Evan Prodromou on Nostr: Today, October 14, is my birthday. I’m far from home, in Brussels, with my wife on ...

Today, October 14, is my birthday. I’m far from home, in Brussels, with my wife on a trip to celebrate our anniversary and my birthday. We had a long, exhausting flight from Montreal, got in yesterday evening, and dragged ourselves out for dinner and got to sleep at a reasonable hour. This morning, coffee and ontbijtbrood in the sunshine overlooking the city from our borrowed apartment.

Each birthday for the last few years I’ve done an inventory of my life from various points of view. It’s been a really valuable exercise for me, and I’m going to continue today. I don’t like to compare, but there are earlier ones on my blog.

Family. Life in our four-person family has been changing this year. My daughter Amita turned 18, and with her schoolwork, social life, and working at a cafe, she’s been away from family events. We’re no longer a certain group of four for every excursion; she does a good job making time for us, but for longer trips it’s been likely to be just 2 or 3 lately. I’m glad she’s growing up, and I’m proud of the woman she’s become, but our social circle during COVID-19 was largely circumscribed by the four people in our household, so it feels like a change.
I still get a lot of joy from the things we do together, though. We go to events, have special occasions at home, and take day trips from Montreal to the country or to nearby cities. It is the richest part of my life.
My extended family has been farther away and closer this year. My brothers and their families and our parents, all of whom are in the San Francisco Bay Area, had video conference calls every couple of weeks during COVID-19. We’ve been doing it less and less since they’ve been able to visit in person more often. But my cousins, uncles and aunts have been closer this year. My household took half a week on the Jersey shore with extended family in August, and we had a family wedding in September. It feels like we see extended family more than my California family.
My relationship with my wife has also done well. We’re both very busy with work, but we find time to be together as a couple and to go out alone or with others. Our shared projects — kids, home — take up a lot of our thoughts and time together, but we also get to talk about the world and our lives. We’ve started to discuss what our life will be like as empty-nesters, although that’s still 5 or more years away. I feel luck to have such a good companion to be with.
Health. This is a hard part of my life right now. I’ve been slowly gaining weight since the pandemic started, although I exercise daily and try to eat reasonably. A lot of the techniques for staying in good shape that I used to use in my 20s, 30s, and 40s no longer seem as effective, and I’m going to have to make some deeper changes to my diet and exercise habit. I’m not as comfortable in my body as I’d like to be. I remain fortunate in not having any chronic issues, and I’m trying to make changes before those become inevitable.
Mentally, I’ve been overextended. I do a full day’s work every day, then move into school or one of my other jobs in the evening, or sometimes in the morning before my paid work starts. I consequently haven’t had time for practices that help keep me happy; my daily meditation has dropped to 1-2 times per week.
This year I hit my 20,000th day on the planet — an unusual anniversary to celebrate, but one that has made me think about the arc of my life. I feel like I’m at a special part of my lifetime, and I’m trying to experience it fully.
Work. My work for the last year has been an excess of riches. Last year I started working in my dream job — as director of technology for the Open Earth Foundation, a non-profit that makes Open Source software to fight climate change. It combines my experience and skills with a topic I care about deeply. I’ve managed to hire a great technical team. Best of all, our organisation has changed strategy from covering a lot of different projects on different topics in an experimental mode to a single project in production mode. This is where I’ve done my best work in the past, and I’m happy to see our team buckling down to make software that really matters for people. Our product, CityCatalyst, helps cities track and report GHG emissions, and our initial users and wider community are effusive about the need we’re meeting. That feels great.
Which makes the distraction of the last year all the harder to deal with. In October of 2022, with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, interest in federated social networks has skyrocketed. The protocol I worked on at the W3C, ActivityPub, has had exponential growth in adoption. I had been holding off on joining the network, partly to pressure myself to upgrade my own sites to support it, but with the surge of popularity I felt I needed to jump back in. Most overwhelmingly, Meta, the social media giant, has announced that their Threads product will support the protocol in the coming months.
So, I’ve been posting on my own Mastodon server for the last year, and I’ve been hugely involved in the growth of the “fediverse”. This has taken on three big aspects. First, I cofounded a social media cooperative for Canadians called CoSocial. It’s my first time being part of a coop, and it’s definitely new territory, but it’s also really rewarding. I love the people I work with and the dedication they have to user-owned social networking.
Second, I’ve been much more active in the W3C’s SocialCG community group, which maintains the ActivityPub spec and the Activity Streams 2.0 documents. As the main named author on the documents who’s still involved, I do regular meetings, participate in online conversations, and manage errata and corrections to the docs. I also do a weekly issue triage to handle questions people have and document best practices.
Thirdly, and really exceptionally, I’ve been working on a book about ActivityPub for O’Reilly Media since September. It’s the first time I’ve written a technical book, and it’s a lot of work. Because it’s technical, I find myself switching back and forth between writing English text and writing sample code in Python or JavaScript. It’s remarkably rewarding, but also very high stress. I’ve got a tight deadline, since we want to meet the moment of the Threads launch.
