2025 was a strange year. That almost certainly factors in to why I really didn’t post here.

Navigating a Layoff

On a cold February morning in 2025, I came in from snow-blowing my driveway only to sit down at my laptop and realize I couldn’t log into Slack, and then Google. That was enough to realize I was experiencing the classic tech company goodbye. It was my first time ever being laid off, but with the current market, I couldn’t be shocked. I took a few minutes to collect my thoughts, called my wife to let her know, and then it was off to LinkedIn (gross) to start the process of figuring out where to go from here.

I had an outpouring of support pretty much instantly once I posted on LinkedIn. My connections in the Drupal community really helped - without them, navigating the layoff would have been much harder. Personal connections made all the difference. If I was chasing unsolicited applications I would have lost my mind.

As I explored my options, I was quickly able totake on contracting work with a company called Actual AI. This made a huge difference in lessening the blow of my job transition and providing stability as I figured out what’s next. It also unsurprisingly changed the way that I used AI in my development workflow and opened my eyes to the changes that are happening right now.

I eventually took a full time Founding Engineer role with Actual AI. Working at an early stage startup is not without its challenges, but the work has been really interesting and I’ve taken on many things I probably wouldn’t have been able to do elsewhere (at least not on this timeframe.) Looking forward to what is ahead this year.

All of these changes have kept me out of the loop with the Drupal community aside from attending Midcamp and NEDCamp. At times that made me feel a little unmoored since it was such a big part of my professional life. The Drupal API client is a dependency of Drupal’s next generation page builder, so keeping that maintained will be a fun way to keep my link back to Drupal alive.

Family Fun

We went on a Midwest road trip during our summer vacation. The header image from this post is one of the amazing views we took in at Badlands National Park. We didn’t have any major travel mishaps and stayed at an amazing bed and breakfast.

My son started high school, which is still wild to think about. He’s been busy playing percussion in the marching band and jazz band in addition to all of the regular high school things. And as an added bonus the football team made a solid run which made the marching band events even more entertaining.

Things That Kept Me Sane-ish in 2025

• Switch 2 - had a great time following the lead up and eventual launch of the sequel to my favorite game console of all time. Played a ton of Donkey Kong Bananza as well.

• Guitar - kept a pretty good pace of learning guitar. So much more to learn, but can actually kind of play a few things at this point. Got an electric for Christmas as well.

• Snuck out to a few concerts - David Byrne and Bear vs. Shark were (very different) highlights pretty much back to back.

• Made pizzas of varying quality - got one of those small wood fired ovens and tried to learn how to make a reliable pizza. Improved along the way, but stil not as consistent as I’d like.

• The Patriots got good again out of nowhere - thought we’d be looking at years for Vrabel to get us back to the playoffs, but this was way better. Well, as long as you don’t think about the Super Bowl…

• Albums - my favorite album of the year was Never Enough by Turnstyle but the best album of the year was Getting Killed by Geese.

Hopes for 2026

I’m looking forward to seeing Actual AI evolve and grow.

I’ve been working on an app on the side as a way to continue exploring what is possible both using AI, and building with AI. I’ll be upset if I don’t launch it in some form this year. Of course, I said that last year as well.

I have some ideas about how I could share more frequently at this site, but just getting this post out the door was a big milestone. We did it!