The Big 30

When I looked at the calendar a few weeks back - odds were in my favor. The day this post goes out on August 14 (Sunday) happens to be my birthday and the 30th one.

So yeah I'm now 30 and I think for one - I didn't die on the way to 30. When you look in your own little bubble of folks you know that wasn't always expected. From memory I remember losing a classmate or friend to:

• Suicide (2x)
• Car Accident
• Sickness

Some classmates I remember are still alive, but sure aren't living the life they intended with prison & rehab taking the time.

Health wise I seem to be doing okay - only 2 surgeries to my name after 30 years. Weight fluctuates depending on how serious I take working out - as its way too easy to fall into a trap of work/sleep/repeat. I did have a blood panel a few days ago and not a single value out of normal range - so pretty happy with that.

I did end up cancelling Hello Fresh though as I got unhappy with the consistency of the service. While it did help have a more consistent diet, I couldn't deal with the up and down quality that was delivered. It didn't make sense to me how every delivery could have a different quality set of coolant materials, paper and organization. It was like they slowly decreased the quality of the box from initial signup to see how much they could make while at the same time increasing the cost.

On the front of spam, bots and scams I feel like the digital and physical world is even more packed with things to confuse you. Nearly every week I get a letter trying to scam me into free solar panels or a new mortgage at the costs of signing over my home to someone else. Daily I get an influx of spam emails or texts that increase in chances of just having a half naked woman.

For someone who grew up during the rise of this - it is easily detectable, but boy its annoying. Even swiping on a dating app has a chance of landing on a bot with the predictable messages ending in asking for a credit card to verify age.

Much like the Internet was much more insecure a decade ago - the phone system was built on a promise to act good, but in theory folks aren't. Maybe in the next 30 years the FCC will enforce some changes to crack down the pure abuse of the spammers that annoy me daily.

When you pivot to looking at the work life - I think I'm a minority. I've been in the same job since I graduated college about 7 years ago. I've heard or seen from many LinkedIn posts that most folks have jumped a few jobs in that time. Which at times after I read a few popular posts from r/antiwork on Reddit seems perfectly normal to swap jobs.

I started as a junior software engineer and now I'm the director of engineering as our company grew from 11 to 64. I continue to be amazed by the level of quality we produce, then when I see competitors and realize how embarrassing their quality is - I get scared about the infrastructure that crucial systems run on.

So all in all - I made it. A cheesy blog post to mark the time and the personal opinions or rants will resume next week.