“Way too often we bring the best of ourselves to work and the leftovers home.” – Esther Perel

This has been a slap in my face when I realized it’s true. I’ve been putting all my prime energy at work — the fun, energetic, solve-all-your-problems attitude version of myself. I go home tired, irritated, no energy left for my family. My thought is it was justified since my main role was providing, and I’m doing it fairly well. But turns out it doesn’t align with my values.

Strong values makes easy decisions

What I do now is have “slow mornings”. I do not go to work until my kids wake up, have breakfast, and I spent time with them (with as little gadget use as possible). I also make sure I’m around when it’s bed time, regardless of deadlines and deliverables. Those can wait until my kids are asleep.

One of my core value that I identified is family comes before work. I couldn’t count how many times I ditched work to spend fun times with my kids now. Ditching work is easy if the question is should I have fun with my kids or be guilt-ridden procrastinating while I try to work? Of course my default answer is have fun with my kids. My prime energy is for my family.

What’s my work structure looks like now?

The only time I’m guilt-free working is when they are sleeping. However, working only when they are sleeping isn’t sustainable. I still need to work. After all, providing is still my primary role.

My kids wake up at 6-7am, then I stick around to spend time with them up to 10am. I officially start my work day by then. I try to go home for lunch, late afternoon walk, and dinner, then go back to my office until bed time at 9pm. This is a hard stop of my work hours. It’s very important for me to be there at bed time. Usually, if I still need to deliver something within the day, I’d just set an alarm at 11pm to wake up and continue working.

I preferably not want to work beyond 3am because I wouldn’t have good energy when my kids wake up. If I’m still not done by that time, I’d reset expectations.

Where do I compromise?

I want to be good with family and work. My work enables us live a good life. So where do I compromise? Sleep. Year-over-year I’ve been needing less sleep. I’m at 6 hours/night now. This is why I have more coffee in my blood than water. 😛

There’s a 2 hour gap between my average time in bed and average time asleep because my kids usually takes sometime to sleep. We ask about their day, pray, and say thanks for everything we’re grateful for (usually for new toys). It’s extra fun when they start talking.

Why am I doing this?

Kids belong to themselves. The process of them leaving you starts when they leave your body. – Marriage Story

Well, in my case it started when they left my wife’s body. I can imagine it’s a long steady process of them leaving slowly until they are capable on their own.

“They grow up fast, spend time with them while you can.” is a recurring theme when I read about parenting stuff. This is why I try to spend as much time with them as I can. Soon enough they wouldn’t even want to hang out with me anymore (and that’s okay).

I’ve accepted that the next 10-20 years of my life will be mostly about supporting them. Things I selfishly want to do, I can do later on if I’m still given the time. All the time spent with them is well worth it on it’s own anyway.

Ultimately, it’s a meaningful experience to witness a human being that was part of myself grow to be their own self. And I just want to witness as much as I can.

I recently joined Human Made as a Cloud Engineer. The application process spans a few weeks and I was super anxious with the whole thing. I was actually bracing myself for rejection. But when offer has finally been made, I was jacked to the tits!

This is a big win and exciting for me for multitude of reasons:

Culture

Start with trust, and be trustworthy

The whole company values aligns with mine and makes a lot of sense. I strive in a trusting environment. I naturally give my best to people who supports me. The company have a big focus on the well-being of its people (also called Humans).

HR policies reflects company values. On my first day: 1) they provided more than adequate equipment 2) health care coverage to me and all my dependents 3) pro-rated paid time-off that I’m required to use, and other things that just shows how much they care.

Working with top-notch talent

I couldn’t believe it when I realized that our Director of Product (my boss) was the one who created WP-API.

I distinctly remember getting really excited when it first launched because I was working on a WP project that was AJAX/jQuery-heavy. The code base started to felt hacky the more features were implemented. When I tried WP-API (even though it was still in beta) together with AngularJS, development started to become enjoyable and easier to maintain. It made my life and that project’s code so much nicer!

I feel small around other Humans because of sheer amount of experience everybody have, which is a good thing. Feeling small only expands my opportunity of growth. Observing how other people do things makes me realize gaps in my knowledge that I need to fill-in. I also have access and learn from them. This position will only accelerate my growth.

New career path

I’m coming from full-stack web development. I’ve been doing this for more than a decade. However, I’ve always been drawn to servers, networking, and automation ever since I tried sharing our dial-up connection, for two computers, using a crossover LAN cable when I was a kid.

Applying required me to do a trial. The trial involves troubleshooting a broken stack. They provide all the documentation and access to AWS console. I was told that I don’t have to fix it but I need to write down my troubleshooting steps. I had so much fun doing the trial. It took me 4 hours of intense focus and frustration, but the satisfaction of finally making it work was just priceless.

I still have a lot of gaps in DevOps skills. I’m planning my next few years focusing and honing those to give more value back to the company. And also have fun learning along the way.

Validation of my current skillset

“There’s a deep satisfaction when you know how valuable you are, and the world agrees.” – Derek Sivers

I try not to seek validation. But it just feels good to know that my skills is on par with first-world talent.

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Despite emphasis on my skills, I still largely credit luck (being blessed) on how I landed in Human Made. My skills only maximized my chance, but overall I just got incredibly lucky (blessed).

