It’s January 21^st, 2026 as I write this. I’m the happiest I’ve been in years, at least since 2021. I’m the most hopeful I’ve been in years.

On January 20^th, 2025, I spent two days uncontrollably crying.

In June 2025, I was $20k in debt and expecting to have to find a salaried job.

So yeah. It’s been a year.

Living in uncertain times

I have a lot of colleagues whom I deeply respect and love, who sit on different parts of the political spectrum. I think we would all agree that political polarization is up, political violence is up, AI is going to be horrifically disruptive, and overall, we live in very uncertain times. We may disagree about why and for whom, but I think we agree about the generalities. 2025 was a mess and 2026 is going to be a bigger one.

So, on January 20^th I cried for 2 days straight. I sulked online. I asked for prayers even from folks who didn’t understand why I was distraught. Thank you to everyone who prayed for me and my family. Things are better now, but I’m still gladly accepting prayers from all denominations and good vibes form my atheist friends 😁.

Ultimately, I felt out of control in terms of maintaining the safety and wellbeing of my family. We would probably be fine, more than fine, but there wasn’t much I could do if I was wrong. It felt like I had just bought a fistful of reverse-lottery tickets with a 1 in a million chance of ruining our lives. Lovely.

Then my old pastor saw my Facebook sulk-posting. And he asked if there was anything he and his wife could do for us. I told him that his flock needed him more than I did right now, but there was one thing…

My husband and I were coming up on our 10-year anniversary and a lot had changed in our lives. Enough that I don’t know if I’d still be married today if it weren’t for my faith. I couldn’t really control the outside world, but maybe I could host a small private protest of sorts. So, in August we renewed our vows on our 10-year anniversary, with a lot of help from friends and family.

To hell with the world, life is worth living.

Starting a podcast

In December of 2024, I decided I wanted to start a podcast. My previous podcast SQLDataPartners was winding down and I was struggling with consistently producing weekly content that algorithm so strictly demanded.

I would consider the podcast to be a modest success. We have 200-400 regular listeners although I’d love to have 1,000. Trying to make weekly content has been a failure. Too much of my life was a mess, trying to keep a steady even backlog of guests was a challenge, technology issues, etc. As a result I’ve decided to downgrade to every other week.

I had decided to upgrade to the business version of Riverside for ~$400/mo. That was…stupid. I have very limited access to my digital marketer’s time (15hr/week), so I figured I was paying $100 per episode and if the extra features saved her a few hours per week, it was a huge win. In practice she barely used any of the features. A stupid, stupid waste on my part and an annual contract I regret.

One thing I am truly proud of is highlighting voices you won’t find on YouTube or at conferences. An instructional design expert, and organizational culture expert, folks early in their careers, all sorts. I even let in some MSFT employees 😉. The thing I think about is I wouldn’t have my career if it wasn’t for Scott Hanselman and for Diabetes Magazine. When I got diabetes I thought my life was truly over, and seeing others that looked like me succeeding at life, kicking ass even, gave me the courage to try.

I hope my podcast can give young folks the courage to try.

Financial disaster

This year was the year of financial disaster. At the beginning of the year, I was a bit of a hot mess and so I wasn’t paying close attention to our finances. We live comfortably in the rust belt, so I didn’t really need to. But Pluralsight retired half of my courses and my revenue from them dropped a significant amount. Over the three years since Pluralsight got bought by private equity my revenue dropped from comfortably covering all of my living expenses to covering mortgage, US health insurance, and a few utilities. Still nice, but not nearly enough to keep me afloat.

And in 2025 I had committed to too many expenses. Repainting my office, redesigning my website, MVP summit, Fabcon. By the end of Fabcon, I realized I was suddenly broke.

I did damage control, I took on debt, and by the end of it I had $20k in debt and no real customer pipeline. I had cut down on the consulting to do more courses on Teachable, but I was too much of a hot mess to manage more than 2 courses over 2 years.

Thankfully, in June a customer was consolidating from Snowflake, Edify (Postgres PaaS), and Power BI to Fabric. They asked if I could help since I had provided Power BI training and support before. I gave them the nickel tour and said “I used to be a DBA and I know Power BI, but I have no ETL experience.”

The response? “Well you are already in our system, you seem to know what you are talking about. You want to try to help us get Fabric going?”

I’m quite lucky. This project is the only thing that prevented me from looking for a salaried job and being in debt.

An elephant in the room – AI

So why am I so joyful when the world is a mess? Well, I’m finding the joy in AI. I’ve been able to build more than before, troll Reddit by putting the M language in Python, and I’m just having fun. I’ve processed the grief that most of my code moving forward will be AI-written and I’m just riding the wave for now.

I anticipate that 80-90% of the code I produce that isn’t customer facing will be AI-written. It’s a loss in many ways, but new skills to learn: unit tests, devops, docker containers, scrum, LLM evaluations, etc. I’m hoping I can make content too so people don’t get crushed by the wave. Because it’s coming.

All in all though, if I could go back in time and un-invent LLMs, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I expect them to be a net-negative on society. But I can’t so I’m making the best of it.

Oversharing

I’m probably oversharing here. So why? Well partly because I decided that when I became a consultant, I would share the highs and lows, no matter how frustrating. I think a lot of people get burnt by survivorship bias and thinking consulting is for them. It isn’t. Don’t do it.

But also, I see what AI is doing to our social connections and I hate it. AI slop. LinkedIn toxic positivity. Inauthenticity-as-a-service. I hate it. Where did my friends go?

These days I’m hard to fire, so I hope this blog can be a bastion of authenticity and lived experience, for as long as I have the energy anyway.