Chris Wiegman
Another year has come and go.
For those of us still here… we made it.
We’re another year older, if not wiser.
Thankfully 2024 was, for the most part, much better than 2023 was, at least personally, as the theme of the year was settling into our new home in Chicago.
We’ve been in Chicago a full year now and did our best to make the most of it. We made it to a number of sports games: Cubs, White Sox, Hounds, Fire, Red Stars and Dogs. We went to see Back to the Future: The Musical and we generally spent the year making the most of our new city.
I’m also happy to say that, as of this past April, we’re finally done with Florida having sold our house in Sarasota. The sale process itself was hellish but we’re done with it and I don’t much care if I never step foot in Florida again.
As for our new neighborhood, we love it. We walk almost everywhere and Joy has even found a way to start getting back into theatre with acting classes at The Second City. Of all the places we go to nearby I think my favorite is the Lincoln Park Zoo. It’s about a 10 minute walk and we go a lot. I never would’ve thought a neighborhood with so much to offer would be accessible to us and I’m so very grateful for all of it.
As for my health, I’m heavier than I’ve been in a few years and haven’t been able to exercise but I’ve mostly quit drinking again (with occasional slip-ups) and I’m pretty happy about that. If I can reset some other healthy habits going forward I think I’ll be really doing pretty well.
As for work, well, that’s taken some turns this year I couldn’t have predicted on 1 January:
I loved my team and the work we were doing at WP Engine but, like all good projects I tried to work with at WP Engine, Faust.js didn’t make money as a open source project and was effectively cancelled in March with the laying off of two members of my team and the breakup of the rest.
Frankly, I got a bit lucky in that one. Without a team to manage they offered me a slot as a staff engineer and I took it thinking I would be working on various WordPress projects but that wasn’t to be. They didn’t want to admit that they killed off the project my team had been building so they told me I would need to maintain it.
Faust was fun for me to manage but I loathe working in JavaScript. It was time to find a new job. This wasn’t the first time the rug had been pulled out from under me at WP Engine and I was just done with it. I left the company in July.
Now for years I said I would never work on-site again but being in a new city that we actually like changed that. I didn’t want to wind up like we were in Florida where the only people I knew were bar people so it was time to find a role on-site, preferably downtown.
I found that in July where I started at SuperFile in July with my Engineering Manager title back and I quickly rose to Vice President of Engineering by October as, frankly, managing a team is something I do very well.
Sure there are still days I would like to write code again but building a team rather than the product itself seems to be my sweet spot and I’ll have my work cut out for me doing so here in 2025.
My biggest issue with the new job: unhealthy snacks and food are way too available and I’ve put on over 10lbs since starting there. I really need to fix that.
As for WP Engine, Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, threw a temper tantrum like a toddler in September and vowed to destroy WP Engine. Given all that I can definitely say that I got out of WordPress at the right time.
So here we are at the dawn of our second winter in Chicago. We leave the house regularly for work and class, spend weekends with my dad at least once a month and get to see Joy’s family regularly all while continuing to explore and enjoy all that Chicago has to offer.