2024, with occasional introductions

Hello, and thank you for stopping by. I’m John, married to wonderful Erin, and father to a lovely 3-year-young lad named Mario. I have been living in central Nebraska for the past year and half (relocated from Seattle) in a mostly rural community.

I work as a Product Manager, developing analytics applications for contact centers and social media engagement teams. I have been doing this now for almost three years and it has been one helluva a ride so far. Prior to working in product, I spent 20 years in contact center/customer support strategy, operations, and technology, primarily in the mobile data space.

Music, in particular drums, are where I would ideally spend all of my non-family time. I played for many years in Seattle with multiple bands and projects. My career ultimately led me to pause all of that for a bit (10 years!) and I only recently started playing again now that I have a 24/7 space and no neighbors to be concerned with.

I was previously on Micro.blog under the @withoccasional handle. At the time I was testing the service out, I don’t think I knew what I really wanted. I was sitting on the fence with regard to Twitter at the time and had stopped posting there for a bit. I treated Micro.blog as a twitter replacement, I don’t think I realized at the time how tired I was of social media in general (this was probably 2018 timeframe).

Long story short, with Twitter falling apart and Meta seemingly looking to support some openness with Threads, it made sense to me to sign up again and truly use the service as an aggregator for people and blogs I follow across the internet as well as a place to publish long-form writing in the hopes that it is interesting enough for my son to read sometime in the future.