2025

What a year 2024 was both for me and the world. And already 2025 has started with a bang in NOLA with a terrorist attack to color the mood and shape the conversation. I hope we can all nonetheless find a way to calmly reflect with the goal of acting as good citizens and neighbors. The temptation to do otherwise in 2025 will be great.

I like the idea of forgoing new year “resolutions” and instead declaring a “theme”. This approach affords us a North Star to which we can continually re-commit throughout the year despite setbacks. In 2022 I adopted a mantra that “I will live with fear without living in fear“…

… while in 2023 I declared that “energy management is king“. The former got me through a debilitating fear injury sustained while paragliding in 2021 and by the time I reached 2023 I was wired for a succession of amazing trips spanning Colombia, Italy, and Oregon that culminated in a palpable “I’ve made it” feel in paragliding.

Life has a way, though, of interleaving triumph and tragedy, and no sooner had I seemingly escaped a deep gravity well of grief and trauma was I thrust back into it when my sister took her own life. I gave myself some space to recover from that, taking a full two months off from flying, and then got back at it, having some of my most satisfying flying to date in Utah.

Just as I was re-finding my groove, however, a dear friend was killed in a midair collision ten minutes from my house at the local flight park. You take the bad with the good and try to make some kind of sense from it as you weave the rich tapestry of life.

I’m not sure I managed, in the fullness of 2023, a particularly great showing of “energy management”. I also failed to explicitly name a theme for 2024. I think, however, I had nonetheless subconsciously adopted a new theme by mid-2023, and one that carried through to 2024 while distilling to a single word — “resiliency”. And looking back on 2024 now, certainly that represents a quality I had to summon almost continually.

Despite a large part of my soul just wanting to “burrow” in the winter of 23/24 I managed instead a celebration of life. This helped me navigate what might otherwise have been a crushingly depressive time. It also topped up my wellbeing in a way that would help me get through even more difficult times to come.

In January I went to Colombia for the third straight year and had one of my best flying experiences ever. I think that’s what my departed pilot friend, Josh, would have wanted.

In early March I hosted a college friend, Kenny, whom I had not seen in person for literally two decades, for a week’s skiing in Utah. How weird and wonderful to have somehow maintained this connection long distance for a span of time equal to our then age when last we had seen each other.

Then, in late March, I apparently separated my left rotator cuff while bouldering, though I suppose that was a sufficiently gradual process, spanning years or maybe decades, that I so thoroughly failed to grok the severity of the situation that in April I hosted another friend, Dave, from my Maryland days for a week’s skiing, during which time I had the singular experience of sliding down nearly the entire length of Snowbird’s somewhat notorious “Regulator Johnson” trail (for his most epic fall, Dave at least had the good sense to be going uphill). Despite my already compromised shoulder being extremely unhappy about that mishap we did nonetheless manage to have a great trip, albeit with the notable detail that Dave had to help me with the upper clamp on my left boot, as if I were an armored knight of yore who could not mount his steed clad for battle unassisted.

To have one’s rotator cuff reattached entails, in the best of cases, a gruesome and grueling recovery, and while my shoulder itself seems to have navigated that process fairly well, a variety of complications, both medical and logistical, made the journey anything but. The full details of that tale are sufficiently long and tortuous as to merit their own standalone treatment but suffice it to say that the experience offered regular impetus to channel a “crisis and opportunity are one and the same” kind of mindset.

On the 17th of March I booked a reprise of 2023’s Bassano Italy trip and it was just nine days later that I (as yet unbeknownst to me) disconnected my left rotator cuff. In mid-April there was a span of three consecutive days where I got ominous MRI results, I canceled my Italy bookings, and I ended up on a chance phone call with an old friend who needed me to consult on his nascent startup play in the AI space.

I suppose if you are living in a world that a massive AI wave is presently transiting then there are worse things than having random life events force you to be up and ready on your surf board. While I profess no great expertise in AI itself, I have by dint of fate spent decades becoming about as capable a purveyor of “picks and shovels” as one might hope in this nascent gold rush, and being forced to focus on this area of my reality was not a bad thing in 2024.

