Lately

Posted on May 09, 2026

Laid off on a lovely vacation

It was a close hockey game where I contemplated the layoff. The Utah Mammoths and St Louis Blues going back and forth, only for the refs to give Utah a few unfavorable calls. The last minute was a strong effort followed by ten seconds of holding the puck and watching the timer run out. As far as hockey goes it was a decently exciting game, with an unfortunate end.

The timer (or, my timer) felt like it was running out at this company too. See the previous post for more on my personal software stagnation. I wouldn't blame that wholly on the job, but my accelerated rebound I think was aided by the layoff. It's also nice that I got the call while on vacation with friends, much better than sitting in my box in a building processing it alone. Two days before the wedding we were gathered for gave me enough time to not be in a state of shock for that celebration, although that initial hockey night I may as well have been half a ghost.

The rest of the trip

The next few days after the wedding were spent in the deserts of Moab, Utah. The nights were frigid and the days were a blaze. It was a relaxing time, where I got to tinkering with a camera and goofing around with friends. I really appreciate their patience with my falling behind and running up ahead on hikes, messing with timers and settings constantly, and leaning out of every window on each ride regardless of seat I was in.

The star filled night skies were captured blurry from the earths rotation. The sun filled canyons and far away mountain tops often over-exposed. The springtime desert life, greener than I expected. The low trees and cacti spindly and beautiful, with their occasional flower in a bright bloom poorly framed. The arches astonishing and unbelievable and a bit vertigo inducing, so were carefully appreciated from a few steps back. None of the pictures I took properly captured the scale of anything we saw, but I'll still share some of the nicer ones eventually on mastodon.

A wonderful trip, that I didn't need to come back from.

More on the layoff

I'm available now for work. If you or someone you know are searching for someone sort of like a Full Stack & Systems Software Engineer:

My recent work involved Rust, Typescript, and Python, working on network infrastructure tooling, and "full stack web dev" for configuration of said tooling in a variety of the popular frameworks. These generally started as small proof of concepts, and we turned them into deployed and maintained tools, either for the internal use or to demo to potential customers (or both).

Having said all that, I'm happy to work in and learn just about any tech stack and interested in expanding beyond the domains I've worked in recently. If you want someone who is always looking for new, weird, and interesting, then please reach out to @ncb@mas.to or job@this.domain¹, and I can get you a resume or we can schedule a call.

This trip was reinvigorating and inspirational, and has renewed my energy for side projects and computers and just about everything else creative. I'm ready to hit the ground running wherever I end up.

Creating

Last month I said I was taking April off from programming side projects. In addition to the trip being energizing and the layoff being time freeing, I have also learned that while the worst way to motivate myself is to say that I'm going to do something, the inverse can also be true. Maybe the best way to get started, is to decide I won't.

As part of the trip I got back and had many photos. I wanted a way to display them.

So I built:

Photoroto

A super small Vue app that displays one photo at a time, cycling every 10 minutes or so to a next photo. The images come from my server with a single endpoint back-end determining which should be displayed at any given moment to keep clients in sync.

The client side is an old Raspberry Pi 3B, loaded up in a full-screened Firefox window and running on a spare monitor on my bookshelf. Caddy handles the reverse proxy to determine which requests go where, and as a bonus has a built in file server which I link to from the page. In the event a photo comes up that I'd like to look at on a nicer monitor, or bookmark for some later editing I can load up the page on any of my other devices (through Tailscale, not on the public internet) and go about my way. This file server is also the weakest link due to the size and quantity of photos, so browsing photos remotely is my next area of focus for this project.

I had the idea for this as I went to bed the Thursday night after the trip, built it on Friday, and deployed on Saturday. It is ~200 lines of code & configuration, super small and simple. It also may be my favorite side project I've ever done. It is pointed at my photo dump backup for this April, so at any given moment I have a photo on display from the trip that I can appreciate, laugh at, critique, or all of the above.

Eventually I'll curate a directory of pictures specifically for display incorporating artwork from others for inspiration too, but for the time being the roll of the dice on my own mess of photos is part of the fun.

Small Site Update

I also swapped the abbreviation for light/dark (WoB/BoW) mode to a svg. See the upper right for details. Icons designed² in TLDraw during the flight out to Utah.

Sun:

Moon:

The previous abbreviation was funny but this looks nicer, and I'm happy with the result.

Consuming

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Finished the latest season of Frieren. It wasn't quite as enthralling as the first, but it was still great. The northern plateau shifted the whole vibe of the adventure they were on. The last series finished off with the Fern passing the first class mage exams, allowing the team access to the north. This season it shows why they needed to be the strongest first class mages. They're not winning every fight like it's nothing. They're struggling and barely surviving a serious threats. It's wonderful and different again, and I'm looking forward to whats next for the series.