Hey, I’m good. Thanks for asking!
I’ve started a new consultancy at the beginning of this year, https://www.dbadbadba.com. Getting it off the ground from zero has consumed the last couple of months of my life.
We are seeking new projects for expansion. If anyone reading this would like to talk to me about that, you can reach me personally at josh@dbadbadba.com.
These days I’m doing:
- long-term planning and business development for the new consultancy
- lots of Elixir code (nearly all of it for graphql projects)
- some Elm (dillonkearns/elm-pages coupled with dillonkearns/elm-markdown plus tailwindui is just fantastic) but never as much as I wish
- some React / React Native / TypeScript (I like it but it just makes me miss Elm)
- Flutter! It’s fantastic for cross-platform mobile apps, and I wish more people knew about it
- Kubernetes! A terraform script to spin up a cluster and configure fluxcd.io on it to deploy a flux repo so you can do gitops for your entire infrastructure trivially is incredibly productive. I want to help more people do this.
- clearing about 2 acres of kudzu and building a path to a pond
I also bought a house in rural Alabama. It’s less expensive than the house I had “in the city” (Birmingham, AL already has incredibly low cost of living), but here I have 45 acres with three ponds. And goats, ducks, chickens, and an absolute asshole of a turkey (turkeys are terrible; let no one tell you that they deserve your pity).
A week ago, I bought just about the cheapest tractor you can buy (2007 kubota bx2350, smaller than I need but tractors aren’t cheap). I expect I’ll spend an hour or two most days taking that out and reclaiming the property that the previous owner had allowed to go native. That’ll eat up a good piece of the next six months of my life, but it’s truly enjoyable to give your brain a chance to rest and work out the bigger things while you operate incredibly dangerous equipment.
This. The economics of what we were doing at SmoothTerminal didn’t work out. The word humbling seems apropos. There were a couple of opportunities that would have changed my opinion here dramatically, but neither of them came to fruition.
It wasn’t completely untenable, and I’m willing to accept we might have just been bad at it. Still, I made about half as much money as I did when running a consultancy, and it was about twice as much work. We spent the last two years of the business doing a fair bit of consulting on the side just to keep plowing it into the company and trying to make it work out for our investors (we didn’t raise a ton of money at all, but we didn’t raise nothing either). We were able to employ six people for four years.
Additionally, my wife was diagnosed with cancer last year. We caught it early, and a couple of surgeries seem to have removed all of it, but of course anxiety remains. Also, a referral from an in-network specialist to an out-of-network surgeon, combined with the speed and mental exhaustion of this sort of thing, led to us getting surgery out of network without realizing it. I am grateful that a good bet on a cryptocurrency investment (tezos ftw, bought some at IPO and got out at the top) allowed us to pay the extraordinarily high bill.
I also have three children, one of whom is three years old. He takes drastically more than 1/3 of the effort, if you were curious 
