Day 1: Hello World

personal

1/6/2020

Oh boy, writing is hard. I’ve already had a few false starts in trying to get this thing going so I’m just going to stream-of-consciousness this baby and hope that it makes some sort of sense.

The question I’m exploring this year: Can I make a living doing the things I love?

(I’ll talk more about what exactly that means to me in a future entry.)

I wanted to keep some sort of log as I go on this journey, both for myself but also so that I have something to point people to when they’re like “I wanna leave my job but I’m scared what do” and I can show them this and say, “well, this is how I did it without dying”. I like how I’m assuming that this is all going to work out rather than ending in catastrophic failure where this ends up as a cautionary tale for why you shouldn’t leave your fat salary and try to follow your dreams because you could ruin a good thing like that fool DK.

Honestly though, I have this (delusional?) conviction that this is actually going to work out. (Of course, I haven’t explained what “it working out” means to me so that’ll happen in another post.) If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t exactly be publishing this so everyone can watch me flame out publicly. Although that would be kind of funny and worthwhile in its own way. What would it even mean for things “not to work out”? Getting a normal job like everyone else? Yeah, not exactly the worst thing in the world.

Anyway. I’m getting off-track from what I originally intended to write about. That’s the price of going stream-of-consciousness.

Here’s the main principle behind my Maker Log:

Share everything I learn.

I want to be more proactive about building things out in the open because it’s way more fun to connect with people that way than go into hermit mode and code nonstop for a week (my usual M.O.). Here are some guiding principles I came up with over the past few days as I thought about this:

  1. Authentic over awesome

    I want to share everything, even if especially if it’s not impressive or “good”. From my time making videos and blogging in the past, I’ve found that being real is way, way better than trying to create some kind of image around yourself. Not only do people appreciate it more, but it’s just much more fun and relaxing because you’re just being yourself.

    I want to share all the crappy parts about this journey as well as the good parts and communicate my experience as honestly as possible.

  2. Incremental over monumental

    Here’s one practice that radically changed my approach to coding: Get it working. Then, and only then, optimize.

    Before I adopted that practice, I would try to think of the perfect architecture or the most efficient way to do something before writing a feature. Most of that would generally end up being useless because in trying to write the feature, I’d discover some scenario that I had failed to consider. So now, I just get something working, even if I know that there’s a better way to do it, and then take all the things that I learned from doing that in coming up with a better solution.

    I’m going to treat writing the same way. I’m going to just write posts as often as I can without concern for whether it’s perfect or even makes sense. I’m basically treating this Maker Log as a place to experiment from which I might come up with polished blog posts later. (Most likely though, I won’t actually make the time to write those “polished blog posts”, but it’s a nice thought.) These are basically all rough drafts, and they’re meant to be that way.

  3. Consistency over quality

    The reason why I had such a hard time starting this entry was because I would start writing, think “no, there’s a better way to write this” or “wait, this would be confusing to someone who doesn’t already know me” etc. and then delete everything I wrote. I definitely have a tendency to be a perfectionist and edit things endlessly to get the wording just right before publishing something. With Maker Log, I’m going to actively ignore that impulse and just write, because otherwise, I’m not going to get anything out there. Over the last several months, there have been dozens of times where I came up with an idea of something to write, came up with an outline of sorts, and then never got around to writing or publishing because I got stuck on trying to get it right before I even started. I’m pretty much going to disregard quality and just focus on being consistent.

    I’m not sure yet whether I want to commit to writing every single day since there are occasionally days when I don’t get a chance to obsess over my projects (e.g. like the last two days when I drove 21 hours from LA to Austin), so I’ll leave that undecided for now.

That’s it for my introductory post. I’m really tempted to back and edit the heck out of it because there are so many places where this could be better but I’m going to leave it as is.

Oh, and since I’ve been using Toggl for time tracking (shoutouts to my homie Vivian for recommending it), I’ll also include how long each post took.

Time spent writing: 1h 24m

(Wow, this is much longer than I thought. There was a 10 minute period where I talked to some friends (I’m working upstairs at my climbing gym right now) but most of this was probably due to the false starts where I wrote a bunch and deleted everything.)

Oh, and I want to thank the biggest inspirations for me deciding to pick this up. I’ve been inspired in different ways by a ton of indie makers recently because I’m wading into this community for the first time, but these two are the ones that inspired the Maker Log specifically:

  • Pat Walls (@thepatwalls) - Pat writes daily updates and I love, love, love how real he keeps it. His journal is a great example of the principles above applied in practice.
  • Michael Lynch (@deliberatecoder) - Michael regularly writes about his bootstrapping efforts and shares weekly updates on his progress (this is so up my alley because I always put a lot of care into writing snippets during my time at Google and found them very helpful)

See you tomorrow!