A Quarter of Making, Fixing, Shipping, Playing, and Showing Up
This past quarter was one of those stretches where, looking back, the sheer variety of things done is more striking than any single milestone. It was less about one big deliverable and more about steady motion across work, side projects, logistics, people, and a fair amount of real life.
On the making-things side, hardware and engineering were a constant background hum. The pic0rick ecosystem kept evolving: a full DVI variant designed, iterated, ordered, received, and debug-friendly tweaks added along the way. Copper markings, extra test points, pinout changes, VGA repair code, fast SD testing—none of it glamorous, all of it necessary. Alongside that, phADC moved into a cleaner card-format design and WASP engineering progressed through specs, pinouts, quotes, board orders, testing, and invoicing. A few boards shipped out, a few came back thicker than expected, and progress happened the old-fashioned way: iteration plus patience.
Parallel to that, AI and data work quietly expanded. Multiple AI use cases were defined, reviewed, and shared; audits and cost analyses were done; clients’ actual use (as opposed to marketing slides) was examined; and bridges were built between tech, AEC, and governance contexts. On the PBN side, this turned into a long sequence of concrete outputs: documents reviewed and published, standards like ISO 37128 wired in, RAG systems built and deployed, FastAPI integrations shipped, Keycloak integrated, prototypes tested, and reviewers onboarded. By the end of September, a lot of “this should exist” ideas actually did exist, publicly and reproducibly.
There was also a very real people-and-process dimension. Project onboarding, training, mockups, interviews, personas, updates, stakeholder meetings, onsite sessions in London—less visible work, but essential. The same goes for the steady drumbeat of calls, feedback, coordination, and follow-ups that don’t leave a Git commit but do move things forward. Some calls were productive, some were simply necessary to get them out of the way.
Outside of work, the quarter was unapologetically full of life admin and joy mixed together. Real estate moved—sales, expert visits, follow-ups, and paperwork finally closing loops that had been open for too long. Homes got maintenance: gas reviews, vases changed, energy checks done. Orders arrived (and kept arriving). Cloths repaired instead of replaced. Plants were replanted. A few things were deliberately removed too—uninstalling COD felt oddly symbolic.
There was plenty of play and culture, the kind that keeps everything else sane. Board games, card games, movies stacked across genres, books ranging from Murakami to Abercrombie to Le Guin. Trips, dinners, guinguettes, birthdays, weddings, weekends with family, cafés with friends. MTG decks built, boosters cracked, and commander boxes picked up—not productive in any measurable KPI sense, but deeply restorative.
If there’s a theme to the quarter, it’s probably this: progress didn’t come from one big push, but from showing up repeatedly across many fronts. Shipping boards. Publishing docs. Making calls. Fixing small things. Playing games. Eating well. Taking the time to both build and disconnect.
