Where I see myself in 10 years

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2020

Vision

In ten years, I still live in Castine. I don't intend to move. All my kids are ten years older, and we've had a lot of fun trips, but mostly stayed close to home. My oldest daughter has started college, and my oldest son is thinking about college.

I retired from the town Selectboard a few years ago, after serving for a number of terms. It was a hard decision because I don't like to disappoint people, but I also did not want to be "that guy" who stays on the board forever and makes people wish there were term limits.

My career is still in engineering. I love what I do, and am leading a team of engineers that work directly with large clients before the contract is signed to make sure what they hope the platform can do for them can be done. I travel a few times a year to be on site with clients, but mostly I'm working from home and helping out with farm chores and with the kids. I'm considering moving away from technology completely, but haven't made the jump yet. While our mortgage is close to paid, we have kids starting college and maintenance on the house to consider. My work gives me purpose as the things we're building has a serious positive impact on the world. The impact is clear when we hear from customers about how the tools have impacted their organizations. I love getting this feedback and it makes me excited to get up in the morning and help solve more problems and find clever hacks to get our software to be as impactful as possible.

Since my career moved away from the day to day of building things, I got more interested in helping with open source projects. I have finally become a ports maintainer for FreeBSD and am consdering getting my commit privileges. I also have a bunch of little side projects at home that I open source as a gesture, but mostly they scratch an itch for myself.

As a side business I bake sourdough bread and crackers which I sell at the farm stand my wife is running with our four kids. Jane, our oldest is less involved now since she started college and only helps out over the summer. Our younger son helps me with the baking and our oldest is always in the middle of building something whether its with wood or electronics.

We rebuilt our barn and added a series of solar panels which has helped us get closer to moving off the grid. Since rebuilding it, we've been able to convert it into a rental space for vacation folks passing through. We have a number of "regulars" who come back each summer and enjoy saying on the farm and eating a farm breakfast my wife makes each morning. The baking and vacation rentals makes it easier to think about leaving my career, but I've met too many people whom I would disappoint by walking away and instead I just look for a way to reduce my time. I think I'm going to end up in a part-time management role, or advisory position for other small business built on technology, but I don't have that figured out yet.

Goals

1. Managing an engineering team

2. Working on a plan to phase out of full-time engineering work

3. Running a side bakery business out of the house