Issue 2021 01
Hey, welcome to the newsletter. I tend to not write much at the moment and wanted to make a way to keep friends, family, and collaborators in the loop. My goal is to have this be a different pace of conversation, one that’s slower than Twitter, but faster than my typical blogging pace. The structure I want to experiment with over time but the current starting categories of thought organization will be Learnings, Conversation (coming next issue), Creations, and Recommendations. So here we go.
Learnings:
January has become the month of milestones, software rabbit holes, and future planning. I have been freelancing for a few years and the work tends to always feel like a means to an end. And mid last year I started making some more personally focused tools but hit frequent technical roadblocks along the way. This month a few of those were finally surpassed. I have started to have a decent working understanding of how to better pass data from the frontend of a website to the backend or server of a project. Which has allowed me to resurface a list of previously parked projects and will now allow me to start charging for a few of them.
Creations:
TinyFactories - A few years ago I started a group of Indiepreneurs with Weiwei and Tomo. This past year the group really started to grow as it filled the need for a studio-like space during the pandemic. We took this chance to do a refresh the group’s goals, aspirations, and directions.
Exploration around Solar Energy Capture - In 2019 I wanted to start writing more about climate mitigation through small explorations of how we could augment existing systems. The first article was focused on Modifying Waste Bins to be Weighable and then I promptly stopped writing. So this is me kicking off this writing process for a second time.
Recommendations:
The Knowledge Project Ep. #102 - I tend to get stuck in the specialist or generalist argument, although I currently lean more generalists. The show’s guest Sendhil Mullainathan does a nice job of breaking down boundaries and goal alignment regardless of the correlations between industry and background.
This Could Be Our Future by Yancey Strickler - I tend to watch a lot of SciFi which tends to have a rather gloomy perspective most of the time. So this book was a very refreshing look at how we can build the future we want to see. You're not crazy for having a big dream. You just need to stay hungry and determined.
Mastering the Microbiome - The focus of this episode is around how we need to balance what’s in our body’s microbiome and it sparked a cascading series of thoughts for me around who is thinking about the earth’s microbiome?
That’s it! more to come next issue. Now off to get some tea.