I love living in Boston, and find the benefits go up each year. The longer I've been here, the more people I know, and the more integrated I am into my local communities. Friends move here because they like the community we've built and want to be closer. The house I've slowly been renovating gets closer and closer to what I want. I get to know the area better, and now that I have kids I know lots of fun places to take them.

I love being married to Julia, and the life we've been building together continues to get richer. She's by far my favorite person to talk to: with so much conversation over the years that we have an enormous amount of shared context and I'm so easily understood. As we continue to get to know each other better, we're better at helping each other and being the kind of partner the other needs. We can divide things up, making complementary investments in skills and responsibilities for our joint life.

I love my kids, and they just keep getting better. At four and six they have such deep personalities, interests, and ways of looking at the world. I love playing with them, showing them things, teaching them things, seeing how they figure things out.

I love my friends. So many backgrounds, skills, and interests. People to visit in so many places, people to catch up with after a long time, people I see almost every day. People to play with, people to ask for advice and help, people to give advice and help to.

I love my blog. When I have an idea that builds on an earlier one, I don't have to explain the other idea, I can link to where past me wrote it up. If I notice something related to something I've been thinking about, but too small for its own post, I can catalog it as a comment on an earlier post. I can notice places where my thinking has changed, and try to figure out why past me had a different view. People read my posts, find them useful, and leave good comments. Some of those people start reading regularly, continue leaving good comments, which attracts others who leave good comments. Being in the habit of writing means that when I want to communicate the barrier is low and I have lots of practice. Some ideas I have promoted here have caught on, and now I can read other people building on them.

I love my work. I've been programming since I was in elementary school, and I can make computers do what I wan...

Leonardo Otto

Leonardo Otto