Marcus Pope

Husband, Father, Inventor, Programmer Highlands Ranch, CO - °

2016

1/26/2016

Testing the Colorado waters...

Elli is turning 34 soon and we are hoping to take a weekend getaway sometime in February so that we can get a taste of what a "coldest winter in years" in Colorado actually feels like. I'm not too worried, but 6 degrees does sound painful (keep in mind that I'm a skinny Puerto Rican acclimated to tropical climates.) Now we just need to sucker I mean provide a wonderful opportunity for one our parents to spend some quality time with the kids for a barely extended period of mere hours. :D

1/1/2016

Happy New Year's!!!

I've never been a fan of resolutions for the new year. In preparation for choosing what you want to accomplish, you end up deciding earlier and earlier in the year to make sure you pick the things you really want to accomplish - or risk wasting a year on a fleeting interest. That cuts into time you might be spending frantically finishing last year's goals or just dealing with the holiday workload. And if you end up picking the right ideas early, you're supposed to just sit on the very motivationally inspiring plans? It's a broken system that is better suited to Lent. If it were Lent, we wouldn't have to hear people talk about how their New Year's resolutions didn't stick for all of Q1.

Although I haven't made an explicit New Year's Resolution in decades (other than in jest), I do use the time to reflect on goals I finished last year and how my current goals, from whenever I may have picked them, are progressing into this year. Continuous Resolutions for the developer-minded.

So last year was a bit different than usual. As a full time Dad, I didn't spend as much time on myself as I did for my children. Hence the one and only status update last year. Despite effectively being a recluse (or being an effective recluse depending on who you ask), I still managed to complete the following personal goals:

  • Beat Guitar Hero III on expert (in co-op mode with Elli.)
  • Built a large-scale site on top of ScrewPressCMS (pending in stealth mode for now.)
  • Took a nigh impossible two week digital vacation from my computer, email, non-emergency text messages / calls, and phone apps.
  • Went a full year without getting sick by not pushing my physical limits (and probably full time exposure to kids.)
  • Converted our house from "Did you just move in?" to "Wow, the house looks great!"
  • Devised a software project management workflow for my personal development projects called PWNN.
  • Finished a stable, production-ready version of VerbotenJS.

I'm currently working on a few different projects to varying degrees of active involvement. Agilelaw will continue with limited involvement for this year, but the real duration of that project is currently undefined. Things that should come to fruition/completion this year are:

  • Finish v1 of a TODO app I've been mentally tinkering with for months.
  • Dispose/Archive all CD's and DVD's - useless media.
  • FTDC - Full time day care for the kids.
  • FTRE - Full time remote employment. Gotta pay for the above, right?
  • Renovated garage & master closet - the last two embarrassing rooms in our house.
  • Plan the move to CO - we'll know this year when in 2017 we'll be moving.
  • JavaScript-able email client - because 50 effing spam emails a week is enough.
  • Purge all the cruft in my real and digital lives - in lieu of hauling it thousands of miles.

Oh, and I might just try selling cookies via the Texas Cottage Laws, because I think I found a loophole distribution channel. Plus Elli has perfected a recipe over the years that frankly I expect would sell itself. Our friends and family will individually go through an entire Ziploc bag in a single sitting. I'm still evaluating my options, but it has a high potential to generate enough income to pay for day-care and ease the chicken-and-egg problem of getting full time income first to pay for daycare, so that I can spend time finding full time income :D

Happy Holidays to all our friends and family,

-Marcus Pope



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