I’ve always said that I’ll keep living in the truck as long as it keeps making sense in the larger context of my life. And for the past ~6 years (plus or minus a pandemic), I think that’s been the case. I’m young, healthy, unencumbered by other humans depending on me for survival, and have had access to food, gyms, and other useful resources provided by employers. But now I’ve gone and quit my job to start my own thing, and suddenly the truck doesn’t look quite so sensible any more.

Being back in the truck wouldn’t really be complete without some semi-inexplicable phenomenon causing me troubles (cough cough). And thankfully, the truck hasn’t disappointed. I say this because I came back to the truck a few days ago to several large mounds of thick, sticky sap on the floor of the truck.

This would be odd under normal circumstances, but to make things further befuddling:

• My sunroof was closed, and
• I wasn’t parked anywhere near a tree.

Certifiably odd. But years of strange truck happenstances mean that my first reaction was along the lines of “This needs to be gone now”, instead of just general confusion. I’ve witnessed one too many ant ^{et al} infestations even without any food in the truck, I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit around and find out if they find sap tasty or not.

To be honest, it’s been kinda weird trying to maintain a blog about living in a truck when I haven’t, you know, been living in a truck.

It’s sure a good thing I’m back in the truck then.

Yup, you heard read that right. After a long, long year (and some change), I’ve sloughed off the normalcy of a one-bedroom apartment and slithered back into my truckly digs of yesteryear. And while the amenities and convenience of things like “electricity” and a “bathroom” and “not living in a legal grey area” were nice additions to my life, I’ve got to say that I’m glad to be back.

I can be a completely insufferable person to be around. Part of this is because it took me a long time to learn the difference between someone seeking advice, and just wanting to vent. If I think I see a problem, I tend to look for solutions. Couple that with a bit of obnoxious optimism and an inclination towards simplicity, and the outcome is that I trivialize problems and offer deeply unnuanced “solutions”.

It seems like just yesterday I was switching subsidiary companies at my resident multinational conglomerate, trading in my gig in enterprise business software for something more acutely interesting to me: surgical robotics.

And the three+ intervening years have been not only a grand ole time, but also marked a clear shift in what I actually do at work. The last time I wrote a post like this, my main job was building the things other people told me to build. Over time, I became the person who decides what to build and how to build it, and I’ve learned quite a bit in that process: how to build big (and hopefully useful) systems, how to lead teams and (again, hopefully) not have them hate you, and a whole bunch of more specific things (working with a variety of cloud platforms, building protocols for embedded devices, working with teams across timezones, etc).