Hey, there. It's been quite some time. About two months, I'd reckon. Actually, I'm not even sure that last post counts for much, being that it was entirely technical. The one before it doesn't count either, as it was more of an op-ed piece... I guess? I dunno...

So, what exactly has Matt Hackmann been up to since his last meaningful "life update"? Who wants to know? Certainly, you don't. But, the future me does, so that's enough to validate my want to write this post. The answer to the original question is fairly simple: not a lot. And also, everything. Maybe it's not so simple after all.

The easy answer, really, is work. NDA prevents me from mentioning what exactly is going on, but it's pretty big. Now that I'm a team lead, I'm being challenged in ways that are completely new and foreign to me. Adding to that, I've spent the last month or so on a pretty large portion of this project that affects everybody working on this codebase. All of that landed on Monday and since then, I've been helping people on-board while also crushing any bugs that crop up. I still have a long way to go until all that is all tied up with a neat little bow, but this is probably the most difficult and certainly the most crucial time in the life cycle. I'm hoping to be able to breathe a little bit once this part is done.

In the now, very little happens outside of work. I spend most of my evenings and weekends just trying to mentally recuperate, which primarily consists of naps and lazing around. However, this is coming off of a fair amount of things that happened in the last few months.

Back in March, I moved from my little apartment in Sunnyvale to a slightly less little apartment in San Mateo. The apartment itself is pretty sweet and the location is even better. There are so many places that are now in walking distance, from ramen shops to the train station to friends houses. Due to the above exhaustion, I haven't taken as much advantage of this as I should, but once things ease up, I hope to start sampling some more of the food wares in the area. Inside my apartment, I built a couple of sweet desks to fill the larger space in my room, so I now have a space for computer things and a space for electronics things.

In April, I made another pilgrimage to Japan, this time accompanied by a couple of friends from work. In some regards, I consider this trip to have been more successful than the previous one. I knew better what was going on, and had far, far less fast/conbini food than last time. We also managed to land right in the middle of cherry blossom season which was goddamned gorgeous. Of course, there was plenty of time spent in Akihabara and I came away with many nerdy goods to fill my shelves and to gift to folks. It's hard to believe that it's already been almost two months since I've been back... or that I even went at all.

So, that's a bunch of stuff. I'm actually feeling motivated to work on my LED board project right now, so I guess I'll do that.

Or I'll binge watch a bunch of Forensic Files >_>