School. I started a Master’s degree in Computer Science at Georgia Tech in January of this year. So far, it’s been hugely rewarding. I had thought, after 30 years in the industry, that there wasn’t much more for me to learn about computer science, and that this degree would be more of a rubber stamp on my existing knowledge. But my two classes so far, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Architecture and Design have been extremely useful. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m fascinated with the practice.
HCI was probably the most transformational. It takes a user-centered design methodology and applies it to software, and really gives a different look at the craft than I was used to from a software-development POV. I did two big projects for the semester — one on travel planning, and another on personal relationships in Mastodon — and felt like I did some of the most interesting work in my career.
The hard part has been the time commitment. I put in 10-20 hours of work per week on my single class per semester, between reading, writing, watching lectures, and coding. I’ve found that I can combine the work with my existing schedule — I listen to text-to-speech versions of published papers while I exercise, and watch lectures while I cook or do dishes — but it’s still a big chunk of time. I don’t have as much time for TV, reading, or other media.
This semester, I realised I couldn’t do the extra time of writing a book and also taking classes, so I managed to get a professor to sponsor me for a “special project” in the book project. I’m not sure how this is going to turn out — it’s definitely not as structured as my time in classes, and I feel much more distant from the Georgia Tech community than I did while actively taking classes. Hopefully I can get back to studying in the next semester.
Home. My time at home remains some of the most rewarding for me. I’ve become obsessed with gardening with native plants over the last few years, with work on our yard in the Eastern Townships taking up a huge part of my mental space. That work has really paid off this year — clearing out invasive species and planting native bushes, trees and perennials is starting to (literally) bear fruit. Our yard now has dozens of different interesting plants that take up my attention and bring me joy. My grapevines are also achieving a level of maturity that makes it likely that I can make wine from them in a couple of years. Finally, I’ve planted some native plants in boxes and in the ground in our city house in Montreal — which feels like I’ve brought that country experience home.
I work at home, and some days I don’t leave the house until late in the afternoon for a walk or run. This makes me exceptional in our household — everyone else leaves for school or work early in the morning. I feel a bit like I’m still in pandemic lockdown while the rest of the world has opened up. I’ve shopped around a bit for a coworking coop in Montreal, just for the change of pace, but it hasn’t been a high enough priority for me to actually commit. I also feel like my meeting-heavy schedule doesn’t work well with the style of coworking with a lot of people in a big shared space.
Travel. It’s been a busy year for travel. I’ve done more work travel this year than any previous years — to Vancouver for Open Source Summit and to New York for climate week. My work for the W3C took me to Seville, Spain, which was overwhelmingly beautiful. I also had an absolutely action-packed week in New York at July 4th with my son, Stavro, which we both really loved, and a family trip to Toronto to see my cousin-in-law Nick play with his band Slowdive. I’ve liked the regional travel, which we either do by train or in our electric car, but the international and transcontinental travel has been by air. I keep telling myself that it’s exceptional, but I think over the next year I’m going to get more serious about reducing that carbon footprint, even if it means missing out on important opportunities.
Friends. A perpetual source of concern for me, personal friendships have been hard to keep up this year. Partly it’s been the huge demands on my time by graduate school and my work in the federated social web. I have been lucky to meet and spend time with great people, notably my fellow members of CoSocial, who I really like and admire, and the people involved in the SocialCG, some of whom have been allies going back decades. But I’d like to put time into other offline connections.
My online friendships have suffered somewhat from my move to the social web. I have left Twitter entirely, and I haven’t been as active on Facebook or Instagram. My time on the social web is less about me as a person, and more about me as a figure in the movement. That said, I’ve continued to use my social presence to post polls about ideas and practices that interest me.
World. As I write, a war rages between Israel and Gaza, with an invasion of Gaza City imminent. With family roots in the region, it’s hard to see this level of human misery, and it makes me wonder at my own good fortune. War in Ukraine continues, and the government in the US seems completely unfit to meet the challenge of rising authoritarianism and instability around the globe. My hope is that multilateral cooperation can step forward and replace the unilateral world we’ve known since the early 90s.
Most troubling over this year has been the increasingly visible effects of climate change. My work brings me in touch with climate change data on a daily basis, but just looking out the front window shows exceptional changes. From ice storms to heat waves to torrential rains, we’ve had strange weather almost non-stop. The hard part is realising that these conditions will continue to get worse, even if the world community manages to meet its GHG-reduction goals. It does make me feel, however, that I’m putting my time and skills to their best possible use at the work I do now.

Wow. That’s a lot. Just looking over this list makes me realise how over-charged my life is right now. I’ve thought a lot of this time as a high point in work and life, and I can see on the page that it’s true. I hope I’m able to give as much energy as is demanded by all these different strands of work to bring them to successful fruition.

Thanks for reading this far. I’m going to go out now and enjoy this sunny cool day in Belgium, see the sights, and have a cold weird Belgian beer for lunch. Tonight, we’re having supper in the Atomium restaurant — a great way to celebrate.

https://evanp.me/2023/10/14/birthday-inventory-2023/