mom and brother live so far away, I don't get to visit them during the holidays. We pick the NFL draft as our excuse to hang out as family.
Work has been very challenging. I'm getting a lot of direct input from leadership that's making everything harder. It feels they're micromanaging and they're firmly in my lane. Usually, I can do a pretty good job at persuading them that my ideas and preferences are the better ideas but something has changed recently. I think they're getting pressure from their leadership. Understandable but still frustrating to have to approach a project in a way that I feel is the wrong way to do it.
Work is not all doom and gloom. I'm building a runbook automation application with PowerShell. I've styled it after the old BBS/MUD aesthetic and it walks tech team members through the various SOPs in a guided way. It's actually been quite fun. I've only shared this with my direct leadership because this is mine. I'm hesitant to share it with their leadership as I believe they will meddle or tell me to stop. I'm building this for myself and for the team so I think I'd prefer to keep this to myself.
At home, I've been using Claude Code to help me build my homelab and this website. There's a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the IndieWeb community but I still find a lot of value. It's allowing me to add features that I probably wouldn't have added otherwise. The thing I'm starting to struggle with now is basically context management. How can I get the dumb agent to remember not to break my webmentions when we're working on something? I think I will setup a list of regression tests the thing can go through after each feature change. A point for the anti-AI crowd, I guess.
The aquariums are humming along. I've not lost any fish in a while and I added two bristlenose plecos to the 75 gallon tank in the living room. I've been thinking of moving the fish from one of the 20 longs into the 75 so I can setup a different bio type. Right now, all my tanks are kind of the same type of tropical, community tank and I want to setup a hillstream loach tank. Alas, that takes money and time, both of which are in short supply this time of year.
Last but not least, The Goblins! Everyone is doing fine! Lennie finally learned to use the cat door and he tends to stay pretty close so that's nice. He's a scaredy cat so when a car goes up or down the alley, he comes bolting in; that's fine by me. I need to write 'please meet my cat' posts for Linus and Lennie still.