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The view from the top of Old Rag Mountain in Virginia

Is this thing on?

Hello, this is my first ever blog post! As a brief introduction, my name is Dustin. I grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, acquired my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Grand Valley State University in 2019, and I have since been a full stack software engineer for a little over 7 years now. I initially kicked off my career at Ford Motor Company, before landing at ZeniMax Online Studios in 2023, where I made various tools that supported the development of Elder Scrolls Online. Unfortunately, in July of 2026 I was laid off as part of a 1600 person reduction in force imposed by Microsoft.

Unemployment

While the job search has been stressful and so far unfruitful, I’ve had some time to reflect! I’ve realized that this is the longest break from work that I have had since I was still a kid. I started working at 14 or 15 years old and really haven’t stopped since, and as of writing this I am 30 years old. That’s quite literally half of my life where I haven’t had much more than a week off of work, let alone so far over a month off from working. Even in college, I worked part time each semester and went back home for the summers to work for a civil engineering firm testing concrete, helping out the survey crews, and washing dirt (not kidding, it’s a real thing). While I definitely have always enjoyed hobbies that allow me to slow down, I’ve also realized that I put a lot of my self worth into my career and the work that I do. I don’t think this is entirely abnormal, I feel like a lot people do this. But I’ve been doing things that I enjoy to try to regain some part of myself, which has been grounding and a reminder to take the bad with the good.

So far with this newfound free time, I have:

  • Applied to jobs
  • Unsuccessfully interviewed for a few jobs
  • Hiked Old Rag Mountain in Virginia with my partner (Where the cover photo for this post was taken!)
  • Spent some time on the beach with my partner while visiting her family
  • Started diving into my ever growing backlog of games and movies
  • Been going for walks every day
  • Had the honor of being a pallbearer for an old friend
  • Taken lots of photos, some of which will be found on this site at some point in the near future! But if you’re interested, my photography is on Instagram @photos.dustycode or on Grain @dustycode.dev
  • Reconnected with some old friends and family members
  • Made some travel plans to have something to look forward to
  • Finally taken the time to work on getting version 2 of my website deployed!

This Website

The site this post is deployed on is actually version 2 of my personal website! I still have the original version up and running for anyone interested! That one was built with React and ThreeJS, originally hooked up through EmailJS for the contact form, but someone ended up trying to use it to send spam mail. I think it was mostly an implementation error on my part, but I just disconnected it as I was already planning to build a newer better version of my personal site anyways.

This website is built with Astro and Bun with a React Island for showing my currently playing or most recently played song on the home page. I have analytics hooked up to Umami running on my homelab. I might see what I can do to show some of that data the home page as well, since I already have a bit of a dashboard layout going on. I will probably do a more in depth write up for this site soon as I add more stuff to it.

Oh! And if all goes well, this post should also be posted up to my PDS in The ATmosphere which I will be doing with sequoia.pub.

Final thoughts

To summarize, unemployment has its ups and downs, trying to make the best of it but it is stressful nonetheless. I’m writing this (and doing photography, and building this site) because I feel a strong sense of responsibility to put out real human-made creative stuff, as corporations seem to be currently obsessed with trying to get AI to take that from us. I’m not sure if anyone is going to read this, but if you do, feel free to hit me up on bluesky to tell me a random fact you enjoy! I’m @dustycode.dev.