I maintain and add/fix features to an eight-year-old codebase (web app). I like maintaining and keeping things running. My main challenge here is every time a new feature has to be implemented/fixed, I have a long list to do before I get to the actual work. Regardless on how simple it is.

To get started I need to:

1. Open Visual Studio project
2. Make sure I’m working on the latest version
3. Start RavenDB (local database server)
4. Start RabbitMQ (local message-broker)
5. Start IIS (local web server)
6. Open JIRA ticket for implementation details
7. Finally, start working on the feature

This is only to get started. It doesn’t cover doing the actual work, testing, and deployment. There’s too much friction.

What I tried but didn’t fully resolved my issue

My initial solution was to use a dedicated laptop for web app-related work. This worked for a while but I didn’t like maintaining two laptops. If I forgot to charge the laptop, it shuts off leaving me to do those same thing all over again.

The second thing I tried was to run VM in Azure for development work. It has an image with Visual Studio pre-installed. I was able to ship a few features using this workflow. The lag was noticeable but every time I logged in, I resume where I left off. My issue is the cheapest VM costs around $20 a month (2 vCPU, 2gb ram, non-ssd storage). Build time is also considerably longer because of the specs, which becomes critical for hot fixes.

What I found to be working for me

I discovered cheap tiny PCs in FB Marketplace. Cost is only P10k for a fairly recent Intel i5 9th gen processor (6 cores). It idles at 10 watts (a full pc idles at 100w). I added 2x 16gb DDR4 ram and 1TB SSD. Total cost is only around 20k.

I’m using it as an always-on headless machine that I access through Jump Desktop. Jump Desktop is a remote desktop app that has its own STUN servers. This means I can access the machine anywhere as long as there’s internet.

This solved my main pain point when working on this particular codebase. I’m also back on bringing only a single laptop with me if I go out.

My new process now:

1. Open Jump Desktop
2. Connect to the development machine
3. Since everything is in place already, I only need to start working

This is me accessing the machine remotely from my Mom’s home (the machine is in my office). As soon as I connect, I resume where I left off. Visual Studio is open, local servers are running, build time is fast, and it doesn’t use too much electricity when idle.

Last week, we had a 4-hour power outage. Since all our networking equipment is plugged in a UPS, I assumed internet will be up for at least an hour. When I check the logs though, it was only around 15 minutes. This meant the UPS battery needs replacement.

Now, I have an obsession (lol) with uptime. When I searched for a replacement, I was also thinking if it’s possible to make UPS run time longer. It turns out that it’s possible by replacing it with a larger capacity battery. But there are safety precautions.

Safety precautions

Don’t use maximum load of the UPS

Replacing the battery with a larger capacity means that the UPS will run longer than it’s designed. There’s a risk of the inverter overheating if it’s running at high load for long periods.

To prevent this, make sure that connected devices is not using more than 80{5fcd3cbc9de14e1587c4b983f08e4837fa7ae8985dc66bae235a2c5aa0d68677} of rated watts. My UPS is 300w. The devices connected are modem, router, PoE switch, and a low-power server for Omada Controller and PiHole. It totals only to 40-50 watts which is only 16{5fcd3cbc9de14e1587c4b983f08e4837fa7ae8985dc66bae235a2c5aa0d68677} of my UPS rated watts.

I did a 2-hour test running on battery. There was no notable heating with the inverter.

Use the same wire gauge to extend connectors

Larger capacity battery also means it’s bigger. It would have to be outside the UPS casing. Using thin wires will introduce a risk of it heating up and might cause fire.

I didn’t understand how to compute what’s appropriate for this, I just used the same wire gauge as the connector inside the UPS (looked like 12 AWG).

Other than that, things should be fine.

The battery included with it was 12v 4.5Ah. I replaced it with 12v 25Ah (5x more than the original battery). This should provide 4-5 hour run time in case of power loss. I then cut a hole in the side of UPS casing to pass through the wire to the battery.

It’s already installed but we haven’t had a power outage yet to actually see how it will actually perform.

Growing up, I heard that investing in a real estate property and renting it out is a good investment. I didn’t understand why. Especially where the required capital is intimidatingly high, I couldn’t even imagine how to earn that much.

We’ve been incredibly blessed though. We got in a position where we can afford it. I also had a goal to purchase each of my kids a property while I still can. The idea is whatever happens to me, at the very least they’ll have a place of their own. But since they are still very young, we thought of trying to rent it out for the mean time.

We were able to purchase and rent-out our first property last year. That’s when it hit me why it was a good investment.

Investment options

When our savings started to grow, I started looking on where to put it. I knew that keeping it in a savings account will make its value slowly eaten by inflation (which is 2.64% last year). So I had this urgency to make it productive. These are the investment options I considered:

Pag-ibig MP2 is most often recommended because it has a high interest rate and relatively safe. It’s interest rate last year was 5.62% and it has a maturity of 5 years.

For our rental property, we were able to rent it out at 1% of the total cost. That’s an annual gross of 12%. Setting aside 2% for tax and maintenance. It earns 10% yearly. Higher than other safe investment options I considered. At the same time, the property itself appreciates in value overtime (I have no idea how to compute real estate appreciation though).

To be concrete, let’s say the property costs 1,000,000. And we’re able to rent it out for 10,000/month, that’s 120,000/year. Then set aside 20,000 for tax and maintenance, that will result to 100,000 net income yearly.

This made sense to me.