This week was pure chaos in the best and worst ways: three states in three days, last-minute tech talks, and somehow still trying to be a decent husband during my wife’s birthday week. I start in Austin with a workshop for a customer (and I don’t even know what I’m presenting until the morning of). I’m doing the classic developer advocate thing—scrambling to build a talk, cleaning my desk so my brain can function, getting the haircut lineup because I’m not embarrassing my culture, and then finding out my session got moved up from 3PM to 1PM. Love that for me. From there I’m off to New Orleans for a conference where I’m teaching workflow automation and the Slack developer experience (CLI, APIs, the whole deal). I walk through how I actually build workshops: start with the “why,” then the code (usually TypeScript + Slack SDKs), then a hands-on demo because people learn faster when they build it themselves. I also answer career questions—like why help desk or customer support is one of the most common entry points into tech—and I talk about how I’m learning to relax now that I’m more confident in my purpose. The week ends in Destin, Florida, back where my wife and I met, and it’s a reminder that the grind is great—but you’ve gotta actually live too.