Musings

I’ve been using Subsonic to self-host my personal music library for many years. I even wrote a love / hate blog post about it back in 2024. It’s always been “good enough”.

But a few months ago my friend talked to me about the open-source alternative to Subsonic: Navidrome. It’s a faster, better maintained, free alternative to Subsonic.

Today I found the time to get it up and running. Unsurprisingly it exceeded Subsonic in just about every way!

I have held a diverse set of full-time roles within the tech industry. These roles have ranged from a jack-of-all-trades at a 2-person product company to a lead developer for some of the best marketing sites in the world.

While I think this diverse experience is very valuable, it’s sometimes hard to talk about effectively, especially in the span of a 30-minute interview when the interview questions are geared towards specialists. As such, I wanted think through explicitly what I think makes me stand out from other engineers. I came up with this list:

Differences that I’d argue are good

• I am skilled at noticing.
  I usually approach projects with a high-level prespective. Instead of focusing on only the details in front of me, I tend to analyze the whole situation. I am skilled at noticing things that many engineers miss and often act on these areas of opportunity whether that is for a product, a team, or individuals.

I published my first fully vibe coded application: Toddler Photo Lock. It’s extremely simple: Select a photo, start Guided Access, and hand your phone to your toddler. Your kid can then view the photo without you having to worry about them doing something else on your phone.

Here’s a list of things that I wrote down about being a parent in the first few weeks. Quite a few of them I wish someone had told us before having a baby. I hope it helps!

I’ve been doing some form of “customer support” for more than the last 12 years. I started my programming journey by participating on StackOverflow, answering more than 600 questions and doing around 7,000 other actions like commenting and making edits. My first full-time tech job at GSAP required heavy involvement in the (very helpful) GSAP forums. I’ve been maintaining a well used (>250k weekly) open-source web extension, Just Read, for the last 10 years. Supporting Just Read means responding to customer emails and (now over 430!) GitHub issues.

All of that is to say that while I’ve never worked full-time in customer support, I’ve done my share of it.

Recently I had my least favorite experience as a customer trying to get support from a company. That company was Thrive Market.