Birthday Inventory 2024

So, it’s my birthday on Monday, which means I’m going to do a birthday inventory, as I do every year at this time. I try to do a comprehensive evaluation of where I am in life, what’s going well and what’s not. This year, Maj and I are travelling to Crete for a week-long trip, so I’m trying to do the inventory a little early to avoid spending my entire trip in the hotel room. (UPDATE: I failed at this. I got part of it done in Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for our flight to Herakleion, and now I’m on our hotel room balcony in Chania at dawn on the day of my birthday, watching the sun come up over the harbour and typing away.)

• Health. So, this one has been rough this year. I got hit by a truck at the end of June while crossing the street in Healdsburg, California. I had many broken ribs, smashed up my face real good, and also snapped one of the bones in my wrist when I hit the ground. I was in the hospital for a week, then groaned on my family’s couches in California until I was allowed to get on a plane to fly home.
  Three months later, I’m… kind of OK. I am off pain medication for my ribs, and my wrist is healing well. I do occupational therapy and acupuncture and, with luck, I’ll be back to lifting weights at the gym with Stavro in a month or so.
  The whole incident has made me consider a lot about my health — how it affects people around me, how resilient I can be, how the body keeps the score. Most of all, it reminds me of what a deep bench of social support I have — a big family that takes good care of me. It makes me feel rich.
  • This all said, my physical health is not where I want it to be. I’ve got a BMI of 31, which is heavier and thicker than I like to be. I have not yet figured out how to find my way out of this corner; I hope a birthday or a new year gives me the impetus to start exercising more and eating more carefully.
  • Mentally, I’m really over-committed with work and school. It makes me testy and irritable. The accident also has me considering a lot of important issues with relation to my body and my age. I’ve been meditating regularly for almost a decade, but I’m also now taking time for therapy sessions. Together, I feel like this is keeping me on the right track.
• Family. My little kids are growing up. Maj and I are transitioning to empty nesters, and I think we’re both comfortable with it. It feels more like a phase transition than the end of anything; we’re parenting in different ways.
  • My daughter Amita is 19 and still figuring out where she’s going to go to university and who she wants to be. Since this summer, she’s sublet her own apartment in our neighbourhood in Montreal — when she wasn’t travelling to Martha’s Vineyard or Brooklyn. I think she’s happy and fulfilled, and I’m proud of the person she’s become. I am also very excited for her university opportunities as a bilingual student and dual citizen. Quebec, rest of Canada, USA, France — these are all open doors for her. I’m probably more aware of the opportunities that close down the longer you wait than she is, which is a cause of tension between us.
  • My son Stavro is 16 next month. He has really blossomed in the last year; his love of music has him playing guitar and drums constantly — at home, school, and separate music lessons and studio. For his birthday last year, I got him a membership at our local gym, and we’ve been going to lift weights together since — up until the car accident. It’s a great way to connect and it’s the major milestone I hope for in my recovery. He’s also become more socially aware and engaged.
  • My wife Maj and I are doing well together. We’ve hit the point where we have stopped begging the teens to come with us to do things we enjoy, like hiking or museums, and we just go and enjoy them ourselves. It’s been a nice change, and a glimpse into the life we’re going to have over the next few decades. Our trip to Greece for our 20th wedding anniversary is a nice celebration of this change.
  • My extended family has been closer this year than expected, because of the accident. I was unable to fly home to Montreal for the first few weeks after getting out of the hospital, so I split my time between my brothers’ houses in the Bay Area. Although I was in a Percocet haze most of the time, I got to be part of their households in a way I haven’t before, spending time with kids and parents. I also got to spend some extra time with my parents in Half Moon Bay. It was a great windfall from the accident.
• Work. Work has been great over this last year. My team at Open Earth Foundation has been working on a new product, CityCatalyst, an Open Source tool for tracking and managing a city’s greenhouse gas emissions and climate change risk. I’m now managing a team of 10 people, from data engineers to full-stack Web devs to AI apps developers. It’s a challenge, but I’m really happy about the impact we’re having. This summer, we landed a project to develop climate plans for 50 cities in Brazil — a big jump up from the 5 pilot cities we had up until that point. We’re on the upslope on the rollercoaster, and it feels like we’re on our way to product-market fit. Our ability to execute on this project will determine whether we can leverage it to hundreds or thousands of other cities, or if we sag into mediocrity and failure. It’s a really crucial time, and I’m nervous and excited about it.
• Life’s Purpose. What’s developed since last year, even more, has been my work on the Fediverse and ActivityPub. I helped create this protocol in the 2010s, and since 2022 I’ve been actively working to maintain it and develop it. The surge of interest in distributed social networks since Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X has made this work seem extremely important.
