Lost Photographs

After being laid off in June, I immediately found myself missing the people. That I expected (see some of you at camping!). What I didn't expect as much was missing the codebases. I suddenly had no C# code to look at to think through how I'd handled problem A, or situation B. It was a little like losing a box of photographs. I held the memories, but the physical artifacts attached to them were gone.

As a developer I dug in to designing systems to fix those problems, and in pursuit of that it's been a busy couple of months for this technically unemployed developer.

I've:

• Set up a homelab on an old MacMini on my shelf, hooked it to a Cloudflare tunnel, where I now host my personal .NET site (Welcome!) alongside multiple tools (most of which are only locally available, so don't bother looking for much).
• Developed a platform I've dubbed ClaudePress (though I'm trying to make it as model agnostic as I can) to avoid using WordPress for the small sites people always want. I'm in the middle of forking it to a version called PawPress for my wife to design sites for ethical dog breeders. (See the about page for a picture of one of our pups, my boy Yogi)
• Developed an Agentic Job Search system that I'm running daily and helped me land a second interview on its first run. It even saves tailored resumes and suggested cover-letter angles to a Vikunja server on my homelab, so I can keep track of the applications on deck.
• Worked on a couple contract jobs I'm consulting on that I can't say a ton about other than the domains they're in: One big AI venture doing local models, and, you guys... the other is related to flying cars. Can't say much else.

Aside from that upcoming camping trip, however, I didn't have a fix for missing the dev community I was a part of. So I figured, starting a blog is a rite-of-passage, right? Right?

Great, another avenue for imposter syndrome... maybe I'll write a blog about it eventually. I'll probably start with a dive into one of the above systems first, though. If you have any thoughts, please share them back on the LinkedIn post that most likely got you here for now. I want to work out some good spam filtering before I set up a comment section on this site. Thanks!!!

See ya real soon!