Towards an Embodied Life
I sleep better when I am tired from physical things. If I spend too much of my day on a computer, I feel tired in a way that is opposite and inferior to the tired that I feel from doing something physically tiring.
Computers have been a hobby for a long time. I spent hours every day on a computer when I was growing up, trying to learn as much about them as I could – and trying to build cool stuff.
Then they also became my job, in addition to being a hobby. Too much computer time for me!
It's Time to Make
During my six weeks of paternity leave, I wanted to try building some things I never would have attempted before agentic engineering. It went pretty well! I’ll share some things I built, with screenshots, in this post. There has never been a better time to be a maker!
Naturally, the time off has been mainly colored by snuggles, diapers, doctor appointments, friends and family, laundry (more than usual!), and learning many new skills and patterns (and lack of patterns). This is our first baby. I had no desire or mental space in the early days of the transition to tinker. But, in the last few weeks, I have found some time to tinker. Sometimes tinkering is nothing more than the /voice mode where I use my space bar to talk to Claude (the speech-to-text works great!), sometimes while also holding my daughter.
My First Split Keyboard
A couple of months ago, I started thinking about getting a split keyboard. I spent a ton of time reading about them and decided that I wanted to try one. I was experiencing some back pain during the day and wondered if I would notice an ergonomic benefit from a split. The idea of being able to customize the keyboard also sounded cool, but was not a huge draw; I was worried I might spend too much time on that.
After much debating, I ordered the ZSA Voyager (black keyboard with linear red switches). I picked it because (1) I decided I wanted to order from ZSA given their reputation; (2) the Voyager is their latest keyboard design and seemed to capture everything they’ve learned so far; (3) I like the idea of a maximally portable keyboard, in case I wanted to take it with me on any travels.
Supporting Medical Clinics in Ethiopia
About five times per year, Ethiopia ACT mobilizes week-long medical trips to provide care for hundreds of underserved people in Addis Ababa. I’ve been on three of these teams in the last five years and have used my tech skills to help.1 On my most recent trip, in January 2025, I built a clinic data system, based on feedback and conversations with the staff since 2024.
Screenshot: Dashboard of new clinic data system
The data system helps the organization to operate better during clinics and to prepare for future clinics. For this project, I used Ruby on Rails with Avo.
My Resume as Code
I wanted to update my resume, and I wound up also building a resume generation pipeline. If you too are tired of fighting with a word processor to get your resume just right, and would prefer to fight with LaTeX and Python and Docker, then this post is for you!
I’ve made the relevant source code available on GitHub.