Episode 12: Golden, Depression, Wanted and Unwanted Projects, and Money
Welcome, new readers! This newsletter is an ongoing project where I share some of what I'm working on, in ways that will: 1) be useful to some of you, 2) be interesting to some of you, 3) help some of you help me.
I've got a ton of interesting software development/training/education irons in the fire. Don't have time to get into that via email now, but hopefully soon.
"Old" readers, you know the drill. Smash unsubscribe if you don't want these emails. Hit "reply" and shoot me an email. I read every email, but sometimes I get behind on replying. Sorry!
Some words on depression
Last time, I wrote a bit of a work-in-progress piece about my experience with depression. Sparked lots of interesting conversations.
I plan on doing a follow-up or update to it at some point, especially since the chronological component of the piece extended only to December of last year. As we would all expect, a lot has happened since then.
(like, uh, my wife is pregnant! We're gonna have a baby, it's due in about three weeks! We're extremely excited, and feeling well prepared/supported/etc.)
A few threads that I want to weave together in that updated piece on depression:
- People matter a lot.
- It's critical that, at certain times, I downgrade my trust in my own emotions and perceptions of things, even though historically I could make a convincing case for why I should trust my emotions and perceptions of things.
- My sense of what's important and weighty in the world has shifted. I've had more close passes with death and disease and despair at this point in my life than before (sorta comes with the territory of "getting older"). Yet it's all the more important (and reasonable) to see how the sum total streams of cynicism and madness in the world is decreasing, the opposite of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
- "Hope" isn't "just an emotion", kinda. There's a feedback loop between actions and beliefs, and if you take certain actions, you tend to believe certain things, congruent with those actions.
On the 4th item, I've been trying to spend a bit more time just shutting off/turning down all the noise, where possible, and trying to do "interesting and useful things", because such things are good for my soul.
Which brings us to "interesting and useful things Josh is working on"
How I spend my time vs. how I earn my money
People ask me "what I do", and I don't know how to respond. My most recent full-time job was as a software engineer at an enterprise in the "software security" space. I cared deeply for my team, but didn't feel much reciprocated trust in the larger organization.
Over a year ago, I quit my job to take a sabbatical (the socially acceptible term for "quitting a job with plans on taking time off, and no explicit next thing lined up"), but the goal is to build income streams to replace full-time work.
I've got a bunch of irons in the fire around that, more on that soon. The things I'm currently doing for zero dollars are extremely interesting to me, but so is the things I'm doing for many dollars. I hope to keep developing both sorts of activities.
I therefore describe myself as a software developer, with a surprisingly strong interest in cities, and helping the city of Golden function well. I don't currently earn a ton of money, by the standards of a full-time software development role.
I'm privileged - my wife is very well employed, is an extremely valuable contributor to a high-impact team, and earns a substantial salary. We also recently bought an old house that has a ton of work that needs to be done on it.
Like... a lot of work. An extremely generous friend came over today, and a plan on replacing just a leaky hose bib turned into 'refactoring' an extremely janky old plumbing situation.
Here's the before:
He's the best plumber in Denver, and also climbs 5.14, and is looking for his first software development job; I can hook you up with your next best engineering hire if you want.
For a frame of reference, he's reached the apex of two challenging domains (commercial plumbing, rock climbing). The guy that last employed him as a plumber is begging him to come back to work, offering a big raise to $100k/yr+, and give up on this whole software development thing. Oh, and he's 27. I don't think he gets these emails, so hopefully he won't read this. But he'll make a great hire.
If you want access to good engineers, I've got emails focused on that going out to everyone who sponsors me on Github: https://github.com/sponsors/josh-works. I'll send out a big update over there about all the going-ons in the last few months in the realm of software development.
These interesting and useful things might look like paid work (I've landed ones of thousands of dollars in rails performance consulting projects across three customers, and all have gone well!, despite what's worked out to a less-impressive "dollars per hour" rate.
I'm doing a lot of "unpaid" "labor", as well. I asked my CPA if there's anyway to deduct the labor that I could do for >$130,000/yr as a full-time employee and instead "donate" it for free (or heavily reduced) to groups that need it, and if I could possibly deduct any of this donated time from my taxes. He laughed at my naïvety.
I'll save that rant for another day.
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Land use in Golden
I am working on a project - I definitely cannot share all the details publicly, via this email list, yet.
But I'm working on getting a local credit union to create a new financial product, to create a mortgage product that is an interesting deviation from modern mortgages (in some ways) and is an extremely conventional and uninteresting product (in other ways).
This "innovative financial product" would be applied to a property across the street from my house, and would be the beginning of an incredible amount of change in Golden.
For an understanding of "what kind of change does Josh have in mind?", please reference:
- Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York City
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
- White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
And another dozen books that we can talk about if that is your jam.
I just expanded on "White Too Long" in this twitter thread.
If this works out, this mortgage-as-a-new-financial-product could be a big deal. There are a ton of rapidly-moving pieces that I can't wait to share more about.
Related, I need about $1,000,000 to pull it off, OR 10% of that to bring all the appropriate players to the table. I've told some folks (who's preferences and opinions about this project matter a lot) that I'd gladly write a check for $10k if that would help this keep moving along.
I know that some of you can easily write $15k checks, given a week or three to pull it together. (And I know some of you have been involved with bitcoin for a while, and I know it's at $50k right now.) In some ways, money is extremely difficult to obtain. In other ways, there's an incredible amount of money sloshing around out there.
I'm rooted in both sides of that.
How you can help me
So, can you part with a few thousand dollars or many thousands of dollars? Let me know. I might need it, I might not, but either way, we'll work something out where you feel it's the best money you've ever spent, and it'll be early investment towards driving much-needed change in the world, as it relates to housing, affordability, structural oppression, and more.
I could bootstrap this project if I were working a full-time job (experienced software engineers can pull in $10k/month, pre-tax, easy) but then I wouldn't have the time/flexibility to actually work on the project.
I can also *almost* bootstrap this myself, at about $5k/month. I've got some actual on-going consulting work, one of the customers for my rails test performance audit product just paid me for some more work, and I'm exploring a fascinating opportunity to rapidly train early-career engineers, to get them competitive for intermediate-level engineering roles.
Much more on all of this in later emails. I've been trying to get this email out for three days. Maybe if I hit a regular emailing cadence, these won't all be 1500 word emails.
For those of you who read this far, i am honored and thankful.
-Josh