The last couple of months have just been a little different.
For a while, my life had a fairly predictable shape.
There was my work at the marbles company, there was Ordina, and there was whatever was left for everything else.
That shape has changed recently.
I've been in the middle of a transition from my work at the marble company toward taking on more responsibilities within our family businesses. I say "transition" because it hasn't really been a clean switch from one thing to another, and honestly, I'm not entirely sure what the final shape of it will look like yet.
There has been a lot of back and forth, overlapping responsibilities, and figuring things out as I go.
And then there's Ordina.
Not every problem is a software problem
One of the things I've been reminded of recently is how little control you sometimes have over the environment you're operating in.
A power outage doesn't care if your servers are healthy. A bad internet connection doesn't care how well your API was designed.
During one of the grid blackouts, we lost our ability to properly communicate with some of our shops and restaurants. Suddenly, something as simple as coordinating an order became much harder.
Poor internet coverage creates its own kind of problems too. Requests fail, messages are delayed, people have to retry things, and sometimes you end up picking up the phone to solve something that normally wouldn't require a phone call at all.
Then came the heat wave.
At its peak, we had to spend more on delivery-driver bonuses just to keep things moving. When you're asking someone to spend hours outside delivering orders in extreme heat, the cost of operating the platform isn't just servers and infrastructure. Some of it is simply making sure the people doing the hardest part of the job are willing to keep going.
None of these things are particularly unusual on their own. But when they start happening while I'm already juggling several other responsibilities, they have a way of changing what my "normal week" looks like.
Learning to be absent
One thing this period has made more obvious to me is that I can't always be around. There are days where I'm busy with something completely unrelated to Ordina, days where I'm away from my laptop, or simply days where I don't have the time or energy to keep up with everything happening.
For a long time, when something happened in Ordina, my instinct was to be involved. Check it, understand it, fix it, follow up on it. It's easy to fall into that when you're so close to a project.
But eventually you have to accept that things need to keep moving even when you're not there.
My partner and the team have been filling in during those gaps. Sometimes I come back and find that something has already been dealt with, which is honestly a good feeling. Not because it means I have less to do, but because it means being absent doesn't automatically mean everything has to stop.
Being responsible for something doesn't necessarily mean being present for every part of it.
I'm still learning that — that you can step away for a while and things still move forward. And with everything else going on lately, I'm probably getting a lot more practice at it than I expected.
I'm very grateful for that.
Life doesn't wait for a convenient schedule
And, of course, not everything happening recently has been work.
My brother got married.
Which meant family, preparations, gatherings, and a lot of social commitments that obviously take priority over whatever happened to be sitting on my task list.
Days where I didn't write code. Days where I didn't touch Ordina. Days where I didn't even think much about work.
And I think that's okay.
I've spent a lot of the last few years being very deliberate about squeezing things into whatever time was available. University. Work. Graduation. Ordina. And somewhere along the way, I got very used to measuring my time by what I managed to get done.
The last month hasn't really allowed me to do that in the same way.
Getting it out of my head
I think another reason I've wanted to write this post is simply to get some of this out of my head. Not everything needs to become a lesson, a project update, or a carefully structured technical article.
My portfolio is primarily where I document the engineering work I'm doing — the things I'm building, the technical problems I'm running into, and the things I'm learning along the way. But I don't think it has to be limited to that.
Some of the things I've been dealing with recently are more business-related. Some are just experiences that I found interesting and wanted to put into words. And maybe that's useful too.
Writing has always been one of the ways I make sense of things. Sometimes I don't know what I actually think about something until I try to write it down.
So this isn't really a post with a conclusion. It's mostly me getting a few things out of my head, putting them somewhere I can come back to later.
Between things
I think that's probably the best description of where I am right now.
Between one job and whatever comes next.
Between being deeply involved in Ordina and learning that I don't have to be involved in everything.
Between technical work and responsibilities that have very little to do with software.
Between having a plan and figuring things out as they happen.
I don't have a particularly profound lesson from all of this. I'm still figuring it out.
The transition from the marbles company isn't completely finalized. The family-business responsibilities are still taking shape. Ordina keeps moving, whether I'm available or not, and life keeps throwing in things that weren't on the roadmap.
Maybe that's just what this period is. A period of being between things.
Ordina hasn't stopped moving either. There's still that v1.6 post sitting in my drafts, which feels slightly ironic now that we're planning to ship v1.8 next week. I spent the last month avoiding writing it.
Maybe I'll finish it. Maybe I'll write something else first.