(updated on 10/12/2022)

I am currently leading the Platform Elementals team within the Platform organization in Contentsquare.  You can read more about them here. The work is always interesting and challenging and we always get to learn and decide on how to do things, in different scales, for the first time.  I am also going through a personal learning challenge in my career as I am transitioning from a team lead – leading a group of Platformers but also taking part in the projects and day-to-day work, to an engineering manager, in which in addition to leading the team I also have a broader and more strategic view of what we’re doing.  This is unknown territory, and it is both terrifying and exhilarating.

This year my children have both started new portions of their school path – my son has started on the first grade of junior high, in a new school; my daughter started the second half of grade school, in fourth grade, which is a completely different experience than the first half.  Both of them have rich worlds of imagination that have, in some cases, overlapped the ones I occupied when I was a child, and it is wonderful to watch. I am coming to terms with how much screens are part of their worlds and their lives, and with the fact that I will have, to a certain extent, to let go of the control of that.  My wife has found her calling, as far as she says, and is very happy with it, and I am happy along with her.

I am still working through the David Bowie Book Club, a challenge for myself and a Medium publication for whoever is interested.  I have read 56 out of the 100 books in the list so far, with a small lag so far – I have yet to read the November book, which is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and there’s also the December book following that, which is Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence. The project will probably be completed by the end of 2027.

I am currently limiting myself to two languages to learn in parallel through Duolingo, and I tend to not invest enough time in them – there is French, which purpose is practical – as Contentsquare is a French company, with headquarters situated in Paris, I want to be able to converse with my peers in their native language, although the formal language of the company is English; and Chinese, which I want to learn to be able to converse, even in the most basic way, with a colleague. So far in French at least, I tend to understand more and more, but I still haven’t been able to lift the psychological block of conversation – whenever my conversation partner starts to speak a little too fast, I switch back to the comfort of English.

I am continuing to read a lot of books – for now I have settled into the cadence of reading eight books in parallel, but I am working my way back to three.