In 2026, I’ve had a fun time juggling growing Masterpoint, working on athletic pursuits, and raising a puppy.

The puppy is the most important obviously, so I’ll start there 😁 In January, I adopted a 6 month old rescue and named her Pingora. She’s super loving, wicked smart, and an all-around amazing dog. Check out my LinkedIn feed for the occasional photo.

Juggling Masterpoint has been fun as we’ve doubled our headcount in terms of full-time staff in the past six months, and we’ve added our first non-billable team member, both of which are milestones that I’m excited about. We’re growing an incredible team of people that I deeply enjoy working with, our clients are very happy with our work, and I’m finding a lot of fulfillment in working to build a sustainable organization that gives back.

We’re continuing to grow as well… so if you’re reading this and you’re interested in a position, please check out our Careers page 😉

On the personal side, this year has been a big deviation from my standard climb-as-much-as-I-can thought process. I started out the year with a goal to run a 50 mile race. My early months of the year from January to April involved 100+ miles of training per month, culminating in me running the Rock the Ridge ultramarathon on May 2.

The other thing I put my efforts toward this year was working on doing the LA Freeway (Longs to Arapaho Traverse). The Freeway is a 38 mile, 20,000 feet of elevation gain technical ridge scramble starting in Rocky Mountain National Park and ending at the end of the Indian Peaks Wilderness. I put in many days of recon missions over the summer and one unsuccessful attempt in August before realizing this was going to be a multi-year objective, so check in next year to see if this objective gets ticked off!

Living on a farm means there is always a project waiting to be tackled. Lately, my biggest physical undertaking has been renovating an old barn to turn it into a proper tool workshop and garage. The pace around here is starting to pick up, too, as fall is right around the corner and we are gearing up for the busy corn and soybean harvest.

On a more personal note, my life has shifted quite a bit recently as I now have a partner. It has been a wonderful new chapter, bringing with it a lot of meaningful personal and emotional growth. Navigating this evolving relationship has been a central and rewarding focus of my everyday life.

As part of that, we have been experimenting with different hobbies we can enjoy together. We are aiming for a good mix of active and fun, which has led us to try a bit of everything from video games and cooking to ping pong, badminton, and hiking. Right now, we are also having a great time plotting out some upcoming travels.

I am a recent empty nester and have been enjoying having the kids back from college for the summer. I live with my husband and Labrador retriever just outside Denver, near a state park, and have recently moved from running on the treadmill to running out in the park, enjoying the early morning sunshine when it is still cool.

I’m always reading something, often two books at once. On business, I’m currently re-reading Radical Focus by Christine Wodtke, and have also been enjoying mystery series, most recently by authors Tana French and Barbara Fradkin.

As a process and delivery person, I’m focused on learning to build tools, reports, and systems using AI to run Masterpoint as effectively and efficiently as possible so that we can deliver amazing results for our clients.

It’s been a hot, dry summer for my backyard, especially with the significant drought Colorado experienced this year. I let nature take its course, and most of the grass died out. Now that cooler weather and fall rains are coming in, I’m replanting with clover and a drought-tolerant grass that will hopefully survive better than what I had before.

I’ve been fascinated by Agent Skills, AI Evaluation techniques, and semantic data layer integrations allowing humans and agents alike to traverse through small and large data sets. I’m working on a couple of blog posts to share soon about what I’ve learned and how these tools genuinely help small teams keep shipping to production daily, faster and with more confidence.

This summer I spent about two weeks in Italy, split between Venice, Florence, and Rome. There were days where we had plans, but there were also days where we went slow and wandered to see what we’d stumble upon, and that turned out to be the best part, finding lesser known gems that were beautiful or had great food.

Closer to home, most of my free time still goes to racquet sports, at least two or three times a week, I’d play badminton, tennis, or pickleball. I also skateboard now that it’s getting cooler and not as hot as the summer, and it fits perfectly with my other quiet hobby of finding rooftops around the city with good views. For more chill evenings with friends, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza has become my default thing to bring along. It takes about a minute to teach and works with almost any group, which is most of why I love it.

I also recently received my AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, it was a great excuse to go deeper on the corners of AWS that I don’t touch day to day, so when it does come up, I’ve experienced it and worked with it to know how to operate it, and it’s the same curiosity I’ve always run on.

I’m currently living in the mountains, near the ski areas, and regularly enjoying all of the wonderful freedoms that I have. Lately, my time has been spent traveling and seeing the world. I also own an Airstream and spend plenty of time in the woods, mountains, near the lakes, hot springs, and national parks, or pretty much wherever I want to park it for a while. I’ve continued to improve the trailer and enjoy more and more time camping off-grid and away from the busy cities.

For technology side projects, I’m just finishing up a project to convert my long running Debian server over to a TalosOS Kubernetes deployment. This box runs a small portion of my electronic life, making steady progress towards open source, self hosting, and data sovereignty. I knew K8s was going to be something amazing the first time I started using it, and after many professional years managing clusters, I’m happy to have this project running on my home computer.

In other news, I’ve recently adopted a couple of stray kittens from my property manager. My adult cat is not too thrilled, but I’m sure he will come around. Yes, they are adorable. And yes, I can’t wait to get a full night sleep again.

Soon enough winter will be here and I’m looking forward to my regular downhill activities. As someone who has skied for over 40 years now, this is still one of my favorite things to do in life. While there’s no snow on the ground, paddle boarding, swimming, mountain biking, and summer concerts have been a reasonable replacement. My recent Amtrak trip to Denver for a Red Rocks concert was amazing, I love the train and I love that venue. That trip gave me plenty of time to catch up on my reading too, and I continue to be enriched by Terry Pratchett’s wonderful sense of humor and wit.