I'm back from the dead

The flu hit me like a freight train right at the start of the year, along with the most stress I've ever felt at work dropping on me at the same time, I've been out of commission for what feels like forever. But this week I've been bouncing back and I feel like a million bucks now... and a lot has happened

This post isn't a review, it's a note for me to come back and build on with some more posts probably. My life has been a bit chaotic but in God's good grace on my life, that chaos hasn't ruined anything (I am still wrestling with one aspect of it) but something's changed this year... I'm not only back from the flu over the last several weeks, I feel like I've been resurrected as a developer. I'd written a few times last summer, feeling like I was in a rut, and I felt good coming out of that low season, but as I've reflected it's really the last couple of years have been a slow descent into, not into depression, but something akin to it...

Not only is that season either over or on pause, cause I've been buzzin on building things for a week now like I can hardly remember, but I've had some significant work changes. Longer reflection post to come - but after much toil I am actually back in Caterpillar Autonomy, a group I left from burn-out 5 years ago. In fact, I'm on the same project, but with new eyes, new passion, new knowledge and experience, and the fun part for me now is new tools. AI hasn't been my friend the whole time, I've vibe-coded some disasters, pseudo-vibe-coded some cool stuff, but ultimately it's not been a net positive for me until this week. Getting a workflow ironed out in order to keep up with the group's pace, or the pace I want us to be at, has been exciting and I swear I've done a month's work of work since Monday... no hype, no selling, just letting you know that AI can't do it all, but with good design it sure can generate some code that doesn't suck.

So... I'm back, almost from the dead, and it's January 23 but let's kick 2026 right in the cajones!