I do some sort of painting or drawing pretty much every day.

I tend to post studies and works in progress here and on Instagram every couple of weeks. Right now I am working mostly on small figurative compositions in graphite or gouache, and also on finishing a large oil painting that I started at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Until late April, 2022 I was a staff software engineer at OppFi, where I wrote software (mostly in Clojure), mentored and taught other engineers, and tried to improve process, code quality, and architecture wherever I could. I spent nearly four years at OppFi, learned a lot, helped a lot of people, and am happy to move onto other things.

• Practicing Python programming (again!). I did a lot of Python development up until about 2014, after which I switched to mostly Clojure for day jobs. But I still like Python and it's fun to get back to it for awhile.
• Learning about Quantum Computing by reading books and playing with Qiskit.
• Working on the Web site you're reading.
• Journaling and working on improving my handwriting.
• Implementing a Lisp in Go, with detours into Crafting Interpreters and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
• Learning the Go programming language. I've written a few modestly useful things and am really enjoying the experience after years of focusing primarily on Lisps and functional programming. Go emphasizes a different kind of simplicity than Clojure does, and it seems to occupy a sweet spot on the speed vs. power spectrum. I'm regularly stunned by how fast Go programs are, including the code used to build this site.
• Learning Mandarin (reading, mostly). I got my vocabulary up to about four hundred words. It's a beautiful language, and a slog to learn, but thanks to technology it is definitely possible!