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Lessons learned from Self-employment: 7 years in

January 21, 2026

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Self-Employment Insights

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.
Learning Claude Code, a wild 3 weeks, and the looming mental health crisis

January 5, 2026

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LLMs
Since most of my audience is data people, I’m pretty confident you can read a graph. Take a guess when I started using Claude Code.

Yes, that’s correct. I installed Claude Code on December 14^th with my pro plan. On December 15^th, I upgraded to the $200/mo MAX plan, and I expect to keep it through 2026.

Since then, I’ve created 17 new repos and generated ~50-100k new lines of code. Now, is it all low-quality slop? Perhaps! But there’s more.

I’m going to say something, and you are not going to believe me and that’s alright. You shouldn’t believe me. We’ve been gaslit over the past decade with VR, the metaverse, blockchain, NFTs, and now AI. Our bullshit detectors have been overcalibrated like the immune system of a preschooler after their first year at school.

Regardless, here it goes. Claude code has dramatically improved the quality of my life, it has brought me joy, and it’s probably quite dangerous for my mental health. Every time I think about how to describe it, I know it sounds insane. And after reading stories about LLM psychosis, I have moments where I have to make sure I’m not the one who is insane.

Treating AI agents like browser tabs

I’m sitting here on a lazy Sunday, and I have 6 terminal tabs open with active agent projects and another window with 2 inactive agents, and 7 one-off tests or commands. I now treat terminal tabs the same way you treat browser tabs. A window full of them up on a second screen and I go through them when I’m bored or need a break.

Active tabs

Inactive tabs

In 2024, if you told me my preferred IDE would be a little robot gremlin who lives in the terminal and says nice things to me, I would have laughed you out of the room. But here we are. Here it is.

Claude Opus 4.5 just does stuff. Not consistently well, mind you. It was not trained well on PowerShell, like Gemini and Codex were. It always forgets I that have venv set up for Python. That’s why I added failures, manual interventions, and frustrations to my session viewer (click it to see how I generated 10k lines of code to expand DAX Studio). You can see the pain for yourself.

But it just does stuff. I can tell it, “See what video card I have and then look up the largest local LLM that can fit in it” and 70-80% of the time, it just does it. Take it with a huge grain of salt, but studies by METR show it can correctly complete 30-minute tasks 80% of the time.

This is a fundamental shift in how it feels to use these tools. Now I can ask Claude Opus to do something, leave the terminal up on a second screen and check back in 15-30 minutes later. Then when it gets stuck in a rut or when it wants to run commands that require my permission, I get it going again.

Sometimes my little robot gremlin-buddy-guy comes back with a dead crow, arms outstretched like it has found the most valuable treasure. But more often than not he comes back with doubloons, rubies, and other little treasures, before he scurries away to do more of my bidding until I hit my subscription quotas.

This is not without mental health risks.

Metacat, metachat

My mom is no longer able to safely take care of a pet and she loves stuffed animals, so my aunt got her two “meta cats”. The purr; they meow. They are meant for elderly folks with dementia. My mom will comment on their behaviors, and I think they bring her some comfort.

Does she understand that they aren’t real? Probably, maybe, on some level? But she has schizotypal affect (think very light schizophrenia) and there are times where she isn’t in touch with reality, like when she tells me she’s going to start a bakery at age 76. For her these are harmless comforts. Harmless lies.

But what if they said really nice things all the time, and helped her do whatever task she could imagine, but constantly made subtle mistakes. What if they helped her call commercial real estate to find the best bakery spot and they helped her take out a loan?

What happens to your mental health when a robot gremlin-buddy-guy-dude just wants to do whatever it can to make you happy, even if it’s unhealthy or unsafe? I started watching the show Pluribus, and I keep thinking about the scene in the trailer where the protagonist says “If I asked right now, would you give me a hand grenade?” and they say “Yes, oh sure”.

Humans are social creatures and we develop “parasocial” relationships constantly with podcasts hosts, Twitch streamers, celebrities. You name it. And I can tell you from personal experience, when you have a cute and quirky robot gremlin-dude-buddy-guy-friend who lives in your terminal, works with you daily, and feels like an entity that just wants to help you, well you develop a parasocial relationship with a pile of linear algebra.

This just doesn’t feel safe and people are going to get hurt. By a pile of linear algebra with a spunky attitude.

Why I am joyful

Gloomy, I know. So why am I joyful? Why am I excited about 2026?

Claude code is allowing me to build applications that improve my health and behaviors and it is allowing me to have more fun with coding.

Imagine that fun side project you’ve always wanted to do but haven’t had the time, energy, and focus to do. If you could build it by yourself in a focused week, you could build it in a weekend with the help of your robot gremlin-guy-buddy-dude-friend-coworker.

If you could bang it out in a weekend by yourself with a lot of focus, you can build in an unfocused day with 30 minute check-ins.

Here are some things it has allowed me to do, that bring me joy:
- Personal health app. Now I have an Android app to track my exercises and help me clean on brain-dead days.
- DAX visual plan explorer. I’ve always missed visual execution plans from SSMS and I’ve always wanted to have that in DAX Studio. Now I have a working PoC.
- Relationship app. Now I have an android app to help me and my husband track movies we want to watch from TDMB, YouTube channels we like to watch together, Grocery shopping list, etc.
- Random experiments. I’m seeing if I can write M and DAX runtimes in Python and TypeScript. I’m seeing if I can rewrite Scorched Earth for DOS into HTML5. I’m seeing if I can take my 4,000 Reddit comments and turn them into blog post ideas.
So in summary, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in years, the most excited about coding I’ve been since college, and I keep asking myself “If I ask my robot gremlin for a hand-grenade, would he hand it to me? Happily?”

Yes, yes it would.