The current chapter: somewhere warm, most days on a board, and a quiet habit of building on the side.
After two intense founder chapters, I did something I had never really allowed myself: I stopped, on purpose. Not to switch off, but to reset the inputs. The rough shape of the day is simple. Move on water, train the body, read and think, and keep building just enough to stay sharp. Half athlete, half monk, and still very much an engineer.
It started with wind. A month in Sri Lanka that was meant to be a short detour turned into an IKO-certified kitesurfer, day after day on the flat-water lagoons, learning to read gusts the way you learn to read a market.
In between: wild cows on the road, two wild donkeys warming themselves at a beach bonfire, dogs at every surf point, and sunsets that make you forget which day it is.
Then Bali, and a different kind of humbling: learning to surf from scratch. Kitesurfing rewards power and precision; surfing punishes exactly that and rewards patience. You spend a lot of time paddling, falling, and waiting, which turns out to be good practice for most things.
Around the water sits the rest of the routine: strength and mobility most mornings, yoga, long walks, proper sleep, and a lot of reading. The same six-pillar habit that got me up Ojos del Salado, just at sea level and with better fruit.
And the engineer never fully logs off. A small self-hosted AI server hums away in the background, my own little lab for local language models and the agent tooling I want to understand from the inside rather than from a press release. It is the quietest, most portable company I have ever run.
"Reset the inputs, not just switch off."
Under the hood, a gaming PC runs Proxmox with a handful of Linux VMs. Ollama serves local Qwen models, and OpenClaw acts as their set of hands, so they can actually do things rather than only describe them. It is early, and openly a work in progress. The long game is a genuinely independent second brain: private, self-hosted, and free to grow on its own terms rather than a platform's roadmap.
This note stays deliberately open. It is the one chapter still being written, so I will keep adding to it as the trip goes on. Not lifestyle content, just an honest log of what a deliberate detour actually teaches, and where it points next.
