Welcome to the Outpost

There's a moment, somewhere between your third cup of coffee and the second Slack escalation of the morning, where you realize the skills you're using at work are the same ones you used last night convincing a six-year-old that brushing their teeth is, in fact, not optional.

The Intersection

I manage a 13-person infrastructure team. I also manage a household where neurodivergence isn't the exception, it's the standard operating system. The thing no one tells you is that the Venn diagram between these two worlds is very nearly a circle.

De-escalation? I use it in sprint retros, project calls, and bedtime negotiations. Phased rollouts? That's how we introduce new routines at home. Monitoring and alerting? I have dashboards for both.

Why "The Outpost"

Eris the dwarf planet (not the goddess of chaos, though some days the distinction is thin) sits at the edge of our solar system. It's distant, a little rebellious, and officially classified as "not quite a planet." My son also loves this particular planet, so there's that.

That resonates.

This site is the outpost. A place to write about the overlap between managing systems and managing life. To share the shirts I design when my brain needs a creative outlet. To catalog the books and resources that came from years of figuring things out as I went.

What You'll Find Here

All of this goes to say: whether I'm debugging something in the datacenter or navigating a school IEP, the systems are different, but the heart is the same.

Welcome to the outpost.