It has been a minute. If you look at my blog archives, my last post went up in 2024. Recently, I decided it was time for a massive digital renovation: I completely migrated this blog from WordPress to Hugo using my own theme.
Fortunately, I was able to meet my one key requirement. The migration was a complete one-to-one pairing from WordPress to Hugo. Every post I wrote between 2015 and 2024 made the jump intact. Even the images and URL schema! You can go back, browse the archives, and read a decade’s worth of my written word in my new site. Best of all, every old URL for my WordPress blog will seamlessly redirect to the new home here.
But I didn’t just move the content; I also built a custom Hugo theme from the ground up. (Because of course I did.) I began working on the theme over a year ago for my own site (this very one!). Originally I developed the code inside my own website, but eventually, I moved the theme code into its own repository in June 2025. However, I spent a lot of time in March working on my theme, giving it a solid structure for blogging, and turning it into something highly functional. I confess that AI was significantly used in improving my Hugo theme. It was my first time ever using an AI agent to do something outside of a browser. For various reasons, I chose to work with Claude AI for this project, and it helped me accomplish clearly-defined milestones in my mind since a long time. I wanted to create a theme that was still useful for me, but had the broad appeals of any basic blogging tool or engine out there today. And I believe I achieved that together with AI assistance, my pedantic review patterns, and OCD-like obsession for my design vision. My hope is that eventually, more people than just me could benefit from it.
Of course, a beautifully optimized, custom-themed blog is still just an empty vessel if you don’t write. And to say a lot has happened in my life since 2024 would be an understatement. The last twenty-three months had much to teach me in holding profound grief and incredible joy at the same time.
The Hardest Goodbyes 🔗
The heaviest reality of this past year was a prolonged season of caregiving that culminated in back-to-back losses. Right before Christmas in December 2023, my mother was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, better known as bile duct cancer. Throughout 2024, my sister and I walked alongside her through her cancer journey, doing everything we could to support her. Alongside this, my maternal grandmother’s health was steadily declining due to the onset of dementia.
The emotional and physical toll of managing both of their needs is why I spent so much time away from work throughout 2025, and why my availability became so unpredictable. Ultimately, we faced an unimaginable timeline: my mother passed away in September 2025, and then one month later, in October 2025, my grandmother also passed.
Toward the end of 2025, after they were both gone, I slowly but steadily began the process of climbing out and getting caught up on everything. Throughout all of this, my sister was my absolute rock. Even now, my sister and I are still dealing with the long-term ripple effects and the heavy administrative burden of navigating probate court and managing an estate. Walking through this long, heavy aftermath as partners with my sister means everything to me. I could not navigate this season of life without her.
Finding “Home” Across an Ocean 🔗
On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, my life expanded in the best way possible: I married the love of my life and muse of my soul. In November 2025, my wife and I began the next chapter of life together. She is currently living and working in Germany. Most of the time since then is spent navigating the unique complexities of our union This includes what is usually a simple question for most married couples: where to live.
Because international immigration is a notoriously slow and complex machine, our life is currently a transatlantic hybrid. Right now, while I permanently reside in Georgia, USA, my time is shuffled between the USA, being with my wife in Germany, and traveling for work.
While we are managing the distance for now, our biggest ongoing project is my official relocation to Germany. The exact timeline is fluid, but our hope & prayer is to celebrate the winter holidays in Germany together this year as residents. I look forward to sharing more about this process as it unfolds. (Including any potential trauma of migrating from temperate, warm Georgia to somewhere much colder most of the year.)
The Weight of Context Switching 🔗
Between the flights, the time zones, and my day job at Red Hat supporting Fedora, my brain is regularly forced into a relentless state of context switching.
The “Execution Mode” I use to navigate probate court, resolving medical bills, and executing an estate actually uses the exact same back-office muscles I use to manage budgets and plan events for Fedora. The hardest part lately was not lack of passion, but the sheer volume of threads I am holding. I am constantly shifting gears between my work at Red Hat and Fedora, then to coordinating international immigration, and dealing with the immediate reality of life—like trying to figure out when a technician can fix the broken outdoor air-conditioning unit at my house in the middle of a workday.
If you have noticed me working odd, irregular, or even borderline unhealthy hours lately, that is why. Work is not necessarily an escape from the grief; it is one engine that keeps me moving. So, that is a part of my coping mechanism. But feeling spread this thin has also been a wake-up call that I need to delegate more, reduce the number of hats I am wearing, and focus on delivering deeper, higher-quality work on fewer things.
The Anchor and The Code 🔗
When I am dropping plates and feeling completely drained, someone might wonder why I keep showing up to work. For me, it was always about Fedora. I do not mean this as a humble brag, because I understand it is not this way for everyone. But for me, Fedora was always more than a paycheck; Fedora is the people and community bonds. Getting to build a free and Open Source operating system that aligns with my values, alongside a community I genuinely love, is what anchors me here.
That same drive to build and organize is the same reason why I took on this massive blog migration. Occasionally, I have some deep-seated OCD-like tendencies. Creating structure is another way how I cope with a world that often feels entirely out of my control. During my mother’s and grandmother’s health declines, the volume of incoming paperwork was overwhelming. It was an endless stream of letters, bills, hospital discharge packets, and insurance statements.
To manage it, I accidentally built a massive, semantic digital library. I ended up purchasing one of the best Linux-compatible HP digital scanners on the market to handle the influx of paper. I became incredibly efficient at scanning stacks of paper, writing rules to sort and filter emails, sorting and categorizing PDFs, and developing strict file-naming patterns so everything was easily searchable. It sounds novel, but keeping the physical paper stacks from taking over my own space gave me a tangible sense of peace. So, organizing the things I can control gives me the confidence to leap in and handle the chaotic, uncontrollable moments when they arrive.
Plus, if I am being completely honest, I am exhausted from the WordPress ecosystem altogether. I held significant anticipation for canceling my expensive WordPress hosting service and various other subscriptions and fees tied to running WordPress. However, what I did not expect to find while working on this project was a spark of joy for creation that I did not feel in a long time. My childhood and adolescence were filled with a curious desire to make things that were helpful and useful. This is perhaps what nudged me in the direction of computer science and information technology, because these were domains I could understand. I confess feeling mixed emotions that this rediscovery of joy for creation was mixed with AI assistance. Yet at the same time, this is a project that was on my list since several years, and “pays off” a lot of technical debt. I look forward to maintaining and hosting my website here, and rediscovering my writing voice. (And I can use Vim to write blog posts now too, hooray!)
My creative engineering spark is still very much alive.
Taking it One Day at a Time 🔗
It has been twenty-three months of extreme migrations—digital, geographical, and emotional. The dust is not all settled yet, and I am still finding my steady footing. But now that my new blog engine is finally running, I am excited to share more of the journey, the code, and whatever else comes next.
(One more yak shaved.)