We settled into Switzerland after our 3+ month trip to Asia — see the previous Recently post for more details. While it was (depressingly?) easy to get back into routines and work, the cold and fog of Luzern zapped our adventurous spirit, yet alone the desire to go outside. However, I did get one ski-touring trip in, and visited friends in the region.

I just finished Wool, a sci-fi book that is the basis of the Apple TV series Silo. It was an enjoyable read! I won't spoil anything here, but let's just say it made the thought of the US (and Western world) potentially succumbing to violence even more dystopian. The book, amongst other societal parallels, makes you value peace and its fragility. A /books page is in the works for this website.

Speaking of the US, our yearly company meeting is happening later this month in DC. It might be the last, at least in DC, which is bittersweet. For the past few years, I've left this week of in-person collaboration (I work fully remotely) energized and inspired, no matter how negative the state of the world feels. However, I'm looking forward to entirely regional holidays this year after this trip after this trip and our last big one.

Returning to work has been good. In January, we launched the first product that I (mostly) coded — [EO Predictor](https://www.developmentseed.org/eo-predictor). You can read more about it [here](/eo-predictor). It was fun to "launch" something that I was confident in the purpose of, but not in the code (I'm still a beginner).

Just like everyone else in the web development sector, I've been using more LLM "agents". I've hopped between Claude, OpenAI (Codex), OpenCode, and Github Copilot, mostly just to try to stay up-to-speed on developments in this space. Codex in OpenCode was great, but after learning that the President of OpenAI is one of the largest single donors to the Trump campaign, I've unsubscribed.

With my goals still being to learn to code better, I'm balancing between using these agents as teachers and let's build out all of the ideas that I finally can. Doing the latter (much closer to vibe coding) always makes me feel tense/regretful when arguing with the LLMs and not really understanding the codebase. It's been much more enjoyable to think through a problem, suggest architecture, have it scaffold, and check the outputs (or write my own code) every step of the way.

German took a big hit while I was out. I'll start classes again twice per week, and plan on enrolling in an intensive (or semi-intensive) course over the summer. My best language learning success, Chinese, was because I could study it every day and focus entirely on it. With work and life, that's more difficult, but worth reproducing in some limited form.