Forty Nine

Watch the video above for the same content with more character. :)

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My life continues to revolve around my kids’ school and sports. While I measure years by birthdays, I’m pretty sure my son measures years by soccer tryouts. You see, each May he joins a hundred or so other boys his age to try out for one of the top soccer clubs in the region. Last May, it struck me that there would be only four tryouts left. This fall he starts high school and my daughter enters middle school.

At that moment, standing on the sidelines, I realized how much I appreciate the time I get to spend with them. Working from home and running my own company, enables me to be available whenever they have something going. That was a vision I had for myself when I started FireGiant some 13 years ago. It felt like it came true in that moment.

For fun, here’s a clip of my son shooting the game winning goal at his middle school’s district finals. He had a lot of fun last fall playing “just for fun” with school friends. They were a fun group of kids to watch.

On a more directly personal note, I decided it was time to get my weight down. With a little help from ChatGPT, I put together a mind-numbingly simple diet. I based the diet on descriptions from actors like Chris Evans and Hugh Jackman when they prepared for their roles in superhero movies. I call it the Antihero Diet: chicken and broccoli twice a day with yogurt, granola, and pineapple for breakfast plus a regiment of vitamins.

I ate that way for 120 days and I lost 46 pounds. That was a massive improvement. I didn’t take any half-naked before/after selfies, but you can see a difference in my face in the Deployment Dojo shows. Just look at Season 2 Episode 1 recorded the month before I started the diet.

Anyway, I paused the diet over the holidays, and just maintained my weight. But I’m getting back into it now. I think I’d like to lose another 20 pounds or so. It would be pretty cool to be back around my college weight before I turned 50. We’ll see. 

My wife was just happy to see that I’m taking care of myself. That said, getting enough sleep is still the hardest piece of the diet.

How can I sleep when there are so many things I want to build? So, let’s talk about what I’m building.

Work

At FireGiant, we’re finally making really good progress on our own products. That did mean we said no to a few cool projects for some customers. But the focus on our own work is paying off.

I’m constantly reminded that software always takes longer than I think it will. It definitely takes longer than I want it to. But I’m very excited about what we are building. And I don’t just feel better because of the progress we are making at FireGiant.

This time last year I was preparing to launch the Open Source Maintenance Fee. I was full of trepidation and that is an understatement. I had no idea how the announcement would be received, I just knew that I had to do it.

And… it went incredibly well. The Open Source Maintenance Fee started the right conversations with right people. As I anticipated, there were a few bugs that needed to be worked out in the maintenance fee process and feedback helped find them.

Now, after a year, I’m now confident the Open Source Maintenance Fee is an excellent sustainability option for maintainers. I will continue to refine it as more feedback comes in, but if you’re a maintainer and the success of your Open Source project is weighing you down, check out the OSMF.

Which brings us to the WiX Toolset. I introduced the Open Source Maintenance Fee to WiX v6 last year and it completely changed my outlook. Maintenance tasks feel like less of a burden. When processes inevitably go wrong I’m not frustrated that I have to do them, so I’m solely annoyed at the failed component (I’m looking at you Azure). Overall, I find I am less frustrated and more patient.

And we’re releasing WiX v7! There aren’t any huge new features in WiX v7 but we’ve fixed some complex, and long standing issues that make this a really good release. Looking ahead I have a number of big ideas I’d like to get into future WiX releases, but we’ll see how FireGiant development goes over the next six to nine months.

Pausing to think back over the last six to nine months, I want to reflect on the phenomenon that is AI. Early last year, I remember going to Sounders games with friends that work at Microsoft and they described how AI was being used to fix bugs and file pull requests automatically. I was incredulous. It sounded like science fiction.

But In less than a year, everything they described and more has come true.

Honestly, I don’t exactly know what to think. Not that it matters. AI appears inevitable. It reminds me of a time back in 1995 when I saw a URL at the end of a TV commercial. I was so excited. I told my mom the internet and the web was going mainstream and it would change everything. AI today feels like that. But this time I’m anticipating far more world wide disruption.

I’m less concerned about myself and more about my kids. What skills do I need to teach them so that they are well prepared for an uncertain future? For now, I continue with the fundamentals. Be curious. Be aware. Be flexible. Think critically. Work hard. The future is unknown.

Let me leave you with this little story. Every year, for our Superbowl party, we play a guessing game where each guest fills out a 30-question survey from who will win the coin toss to will the coach get doused with Gatorade. In the past, this was all done on paper. This year, I challenged my 11 year old daughter to move it online. She had dabbled with JavaScript last summer enough that she knew how to open VS Code and “vibe code” a cute “catch-the-falling-object-game”. So, I gave her a 10 minute talk about Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects and how browsers connected to web servers and… she procrastinated until two days before the Superbowl. But in those two days before and after school (she was away on Saturday), she deployed a fully operational single page app backed by a Cloudflare Worker and Durable Object. There was an admin portal where I could configure the questions, lock the game when the Superbowl started and set the answer as the game progressed. The survey itself showed you how other people voted for each questions and after the game started, it showed the questions you got right… in real time.

To be clear, my daughter does not understand how the code actually works. But she is able to structure her thoughts to put the AI to work for her.

And yes, there are bugs. That gives her something to fix for next time. :) You can check it out at heidisuperbowl.com

Next

We’re working hard at FireGiant. I would love to ship this year and that’s absolutely a possibility but we have plenty of work to get done. WiX v7 will also be a great release in a couple of months and then we’ll see how ambitious I am for WiX v8. I also thought about trying out the speaking circuit to talk about the Open Source Maintenance Fee but the FireGiant work takes priority. So maybe next year.

And who knows what disruption will come this way. I’ll just need to remain curious, be aware, be flexible, think critically, and keep working hard.

In the meantime, keep coding. You know I am!