college:

• the designer for a side project i was working on shares some assets with another student building something completely different. i get upset and demand that the other person not use it.

  neither project goes anywhere.

• princetonfml goes down and a friend of mine and i compete to create a replacement. the people he's working with invite me to have lunch at the dining hall and it's tense. they want to collaborate but i'm not interested because i'm going to beat them.

  yikyak shows up and both projects die.

• i want to try spinning off a class project into a startup and work full-time on it. one of the group members is interested in continuing to collaborate but since i'm going to be working on it full time, he's not, and i wrote most of the code anyway, i cut off his access to the code base. i lose a friend.

  i burn out and stop working on the idea a few months later.

today:

• i meet up with kevin from extension.dev. i've been following his team's work for a while now because they're also in the chrome extension + browser automation space and they're super talented. we talk about life, our childhoods, relationships, religion, ethics, how our work has been going, the pitfalls we've encountered, and the insights we've had along the way. we nerd out about the technical challenges specific to this space and freely share our approaches (iframes vs. shadow dom for injection, synchronizing state across the extension, detecting lists for scraping, handling garbage sites, etc.) we grab lunch, have a great time, and make plans to go climbing and work together again next week

life is so much more fun when you realize it's not a competition

shoutout to psychedelics + meditation + life for showing me that

• abundance mentality > scarcity mentality
• positive sum games > zero sum games
• love > fear

<aside> 👋🏼 You're reading Road to Ramen, my public journal where I think aloud and share everything I learn in exploring the question: Can I make a living building things I love?

by DK the Human (@dk_the_human)

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