Aviation Nerd

Here's the embarrassing part: I grew up in St. Pete with Florida's Space Coast in reach, and I still haven't seen a launch in person. You'd think it'd be easy. It is not. The timing never lines up — the scrub, the work day, the cloud cover, the 3 a.m. window. I've missed them by a county more times than I can count.

So it sits at the very top of the list. Not a photo, not a livestream — actually standing there for the real thing: the building-sized machine on a column of fire, the long delay between the light and the sound. Until then I'll keep refreshing the schedule and getting it wrong.

FlightRadar24 lives on a second screen more often than I'd admit in a job interview. There's something genuinely calming about seeing the whole sky rendered as a system — every contrail a flight number, every flight number a tail, a route, a place someone's trying to get to.

It's the same thing I love about networks and good software: invisible infrastructure, quietly doing an absurd amount of coordinated work so that the people relying on it never have to think about it. Air traffic is the original distributed system, and it's been running at a scale and reliability the rest of us are still trying to copy.

Window seat, no exceptions. The climb-out is the best part of any trip — the moment the city tilts away and becomes a circuit board, every street a trace, every block a component. I will fight for that seat.

The travel wishlist right now: Japan, Iceland, and Portugal, in roughly that order. Each for a different reason — the trains and the food, the landscape and the impossible light, the coastline and the unhurried pace. The window seat is non-negotiable for all three.