Weekly review - i
This past weekend was my birthday. My partner and I celebrated by camping at Cape Lookout on the Oregon coast. We had dinner at Willy’s in Oceanside. Run by a husband and wife team they serve Japanese comfort food in a beach town nestled on a cliffside.
The Oregon coast is a special place for me. It feels otherworldly. It is one of my most unexpected pleasures I discovered since moving to the state. Wide, often empty beaches, shrouds of mists crawling over groves of pine. The chance at glimpses of sea lions or even whales.
My favorite moment was our sunset campfire on the beach. When the sun finally fell beneath the horizon the distant dots of other camp fires were the only indication you weren’t utterly alone in the emptiness.
On finding purpose in customer support
I wrote this post as my submission to the August edition of the IndieWeb Carnival, which each month invites folks to write something on their blog based on a topic proposed by a rotating host. August’s carnival topic is “purpose” and the host is Chris Shaw. I am also double dipping and counting this as my first post of Blaugust 2026 - a community celebration of blogging.
For the last 15 years or so my job1 has been (more or less) to think about and build the mechanisms to deliver customer support for companies who (more or less) make software on the internet that (more or less) helps other businesses do something more efficiently. In that time I’ve said a lot of things about what the purpose of that labor is. Support as the face of your product. Support as your connection to your customer’s needs. Support as a viable, valuable and under-appreciated career. My understanding of the purpose of the work has shifted and grown alongside me.
The latest evolution of this opinion has less to do with changes in my own view of the work and more to do with changes in the macroeconomic landscape. While the death of support has been confidently decried many times in the past, I believe a time of transformation is really at hand - even if there is life still in the profession. I’m certainly not the first to say that AI - and more precisely LLMs - are dramatically changing both the support customers receive and the daily lives of the people giving it. At no time in the past has it been so easy for a company to give somewhat acceptable answers at such low costs and, debatably, quality.
Summer slows and trips do to
Earlier this month my partner and I were in the thick of preparing for our annual summer adventure. We were fixed on a road trip in our ancient Japanese van (Vancent) that’d take us from Portland, OR out to Whitefish, Montana. We planned to start with three days of bikepacking through the outer edges of Glacier National Park. Afterward, we’d booked camp sites in the park we’d pass the days hiking the best trails of Glacier before heading back home. I’ve never been to Glacier National Park or even Montana and this felt like a perfect introduction.
But then it started raining. And we started worrying. Both of us have adventured in the rain before. In fact, I don’t think I actually saw Mt. Blanc during our entire trip around it, covered in clouds and falling rain as it was. But then it got worse. Bad enough to close sections of the park and put my glacial dreams to pasture. Left with only a few days before our intended start we pivoted into planning mode. Our goal? Drive somewhere that would be warm, dry and have plenty to do outside.