Hey man, thanks for the line! I am heading out soon for a camping trip for the next couple days, but I’ve signed up for a slot Tuesday the 27th. Looking forward to it!
Things here are good. I’ve been exhausted since the retreat, and haven’t made any concrete progress on coding, but I’ve been learning a lot about ADHD and have made a lot of progress there. I found a couple posts on twitter about people who reorganized their lives after getting diagnosed to emphasize their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. The problem was that they didn’t go into any specifics about how to actually do it. So I’ve started working on it myself and posting threads as I go. It’s a perfect time to do this: I’m unmarried with no kids, switching careers, and leaving town in a few months, so I have an opportunity to basically rebuild my life from the ground up. It’s still super early but I’m excited: already one of my Twitter peeps told me his partner was recently diagnosed with ADHD and he’s finding the threads fascinating, which is exactly what I was hoping for. The two biggest things I’ve learned so far:
It’s time to cheat. My whole life I’ve desperately wanted to be disciplined, so whenever I’ve tried to do tasks and stick with things, I’ve tried to do them with the minimum amount of support possible. So now, as I’m learning to put the structure I need into my life, it feels like cheating. Fortunately, for me this is a feature not a bug: I’ve always wanted to be chaotic good instead of lawful good, and this feels like the first step towards that 🤠
Turns out the biggest tool for solving problems as they crop up is “use your strengths to overcome your weaknesses.” I CAN’T FUCKING BELIEVE I’ve never read that sentence anywhere before. It’s so widely and wildly useful. Example: I am scatterbrained and flaky in many areas of my life, but I never miss an appointment I’ve set with another person. So I’ve started using FocusMate (which feels like cheating), and I’m learning I can use it for stuff like doing my morning routine, or starting my shutdown routine at the correct time, or other stuff like that: pretty much anything I need accountability for.
So that’s where things are! I’m hoping to get some good progress on my friend’s website before we talk. The functionality is all done, and so all that’s left is straightforward styling and adding content. I was really proud of myself for getting it to that place before the retreat.
I think the main thing I’d like to talk about will be a 35,000-foot discussion of the best things for me to focus on after that website is done. I’ll be done here in early November, and I’d like to have some kind of money-making skillset by then. Here are the options I’m looking at:
Focus on Wordpress/Shopify/Jamstack and really get after the freelance website building business;
Focus on my idea for helping family lawyers avoid bad clients and attract good ones;
Focus on my dev skills, restarting with fundamentals of semantic HTML and going from there;
Focus on something new and awesome like Solidity or zero-knowledge proofs (this seems unlikely to be a prudent choice but I feel myself getting sucked in so I’m tossing it in).
The interesting thing about these is that there’s a good deal of overlap on the skill side, and at least a little on the networking side, so I may have a chance to have my cake and eat it too to a certain extent. Also! I’ve been going back to “The 4 Disciplines of Execution”, an amazing book I found years ago, and so I’d like to specifically find a plan for making money from programming, starting in November, using one or more of those bullet points, and work out the plan using this template (from the book):
1 Wildly Important Goal;
1 set of “leading indicators”: practices I can directly control that will move the needle on the WIG;
A scoreboard for leading indicators and “lagging indicators” (lagging indicators are the measure of the progress on the WIG itself);
A system of accountability for work on the leading indicators.
I think that’s it. I hope you’re doing well! How have things been with you? Have you been looking at the ADHD stuff too? If you have been, we should start comparing notes outside of the dev mentoring, it would be fun to have someone to talk to about all this stuff who’s in a similar place. Hope you’re having a great summer and I’ll talk to you soon 🤠
Best,
Chris
P.S. Saw these and thought you’d like them:
This is a good newsletter article about zero-knowledge proofs and their possible (huge) effects on privacy in the next few years: https://www.notboring.co/p/zero-knowledge
Part of that article talks about Evervault, a company building a set of tools to let devs handle userdata in such a way that the data stays encrypted from beginning to end, never exposed at any point: “Evervault builds encryption infrastructure for developers that ensures that any data users enter is automatically encrypted at the field level, never lives unencrypted in a company’s database, and can only be processed in a privacy cage. In its eight-point Pragmatic Privacy Manifesto, Evervault captures the ethos of the new generation of privacy technology perfectly:
Privacy is a basic expectation and human right, but it’s something that should never create any friction or slow down the speed of technological advancement.”
(emphasis in article)
Take care!
Notes
- New Long-term goal: Move to Canada (or somewhere else)
- “Resentment inventory”
- Handmaid’s Tale
Todo
- Send article about reddit database design