In my totality

I thought for about a week about how much I want to bring my "real life" into this mostly anonymized website.

On the one hand, maintaining a good work-life separation prevents burnout and allows you to cleanly redirect attention to half of your life when the other half overextends or staggers momentarily. It also allows me to present two sanitized, optimized fronts to two different audiences, which, apparently, matters enough that people will delete their entire blogs when they go job hunting (or so I read.)

On the other hand, it feels disingenuous to point to two different sources of truth to answer the question of "who I am". Even tuning my resume to fit the job I'm applying for, which is a standard practice in the industry, makes me uncomfortable. (Although that's probably because I just don't believe that I have more than a page's worth of "proudest professional moments".)

All that being said, I should have started thinking about this several weeks earlier. You know, before I kind of locked myself into this path with the design decisions I made with the new site.

Improvise, adapt, overcome

I zugzwang'ed myself, in a way.

Having already customized the tag system into a maximally satisfying form that also happened to be well-suited for an extended professional exposition, and having already signed and titled the site with my online name, in a sense, there was only one natural path left before me. But committing to actually walking it was a separate matter of resolve (and/or rationalization).

I had to ask myself: if this blog was truly to be my "homepage", given that my professional life is built on what I personally find enjoyable, could I truly avoid mixing and binding them together forever, especially when some or other data center could probably put all the pieces together whenever they wanted anyway?

Still, any barrier is better than no barrier, and a sort-of barrier fits my purposes better than an absolute barrier. Upon reflection, a cursory barrier is all I really need to be acceptably sure that only the people who care about my information get it.

Hope you understand.

Answer key

Take the first letter of the second word of every sentence under this heading and the previous one.

I'm still stabilizing my long-term plans for the future, both country-of-residence-wise and career-wise. It all depends on which application comes back positive, really.

For now, though, I'm situated in the United Kingdom as I finish up an MMathCompSci at the University of Oxford.

I generally check my emails consistently but infrequently (email address in the footer), so give me a handful of business days to get back to you on formal matters, but when it comes to informal matters, my Discord response time tends to be fairly fast. Thanks!