I haven\'t done one of these in a while but I also have a lot I want to document so I\'m going to start with a general overview of what\'s on my plate. Personal -------- Personally I\'m trying to figure out what all I want/need to start another business. I know I want it to be a consulting business. I know I want to stay in the devops/sys admin/cloud space, and I know I want it to start of being something I do part time. So the mini problem to this is \"when do I have time\". I got pretty serious into a competitive sport this summer and I would like to spend twice as much time on it next year. I don\'t know what a balance looks like so I\'ve been reading books and experimenting to figure it out. I know this might be the part were you want me to tell you that time boxing was really helpful or that cutting back was the best thing I\'ve ever done. Neither of those are realy true. My days are never really as planned so time boxing just makes me mad, and my version of cutting back was to put every minute (and I do mean every minute) of free time into my new hobby. This hobby has given me an outlet to free my mind while also allowing me to focus on a \"more fit\" version of myself. This has been good and allowed me to not take everything home from work. Work ---- Work is work. lol Nah\...so with work I don\'t have any actual goals anymore. I made a lot of goals years ago when I was in mobile. I\'ll take a break here and mention that even though I\'ve been in tech for 12yrs I\'ve only worked job jobs for going on 5yrs. When you think about the space I was in leaving grad school and then just how far my skills have come since I started all this\...I\'ve done everything I\'ve wanted and more. I would like work to feel more like experiments and almost like a dev shop. I\'m not sure how I get that without becoming an individual contributor (IC) or going back to startups. I don\'t want to work forever either so that\'s been a big thing to think about. When do I retire and what does that part-time work look like? What do I need to do now to make sure that I can have that lifestyle? PS. I\'m trying to decide if I fold in some work studying into my homelab stuff. Things overlap a little bit and I think what I\'ve learned might be helpful even if I don\'t build out a particular part of my lab to support it. No Mobile? ---------- Come on, I didn\'t say that. I LOVE mobile. There is no way you can get me to not love that space, but as a long term career I think the changes I\'m seeing in mobile don\'t really align with the skills I\'ve built and want to continue building. I\'m still going to work on personal apps and things like that but since I do mostly Android it is getting a little harder to maintain multiple apps with all the Google Play changes. I don\'t want to hire a team either. I got into coding as a way to relax and making mobile apps is still that for me. I will say that I\'d really like to get into mobile and VR gaming as time goes on, but I need more time. More time is really the answer to all my \"problems\" and I\'m working on it. Certs? ------ Ok so I\'ve been focusing on some certs and I\'ll talk about them here as I go along but to be  honest I\'m really burned on on certifications. It feels like being in school with a lesser return. At least when I went to college I knew how my degree would help me grow. Certs now are just ways of me showing people I can do things and I\'m trust worthy. If I do get a cert nowadays I have to have a really good reason to spend the money and time to take the test. School ------ You probably forgot I was in school. I kinda did as well. I took this fall off from my AS in mathematics. During this time I\'ve been chilling and really thinking through my next steps. I think deciding to study math was a right choice and I have decided that a MS in mathematics is not for me long term. I have my eye on a network security and/or systems engineering MS program. I\'d like to start in 2025. I\'m giving it that long because I need to finish my current program and there is a few major adult life purchases I\'d like to make and don\'t need the extra stress of also paying for school. Outside of that I can just say that school is always boring but I be here, just chugging along. lol ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hope you enjoyed this little check-in. I really need to do them more. I enjoy seeing my progress on where I thought I was going and what I actually did. It\'s reminds me that nothing is a straight line. There can be detours and I\'ll still be ok.