Meanwhile, although I was fortunate enough to be capable of handling a keyboard throughout this ordeal, a rolling variety of challenges forced me to think far more deliberately and consciously about the inputs of sleep, sunlight, electronics, exercise, food, hydration, caffeine, alcohol, and day architecture, doing so in the framing of energy, readiness, focus, and prioritization, all with an eye toward their consequences for work, play, relationships, and ambition.

To go from a “circadian rhythm” governed by the smooth inputs of caffeine, exercise, and alcohol, with a moderate workload, solid sleep, and gourmet home cooked food interleaved therethrough, and regular meetups with friends for outdoor adventures and meals sprinkled therein, all punctuated with semi-regular two-week paragliding trips to diverse spots around the world, to a life where I was too crippled and drugged to cook, drink, exercise, drive, or even sleep had a “Welcome to Hell — Population 1” feel to it. The world kept turning as my life seemed to come apart at the seams and few seemed aware.

At peak awful, in the week immediately after my surgery, I felt like I had to do everything short of waving a gun in a doctor’s office to get my hands on a CPAP machine, leaving me reflecting on trends I had heard about veterans giving up hope in VA parking lots after concluding that nobody was going to help them. There but for the tenacity and resourcefulness of a startup engineer, aided by a healthy bank account and corresponding willingness to trade personal funds for timely solutions, might have gone I. I’m told that I was shockingly lucid for a person whose Apple Watch was telling him he almost literally did not sleep for two weeks, but I can tell you that I was perpetually on the edge of disaster, having had multiple events of blacking out while standing, to say nothing of the nascent hypertensive crisis where my GP’s helpful advice was “try not do die”.

But I risk digressing. I said that this sub-plot is mostly a story for another time. I mention it here only to note the crisis that I have elected to characterize as opportunity. There is nothing quite like an externally mandated hard reboot of your whole reality to force an exercise in re-baselining and re-prioritization. The experience might break you or, more hopefully, it might re-forge you as you ponder the gifts you took for granted, the unduly thin margins you tolerated, the nature of the people you have in your life, and the mountains you want to climb.

In addition to “themes” giving you more flexibility than “resolutions” to recover from setbacks within a year, I feel they also present the opportunity to think of your units of ambition as ingredients to pursue even higher order aspiration, and in that way the themes of the last few years combine meaningfully and pave the way for another one in 2025. Though I didn’t as yet have any named themes for 2021, clearly striving to be resilient in the face or horrendous loss while also leaning into the discomfort of the unknown were on evidence as I slingshot out of the grief of losing a brother to the opioid epidemic to beginning the Utah epoch of consulting and paragliding. With every unlock came the realization of new limiting factors that in turn required my attention.

I had most of my life unceremoniously taken from me in 2024, though not all of it, and that created an interesting opportunity to rally what capacity remained around areas that had gotten less attention in recent times. At first that looked like a surge on working on AI-centric problems within my consulting practice but later, as my physical recovery took its sweet time playing out, my non-athletic attentions began ranging farther afield, and that looked like exploring how my experiences, work streams, and relationships could underpin the creation of content and products that might not just bolster the services I offer as a consultant but also create a lasting body of work that concretizes and memorializes countless hard won lessons across a few domains.

And so my “theme” for 2025 is that “I will prioritize scalable impact”. That has essentially always been a thread running through my professional life as someone whose engineering output has mostly looked like infrastructure, toolchains, and methodologies that have served as force multipliers for the work of others. I want to take it to the next level, however, finding ways to expand that scaling beyond the confines of specific employers and clients by shaping new product offerings and media forums that allow for the creation of compounding value while also improving accessibility.

Also there is no time like the present so why not get started immediately? And by immediately I mean the present as it existed a month ago when I got this idea into my head. Over my birthday week I had a friend in town whom I had as my first guest on a podcast I subsequently launched. Over Christmas week I found myself wrangling a critical contribution to a widely used open source tool. And now my attentions are turning to bootstrapping a content library that captures at various granularities my learnings and philosophies spanning Data Engineering, Security Engineering, DevOps, and Cloud, doing so with the intention that this eventually rolls up into a book.

This is a scary commitment to make to myself, but only incrementally so, as I have been laying the groundwork in stages for years. How better to steel myself to prioritize scalable impact than to commit to living with fear without living in fear, to treat energy management as king, and to navigate so many ordeals as to cultivate an unquestioning faith in my resilience?

Ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it.

What will your 2025 theme be?