  • In the last year, I’ve been a big part of the Social Web Incubator Community Group at W3C, which manages the protocol spec. I’ve been maintaining the documents as their editor, as well as helping new reports on AP to get out. I’m pretty excited about the direction of this group; it’s really taken shape during this time.
  • I’ve written the O’Reilly book on ActivityPub, ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web. This is the first book I’ve ever written, and it’s been a huge part of my life over the last year — taking up almost all of my scant free time. It was a challenge to structure the text to help developers learn the protocol, as well as writing clearly about the practicalities of developing for the modern Fediverse. I’m really proud of the result — I even had in-person and on-line book readings when it came out in September.
  • With co-founders Mallory Knodel and Tom Coates, I started the Social Web Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to making a bigger, better Fediverse. We engaged many of the stakeholders in ActivityPub and have started a number of projects to focus on people, policy, protocol, and plumbing.
  • It’s hard to believe that Tom and I also managed to work on a Summer of Protocols project to develop end-to-end encrypted messaging over ActivityPub. We got to participate with other protocol developers in a variety of fields and discussed protocol theory with them. It was a great experience; I hope to be a part of the SoP project from here out.
  • I continue to work on CoSocial, the social network cooperative I helped found in 2023. I lead the trust and safety team and sit on the board. I stepped back from the board presidency this year, and I’m hoping I can dial down my active trust and safety role and turn over the team to others.
• School. All this work on ActivityPub took a hit on the other parts of my life, especially exercise and sleep (see “Health”). Another place that I took a hit was in my graduate school classes at Georgia Tech. For the first semester that I was working on the ActivityPub book, I got credit as part of a “special projects” program, but the next two semesters I had to withdraw to concentrate on writing. This fall, I considered withdrawing more permanently, but I feel like getting my master’s degree in computer science is a personal goal that I don’t want to give up. So I’m back in classes, taking “Database Systems: Concept and Design“. It means reading, lectures, and homework every week, but I feel great that I’m making forward progress on my degree. The question remains, though, whether I’m going to be able to maintain this level of work — main job, ActivityPub, and master’s degree — long enough to finish the program. It seems almost impossible.
• Home. I was away from our house in the Eastern Townships of Quebec for months in the crucial period of early summer this year, and it hurt my gardening and vineyard. My grapes grew wildly out of control, and even when I was back to the house it was hard for me to tend to them with my broken wrist and ribs. Surprisingly, they did well anyway, and we had our first harvest of wine grapes in September. Stavro, Maj and I picked, cleaned and squeezed the grapes, and if all goes well we’ll have a case of white wine in spring to drink with Easter lamb.
  • Our home in the city of Montreal is doing great this year, too. We replaced our dishwasher with a new one, and we’ve been slowly replacing other twenty-year-old wedding gifts that are at their end of life. The fact that we are three instead of four in the house is also making it feel less crowded.
• Travel. I’ve done so much travel this year — I went to California in summer, London last winter for an ActivityPub event, Argentina in spring for a work retreat, Maine at the end of summer, and now Greece with Maj for our anniversary. It’s been a real blessing, and one of the major joys I get from life. I’m trying to remember to appreciate the places I’m going to as I’m there — hard to do when so much of my travel is for work.
• Friends. Ah, the constant refrain. I’ve been bad spending time with friends this year — maybe worse than in previous years. My online connection with much of my friend group is through Facebook, but I’ve been putting more of my life and thoughts into the Fediverse and Mastodon than on other networks. But I have also had good times in person with people in Montreal. I’ve also been re-energizing my friendships in the standards community, which has been a good step forward. As someone who is putting so much time into social networks, you’d think I’d have a better story here.
• Finances. This year has been OK for finances. Maj is doing well at work, I’ve been doing great at OEF, and I’ve had some additional funds come in from work on the book and on the Summer of Code. Unfortunately, working so hard makes it hard to concentrate on savings, and traveling means lots of expensive meals out and hotel rooms. Altogether, I feel better about our finances than I have in a while, but looming college tuitions are going to be a big lift, regardless.
• World. Oh, the world. Last week marked one year of devastating war in Gaza — worse than I even imagined it would be in my last birthday inventory. I have tried to do my part to end or at least minimise the suffering with donations, protests, and online discussions, but I can’t help feeling that the runaway war machine has become unstoppable without a major change in the world structure. I hope that we as a world community find our way to that change. I am holding onto hope that the presidential election in the US reconfigures some part of the machinery so that Gaza’s war winds down and that the hostages still held in Gaza come home.

The sun is almost over the horizon here, and the harbour is starting to wake up. I’m going to finish the inventory at this point, although I’ll probably add or amend over the next few days as ideas pop up. Thanks for reading this far.