2023

Loose Ends

In Jan 2023, my role at the House of Reps Clerk's office ended. I had been calling for in-house program design and building many experimental programs, some of which are being used today, and all of which I found far more engaging than the assignments.

On the side, I had a hodgepodge of apps running, so I could explore new languages and approaches. I had a far-too-broad aim of building a search index for legal sources.

Fresh Leads

During that summer I reconnected, briefly, with a former colleage in nearby Richmond. She explained the ideas behind Elixir, and this seemed like a good change of pace from Ruby + JavaScript. I began gradually rebuilding my core apps from Ruby to Elixir, and shared the ideas at a "Pitch Labs" group for local independent businesses.

I engaged with the local hackerspace, where I had become secretary. I spent many days speaking with one of the members, a gamer who had more home-lab experience, who talked me off of my raspberry-pi bundle and onto a real [ProxMox] deployment. I quickly used the VM management therein, to deploy many programs I designed and produced, alongside:

• ProxMox
• Mailu
• Gitea
• Penpot
• Passbolt
• Livebook
• Wiki.js

Side Missions

HacDC had been abuzz that year - we had a spinoff group called hyperdemocracy inspired by the earlier assembled app I had produced. The Hyperdemocracy bunch ran an 8-hour public-library hackathon, where around a dozen coders learned to use LLMs on federal legislation.

Other HacDC members had been explaining NixOS, and it took me until October to pick up the charge and make the change. I managed to change the nixpkgs recipe for Elixir, before the 23.11 release window - my first month! This change helped me compile Elixir as a mobile app on Android, in a proof-of-concept app that for a global hackathon.

That same fall, I had my first (and only) Elixir commission. I charged next-to-nothing, if you know the industry rates, because my friend needed the app and I needed the practice. All along, I had been checking off my learning aims for the year.

2024

Long Haul

The one remaining language I had aimed to learn in 2023 had been Nushell. I began picking this up in January 2024.

I found the experience far nicer than onboarding to any other command line, although I really could have used more guidance in the form of screencasts; I really like the small episodes of railscasts and elixircasts, and I feel that now I'm finally in a place to begin producing these.

Spiraling

I also began that year by filing for a business, Operand Company. Looking back, I had no business running a business. When I heard back about the incorporation in April, my first week became a hellish sequence of slip-ups.

• PayPal dropped my business and perma-banned me for concerns of money laundering.
• I failed to pay, and therefore failed to hire, a collaborator who had agreed to help. (...after 18 months of mutual silence, we came back to discuss the problems on Discord DMs)

I quickly decided, or realized, that I had to produce alone, because by then my money was basically up. I took my deceased grandpa's old pickup from my parents, readied up my emergency housing plan - a sailboat, and moved my home-lab to my parents' place of business in Michigan.

Gale

I had a couple weeks on the Chesapeake bay, examining how to handle the quirks of seaborne domesticity. Whereas 2023 had been full of cyber exploration, 2024 had been a harsh and deeply physical experience.

By that winter, I would commute most nights back to the marina in Deale, MD. The drive was around an hour and by the time I parked, the car was much warmer than the surroundings and the radio lulled me to sleep. In the early hours of the morning, the cold would rouse me, long enough to charge down the frigid dock into the hold of the boat, where I turned on the electric heater, burrowed in blankets, and on a couple occasions had to scream myself to sleep; shivers did no good.

2025

Cadence

As the winter thawed, I came to my senses. I had been making poor spending decisions, and my money was up.

I had been depending on chemical consumption, and as nomadic as I was, a couple collisions raised the price of my car and insurance beyond reach.

Even with monthly help from my parents, Most months ended with no budge in my $10k in credit card debt, and I could only access $10 - $100.

Renewed aggression between my parents and I caused me to re-think keeping my machines at their place. In March, I plugged in at a friend's home and carried on.

Rebuild

I rigged up my pickup truck as a camper, and began exploring more places from where I could log on. From NYC to Baltimore, I checked in on hackerspaces. I spent 4 days in Brooklyn, and spent $0 - though on the final day I met a friend and purchased a $4 coffee before heading home.

At NYC Resistor, I heard people speaking of HOPE. At Open Gov Hub, I heard of the Open Source Summit; I applied and acquired a scholarship pass.

I reached Brooklyn for HOPE and Denver for the Summit; In Denver I connected to leaders in CHAOSS. I headed home, and after long weeks on the road, crashed a marina birthday party; I soon had a message from management, who had cameras recording as I hopped the fence around the swimming pool. They asked me to ship off, in ten days.

I spent seven of those days at Aikido Summer Camp. I spent eleven days that month choosing a course North, to the Baltimore Harbor; I chose a berth in Pasadena, and had no more energy for sailing that rickety scrap lumber another inch. I still need to repair all the broken boards, and find sails in good shape.

Dim

During this period, I had been camping most nights in my pickup in DC; the national guard began deploying around the city, and I came to learn the boundaries of their engagement. I began to learn to beatbox at 7DrumCity's Monday open mics. At Baltimore Node, I began to examine synthesizer circuitboards.

One of my friends is going through housing problems, and I began thinking of how to help. After months of hardly speaking, I expressed many of these challenges to my mom. In prior years, they had repeatedly used nonconsensual legal and medical approaches, to address my unique issues.

By now, they began to see the purpose behind the process, and realized that their enormous resources enabled them to help. They chose a camper, I clambered in. I ended 2025 in a sequence of bus/train/pickup/camper runs, to get the pickup parked securely at the marina, where I can cancel the insurance for a few months and do repairs.

2026

Sobering

For the first moment in 18 months, I can be sure of my housing in a real sense. I can begin to make plans, looking ahead further than the end of the month.

I can spend all day plugged in, on solar, cooking and pushing ahead on my cyber aims as much as need be. And after so long, the need is really there.

I can finally begin considering how to help in the broad range of emergencies all around, rather than fearing my presence is a burden that needs to be carried by my peers.

Being able to check in more-than-sporadically, I can hold up my end of some crucial online dialogues. On Thursday this week, I held up my promise to lead a small lesson on Nushell at Iffy Books in Philadelphia. I'm re-learning the feeling of sharing among peers, rather than chasing endless leads in isolation.

More so, a recent relationship has helped me re-learn some of the empathy that has so long been obscured behind layers of sharpened aggression. The odd combination of martial arts and nomadism has made me a challenge to approach, or address; many egos end up bruised when they bounce off of me.

Eyes Open

So, how to embrace the year ahead? I am eager to focus on problems larger than mine alone.

I'd like to engage in more public communication, and hone in on how these many unique experiences can be aimed at raising the conditions of my neighbors.

On the coding side, I think that open-source is pushing into a cadence that is fully inspiring. I am finally pleased with my local machine, so I'll get back into deployments and focus specifically on approachable documentation.

I explained my production goals already. To complement my normal essays, I'll be learning typst and sharing my process more graphically.

Reaching People

I'd like to engage the many hackerspace connections towards producing similar purposeful resources on a plural scale. Perhaps this means building modular homes; acquiring open land in cities, doing the challenging legal research around zoning and building codes.

I'd like to produce music if possible, because my peers at the weekly open mic have seen me through all the ecstasies and horrors. Music is real magic, in a sense that you can share deeper meaning than language alone. The exercise of an open mic is deeply bio-mechanical, in addition to social.

These are practices that need to be amplified in the year ahead. How are you going to engage? Speak up.