I’ve had some difficulty figuring out what to write next regarding this phase of my life, despite only a month passing since I laid out intentions to do just that. This is mostly because I feel like my healing has actually been going pretty well, or at least rapidly. Life is still very hard in some ways (keeping perspective relative to the rest of the world, of course), but I notice changes day by day in the way that I’m able to handle things and think about them, and especially how much less I’m getting upset or sad. Bittersweet is an apt word here, I think.
My wife Michelle Petruzzi was diagnosed with, and died from, sporadic pancreatic cancer entirely within the past six months. She was thirty-six and probably the healthiest person I knew. She was active in many volunteer efforts in our community, she ran operations for a non-profit encouraging girls in tech, and she was a kind and generous soul.
This was going to be my programming and professional blog. A place to put technical thoughts, store my references to talks I’ve given and places I’ve traveled, and then pontificate on the tech landscape and the things that I keep learning along the way.
A lot has changed since I last wrote here and I debated writing about it elsewhere, but in truth, I need to write about it in order to move on and to get back to the tech stuff, so it might as well be here.
Michelle tasked me this year for our Halloween party to build a magic mirror. You know the type — looks like a normal mirror, but has a spooky face that talks to you out of it. Ok, easy enough. This ended up being a fun project, made more so by me leaving it until the last minute and essentially time-boxing myself to 48 hours to build it out.
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed on the NSBrief podcast by Janie Clayton about what I’m up to at Mapbox, mostly from an iOS point of view. I did touch a bit on cross-platform development in OpenGL and C++, considering Metal instead of OpenGL, my recent forays into Android development, and we even got a little philosophical about learning programming and technology.