Hello!

I migrated this blog to Hugo. It is so much faster than Jekyll as you might expect. Additionally, I’m using the really cool Front Matter plugin for VS Code, and it makes modifying the site super easy!

According to research released by the World Health Organization, 54 palestinians died last year due to delays or rejections of medical permits from Israel. 25,000 permit requests were submitted in 2017, and of those 54% were approved. This is down from 62% in 2016, and 92% in 2012. Israel has slowly been increasing security measures and decreasing permits since 2007 when Hamas took control of the territory. Access to healthcare was further reduced in 2013 when the border between Egypt and Gaza was closed....

This month, I went to the GitLab Summit in Crete. This was an absolutely fantastic experience. It was lovely to be able to meet so many amazing people whom I work with every day. I think it is really interesting to finally meet outside of a work experience and in real life. You learn so much and really get to know people who have many similarities with you, yet are still very different from you....

Last week I went to Vegas with my dad, aunt, and uncle. It was incredibly fun. This has been the first vacation my dad and I have taken in a very long time. He hadn’t taken a vacation in many years due to the health problems my mom had. We went to Brad Garret’s Comedy Club, saw Donnie and Marie, and Blue Man Group. We ate freaking amazing food, including an interestingly named restaurant, Eggslut....

Every year for the past 5 years I’ve participated in the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Walk to help fund services to help those with kidney disease and those who are at risk for kidney disease. This year’s walk is very special. My mother, Barbara Hanselka, lost her battle with kidney disease last year. I will be walking in her memory. Kidney Walk is the nation’s largest walk to fight kidney disease....

Today is the 2nd month since my mom passed away. It has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. I’m not entirely sure what I expected, to be honest. It seemed like everything today upset me. Music, videos, thoughts. Even work was stressful. Ultimately, I took off the rest of the day from work because it was simply impossible to focus. All I could do was think of everything I missed about her....

My tears are a strange mix of happy and sad. She is free of all this fighting she had to do for the past 20 years, and she is finished with all the pain and struggle of being in sick. We had a great last conversation, which you can see in this screenshot.  I wish in a lot of ways I’d gone to see her more, especially after I started working for GitLab and could work from wherever....

As many people know, my mother passed away last week, 2016-08-17. It was somewhat unexpected. She had been in the hospital for quite some time, but she certainly seemed to be getting better. Her heart ended up stopping in the morning and it took them ~30 minutes to revive her. Once she was revived, they believed her to have severe brain damage. We decided to issue a DNR should her heart stop again....

As of Friday, 2016-08-05, I will have worked for GitLab for a month. That is absolutely crazy to me how much time flies! Because GitLab is a completely remote company, it really takes some getting used to on workflow, communication, and really just overall lifestyle changes. I absolutely love it. It is an incredibly amazing benefit that I hope to see become more common. One of the issues I feel that I’ve faced is Imposter Syndrome....

On July 5th I started at GitLab. They are an entirely remote company with an amazing product and really fascinating culture. One of the many things I am very excited about is that as much as possible is public info. For instance, you can see their entire company handbook online. Most of the consumers of such a document are team members, but it was able to give me a great idea on what exactly I should expect and how things work around GitLab....