(Updated on 8/9/2023)
I am currently a director in the Platform organization in Contentsquare, leading the Platform Elementals team. You can read more about them here. The work is always interesting and challenging and we always get to learn and decide on how to do things, in different scales, for the first time. Being a director is an interesting learning challenging because there is a fine balance that needs to be maintained between the duties of being a director, and the duties of leading the team. I am learning a lot every day within that realm as well.
We are at the beginning of September, and my children have started their new classes - my son is starting the eighth grade, firmly in the middle of junior high, and my daughter started the fifth grade, which is the lower of the two senior classes of grade school. They were both excited to start school (which has been expressed in waking up at 6:30 on the first day of school) and both still seem excited. I hope it lasts until the end of the year for them.
I am still working through the David Bowie Book Club, a challenge for myself and a Medium publication for whomever else is interested. I have read 67 out of the 100 books in the list so far, and you will not see it on the publication but I will share a secret with you here - I am a bit ahead of the monthly reading, working through my January 2024 book already. The project publication, at least, is planned to be completed by the end of 2027.
In terms of language learning, I have just reduced it to a single language - French - of which I study at least three lessons through Duolingo. The reasoning is practical - Contentsquare is a French company and it would be nice to converse with my colleagues in their own language from time to time. I plan to expedite my studies, but I still don't know when and in what method. One of the pending books in the David Bowie Book Club I mentioned above is in French, so that at least is waiting.
I am continuing to read a lot of books but have managed to settle back into a cadence of four books concurrently - three which are generally eBooks and one which is a physical book. There has been an inclination to dedicate one hour of reading for the physical book, but it has not manifested yet. I may start writing reviews about the books on this website - we'll see. The books that I'm concurrently reading right now are "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power" by John Meacham, "City of Night" by John Rechy, "Gamestorming" by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo and "The Audobon Reader", which is an Everyman's Library collection of everything John James Audobon has written.
And I have started trying to detach myself from being dependent on corporates with Derek Sivers' Tech Independence guide. This website, in fact, is in the process of being ported over to my own server.