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Beyond the code.

The stuff I do when I'm not building software or thinking about leadership.

Sketch of an orc shredding an electric guitar

Guitar, forever.

I've been playing guitar since I was a kid. Had my first band in eighth grade, kept playing through high school in bands and the school band. Rock, metal, instrumental. Electric for the most part, though the acoustic comes out too.

These days I mostly play in the style of Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Guthrie Govan. Neoclassical shred, fusion. Pick up the guitar, plug into the amp, and nothing else exists for a while.

Sketch of an elf holding up a vinyl record

The bands.

If you want to know what kind of guitarist someone is, look at what they listen to. Here's mine, no particular order:

Iron Maiden Metallica Black Sabbath Pantera System of a Down AC/DC Van Halen Rammstein Disturbed Megadeth Judas Priest Slayer Tool Alice in Chains Soundgarden Led Zeppelin Deep Purple Pink Floyd

Guitarists I follow:

Yngwie Malmsteen Steve Vai Joe Satriani Guthrie Govan Stevie Ray Vaughan B.B. King

This list gets longer every time I look at it.

Sketch of an orc warrior raising a battle axe

For the Horde.

World of Warcraft, since vanilla, since day one. That's over twenty years now. I was there when the servers first came up, and I never really left.

Don't raid much anymore. Family and work took care of that. But I push Mythic+ keys every season, typically 3k+ rating. Some people golf. I run keys.

Sketch of a troll playing the saxophone

Saxophone.

Three years in. Knowing theory from guitar made picking it up pretty smooth. Getting to basic songs didn't take long. The embouchure, though. That's the whole game with saxophone, and it's still what I'm working on.

Mostly working through jazz standards. Different instrument, different muscles, but the theory carries over and makes the learning curve a lot less steep.

Sketch of a gnome tinkering at a workbench with an oscilloscope

The workbench.

I do digital electronics as a hobby. The workbench has an oscilloscope, a soldering station, a programmable power supply, a 4K microscope for SMD work. The usual progression where you buy one tool and then suddenly need five more.

It's a different kind of problem-solving than software. You can't undo a bad solder joint with Ctrl+Z.

Sketch of a dwarf standing proudly next to a server rack

The homelab.

I moved all of my infrastructure off Hetzner and onto hardware I run at home. K3S cluster, everything self-hosted. The cloud is just someone else's computer, so I got my own.

I wrote a guide covering the full setup: k3s.guide

Sketch of a tauren reading a book by candlelight

Books.

I read a lot. Philosophy and psychology are where I spend most of my time. Stoicism, cognitive biases, how people make decisions.

I go through management and leadership books too. "Becoming a Manager" is a good example. But philosophy and psychology are the ones I always come back to.