Still sick: Yes
Children currently fighting: Almost certainly
Current topic of dispute: Unknown, but likely critical
It looks like the natural rhythm for this blog is going to be a simple one: recap yesterday, then outline the plan for what comes next. The recap keeps me honest. If the recap is empty, it means I spent the day perfecting the ancient and highly respected art of doing absolutely nothing.
I’m still receiving an incredible number of kind messages from friends and family across LinkedIn, Facebook, email, and text. It has honestly been pretty overwhelming in the best possible way. A few people have said they are enjoying the blog, which is both flattering and mildly alarming, so I suppose I’ll keep writing.
It has also been fun that the blog has accidentally turned into a jumping off point for some of my art projects. If you haven’t yet, click on Erratic Sand Art or Carved Pumpkins on the top bar. They are considerably less stressful than enterprise data pipelines, and involve significantly less intramural peacekeeping.
Yesterday
Friday afternoon I did something that I haven’t had the time or weather for in quite a while. I took the kids’ scooters to the school so that they could scooter home.
It sounds small, but it was one of those moments where I realized that suddenly I have the time and space to do things like that. It felt really nice.
The ride home was pleasant and peaceful, which in hindsight probably means the children were conserving energy for the fighting that would resume the moment we arrived back at the house.
I also handled some administrative tasks, including booking an appointment for Monday morning with the career coach assigned to me. I don’t know much about this person yet, so that should be interesting.
One of the other administrative tasks was meeting with my financial advisor to move my Cenovus investment accounts to individual accounts. My advisor, Iryna Alieksieieva, is fantastic. I genuinely enjoy our meetings, which is not something I expected to say about conversations involving large spreadsheets and long term projections.
I have a fairly aggressive risk appetite when it comes to investing, so when she shows me their “Rocket” portfolios I tend to get a little excited.
Also, meetings with a financial advisor have the added advantage of being held in locations where my children are not currently fighting with each other.
In fairness, everyone’s returns have been good the last couple years, but she has been consistently thoughtful and easy to work with. Strong recommendation.
Later in the afternoon I cooked a massive batch of stir fry.
When I say massive, I mean the sort of quantity that suggests we could realistically eat stir fry for lunch and dinner for the next week.
The reason for this heroic effort is simple: stir fry is one of the few meals that consistently gets cheers from my kids.
Update while writing this: my son has now informed me that he does not like stir fry.
The children are also currently fighting over something that appears to involve oxygen rights in the living room.
The stir fry situation may need to be reassessed.
What I Learned
Historically my biggest blocks of free time have been on weekends. My plan is to spend a lot of that time with the kids, primarily in the role of grand referee and intramural peacekeeper.
For those without children, here is a helpful parenting insight.
Kids almost never fight.
And when they do, it is usually about extremely important matters such as invisible territorial lines on couches, who touched whose elbow first, or who currently owns the air in a particular room.
Also, I may have completely lost my mind.
As a side note, I am still sick. I had a cold the morning I got the layoff call, and somehow it has gotten worse since then. Ideally it clears up soon, because it is definitely stealing some momentum from my plans.
Today’s Plan
If I find a bit of quiet time this weekend, I want to start digging into materials on RAG systems and agentic AI.
I have a free Snowflake trial available, I’m already in Databricks free edition, and I’ve set up Claude Code, which means I can do some fully irresponsible “vibe coding.”
Some of you have seen the Dota 2 project I’ve been tinkering with over the past couple weekends. When I said in my last post that I planned to overengineer the absolute crap out of it, I meant it.
The plan is to attach RAG and agentic AI to the project whether it makes sense or not.
At this stage it is less about building the perfect system and more about learning new tools and stretching into new areas. Even if it never leads directly to a job, learning interesting things seems like a perfectly good priority right now.
Also, experimenting with AI models has the added benefit that they almost never fight with each other over invisible couch boundaries.
Several people have advised me to take my time and not accept the first opportunity that comes along. This will be difficult for me because saying no to people is not one of my stronger skills.
Right now there are a few companies and individuals “kicking the tires,” which is a new experience for me. Starting Monday I think I’m going to sit down and define what I actually want in my next role.
What does the dream job look like?
What kind of problems do I want to solve?
What kind of environment do I want to work in?
I will probably post that here once I’ve thought it through.
It will absolutely not be presented in a pie chart.
Pie charts are visual junk food. Humans are terrible at interpreting them. Unless you are showing the distribution of pizza slices eaten by different people, you should probably use a bar chart instead.
Monday
Monday morning begins with my coaching session with the career coach assigned to me.
No slight intended toward her, since I barely know anything about her yet, but even during the layoff conversation my instinct was to reach out to my friend Janelle Harder, who is an excellent executive coach.
Yes, this is another shameless plug for a friend.
Also, meeting with professional adults in quiet rooms is a pleasant change of pace from mediating disputes between two extremely determined small humans.
After that I suspect I will have a couple hours of free time, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the coach assigns homework. Depending on how that goes, I will either work on that, spend some time reflecting, or do some writing.
Around noon I have an appointment with my psychologist, Jacqueline Kanipayor of Intrinsic Therapy. I have been working with her for a couple years now and she has been incredibly helpful in helping me better understand myself, connect with who I actually am, and advocate for what I need.
Strongly recommended. Five stars.
Also, if you have benefits that cover psychological services, you should absolutely use them. There is no shame in talking to someone.
And again, therapy offices are famously free of children fighting over couch territories, which is a notable environmental advantage.
After That
After that I suppose I will head back home.
Interestingly, I originally wrote “head back to the office,” which is apparently going to take some getting used to.
Over the years my downtown home base has been CTT, ASX, BOW, RMP, BOW again, BPC, BOW again, BPC again.
At this point I am basically a corporate nomad.
The plan will be to head home and work on one of my three objectives until it is time to pick up the kids and shuttle them to dance or soccer.
During that time I will also likely referee several disputes, because the children have an extraordinary ability to begin fighting within approximately nine seconds of entering the same room together.
After that I will bring them home, feed them what remains of the stir fry experiment, read to them, and attempt to guide the household toward bedtime while intervening in several additional diplomatic incidents.
Then I will retreat to my basement computer bunker for a little game time, which is one of the few environments where the only fighting happening is intentional and part of the game.
The One Constant
One consistent ritual I have had for several years now is game night with my friends.
This is absolutely and unquestionably critical for my mental health.
After a full day of career planning, technology experiments, and intramural peacekeeping between two small but highly motivated combatants, it is nice to unwind.
Smashing heroes into walls of creeps in Dota 2 Ability Draft with a few of my best
friends has meant the world to me for years and will continue to do so.
Some things, thankfully, do not need to change.
Tomorrow
Tomorrow should be interesting.
I meet my career coach for the first time, try to define what my dream job actually looks like, and possibly attach agentic AI to a Dota 2 project that absolutely does not need agentic AI.
At some point I will also return home and discover what the children are fighting about tomorrow.
Historically the causes have ranged from furniture territory disputes to the improper touching of elbows, so the possibilities are wide open.
We will see how it goes.
Brett Wiens 