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First Week: No MSFT

6 February, 2026
  • family
  • tech
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    I am no longer employed by MSFT after 20 years of work, plus all the school beforehand.

    Week 1

    Monday

    • 5k treadmill
    • Kids drop-off
    • Breakfast with my wife
    • 30 minutes of Careme (more end-to-end tests)

    9:30–4:00 PM: Funeral

    • 1 hour of Omarchy/Hyprland and minimal Careme work
    • Picked up Nate; cooked dinner for Nate
    • Folded laundry
    • Cooked dinner for Wintana while she was at soccer
    • Beer pickles

    Healthcare admin, family calendar, Careme e2e tests.

    Netflix (His/Him).

    Tuesday

    • Kids dentist and drop-off
    • Kids bus and orthodontist

    Clerk — 6 hours.
    The first two hours Codex completely failed. Tried manually in the afternoon and realized I needed frontend code, and Clerk has no way to get a session cookie in dev 😞. Also, Clerk JWTs might just be too short-lived, and I may need to mint my own.

    So really, a design issue that Codex/Claude would happily throw more stuff at without any of it sticking:
    https://github.com/paulgmiller/careme/pull/166

    • Kids pickup, dinner (mussels!), Dominoes, house cleaning

    Is Clerk the right choice? Should I manage my own session rather than use JavaScript on every page?

    • Moved Cloudflare over to the LLC account
    • Watched the stock market go down
    • Looked at other auth options in the evening (Stytch, Auth0, Entra)

    Wednesday

    • Beef stew prep plus normal breakfast/dishes stuff

    • About 2 hours refactoring auth so it’s less Clerk-specific — felt better afterward:
      https://github.com/paulgmiller/careme/pull/166

    • New lunch place, keg drop-off, birthday beer purchase

    • Ski bus — 6 hours

    • Ate stew

    • Watched the Pats’ 2015 Super Bowl run and read to the kids

    • Watched the stock market go down

    • Got beaten by my wife at shuffle puck and random TV

    Thursday

    • Kids breakfast, dishes, lunches

    Careme work:

    After dinner:

    • Nighttime run
    • Read to kids
    • Folded laundry and drank a beer
    • No computer activity at night

    Friday

    • Kids breakfast and drop-off
    • Sammamish weight workout and swim
    • QFC shopping: bought two meals and lots of other kitchen stuff
    • Set up parent–teacher conference

    Careme:

    • Concluded Instacart does not want me to intermediate between stores and customers. You can search for ingredients, but they give back an HTML shopping list for the customer.
    • Signed up for sites that scrape Albertsons and Whole Foods.
    • Poke lunch and a walk.
    • Realized Walmart might have a public API. Learned about affiliate vs. direct.

    Week 2

    Over the weekend, cooked an excellent Careme dinner for friends. https://careme.cooking/recipe/le76qpHPhb-EK2KB7TqGZA== https://photos.app.goo.gl/83E1cXchei89Qsg77

    Applied to Y Combinator and started a locations UI update.

    Monday

    • Samena workout. Squats and bike.
    • Finished auth bug
    • Locations UI to prod.
    • Started better wine pairing work.
    • Two dinners and laundry.

    Tuesday

    • Pancake breakfast for kids
    • Catch-up talk on exchange funds (20% in real estate due to IRS rules)
    • Got questions on recipes working, though there was not enough context and reload behavior was bad: https://github.com/paulgmiller/careme/pull/203
    • 4-mile run and met Ruben for lunch. Totally failed to find good food; Ruben gave us bad Seattle dogs and nachos.
    • Failed to trademark, created many issues (mostly non-technical), minor updates, SEO research, sitemap started.
    • Colin’s Pub
    • Missed bus. Careme steelhead (slaw great, trout meh)
    • India scraping company did not schedule a 9 PM meeting as promised
    ← careme beta testing
    Linux desktop →