Issue 2021 10
Today is: ☁️ Sunny ✦ 🍵 Dinking Ice Tea ✦ 🌎 San Francisco, CA
Learnings:
Balancing self-generated chaos → The last few months have been the busiest since college, but the workload feels manageable because of the overlap and synchronicities between the projects. The biggest challenge has been coding all the time and finding ways to contribute to projects without me being in the coding mode 24/7. I do think that each project has put me into a productive flow state for most of the day, although I think that state would be maintained more easily if I didn't need to go into the office.
Reduct.Video → This is my 6th week as a frontend developer at Reduct. It's been kinda a rough start as the team doesn't communicate a lot so it's taking time to better understand what parts of the product I can take ownership over without burning out. It's reinforced to me that I need to double down on coding fundamentals to better communicate with the rest of the team. I think when you can google yourself out of a problem 80% of the time you forget to learn the fundamental structure. So I have been going back to the basics a little.
Dark Matter Labs → This is week 3 at DML and it's been the most comprehensive onboarding I have ever had to a new company. They are Notion ninjas, and it's hella impressive. I'm working on the Viable Cities 2030 project as a design technologist, which has thus far been a perfect blend of design and development for me.
Conversations:
The last big update this month is me forming a climate company called Anthropogenic. We waiting for some paperwork to be completed but the startup process lead to be reconnecting with a lot of mentors this past month as I worked through what my founder equity split would be.
Creations:
Nothing polished enough to share yet, but soon.
Recommendations:
How a Young Activist Is Helping Pope Francis Battle Climate Change shows the value in looking at the scale of the issue you are trying to access. Sometimes you can overlook the scale of your impact but making assumptions about their constraints.
Uncle Pete is a member of Multiverse and has been creating a delightful collection of narratives and interactive posts which bring joy to my day.
Issue 2021 05
Learnings:
I have been working on migrating many of my tools to using primarily open-source or indie projects when possible. So this month, I moved the letter from Substack to ButtonDown Email, which allows for more customization!
Conversations:
This past week some friends rented a studio space in Brooklyn, NY, and it made me excited to work towards having an in-person studio again in the future. One of the projects they wanted to build out was attaching a small train to the ceiling, mapped to the local MTA line closest to the building. I liked the idea of representing more real-world events with physical objects and not just screens.Creations:There were lots of slow work-in-progress updates this month. I have been working more consistently on developing the public-facing version of the Tiny Factories community with a project called TinyGarden, which has now has a development log.We are also taking on clients at Tiny Factories, and I have been exploring what the service offerings could look like and how we want to keep the community involved in the research we produce.
Recommendations
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Living in Data by Jer Thorp gives a nice summary of his personal work and how we could be thinking about data science in ways that directly address biases.
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What is Golf is a spontainouse and unperdictubale golfing experience on most major mobile platforms. It was created by Triband and has been a great help in destressing my days. By far the best game I have played in 2021.
Issue 2021 04
Learnings:
This month we held our first in-person Tiny Gathering in Taiwan. It was very informal and we met a lot of new friends. It made me excited to hold more in-person events in the future.
Conversations:
Lately, it feels like most conversations have been with me as I edit the copy on my website. It’s always been a tricky thing for me because I want the site to feel like it is for me but job hunting is mostly for someone else.
Creations:
First Impressions - Pimoroni created a 7-color e-ink display that uses python. And I created a small guide on multiverse for helping you get started. The guides use a modified example with a collection of example functions to help you personalize the display quickly. The code lives on Github and every so often I add a new service to the frame. Let me know if there are any you would like to see.
Field Notes from Taipei - I observing new environments when I travel and started keeping small journals of what stands out to me. This week I made a mini-site where they can start to live outside of Twitter. My next step would be to add a mapping layer to connect you to the locations of the sights, sounds, and videos.
Recommendations:
Gumption by Nick Offerman - Focuses on a collection of American figures who display high levels of gumption in how they go through their life.
Nintendo Builder Garage - Let you make mini-games similar to their LABO product, but without the cardboard and more control over in-game logic.
Issue 2021 03
Learnings
This last week I took a much-needed break and took the train to south Taiwan. It's been a little over a year since I landed and this is the first real trip I have taken around the island. We went to Kaohsiung City via the Taiwan HSR. The experience of taking the high-speed rail was a nice personal reminder to me of the amazing things humans have made.
Conversations
This month has been full of deeply personal and draining conversations. In the wake of learning of a friends passing back in November and the ongoing violence against Asian Americans, it's been a heavy month. All that I can say is make sure you take time to check in with friends and loved ones especially given that we are currently unable to seek the in-person support we are probably used to. Call a friend you haven't spoken to in a while, and just let them know you are around and available to chat with them. Or if you want to chat feel free to give me a call.Creations:Address of the Color Space - For a long time I thought of color in 2 dimensions until a professor showed me how Adobe created a 3D color picker. It was so mind-blowing to me that I went down a rabbit hole of research on color picker interfaces and wrote about them.Generative Design with RunwayMl - Machines are slowly catching up to be able to do low-level design work. I started to explore what it looks like when I collaborate with a machine to make some lovely gradients.
Recommendations:
A Promised Land - It's uncommon for me to pick up a biography but this one was worth the time. Regardless of how you feel about how President Obama served, it's an interesting look into how the US government works and doesn't work. Zero Data Apps - Recent work of mine has been largely in the Indie-web space for the last year or so. And as I have been researching more of the culture I found a nice collection of Apps focused on you owning your data by RosanoAlex Honnold On The Responsibility of Adventure - I have really missed climbing over this past year, and found it uplifting to hear how Alex is using climbing for his philanthropic work and projects like the Olympics.
Issue 2021 02
Learnings:
February has been a slow month as I think about how to better scope small projects and meet my expectations for doing more climate-related work. I have about 6 projects in various states and am starting to find more collaborators to ship them this next month.
Conversations:
I spent a lot of time talking with professors and mentors to get a better understanding of what type of position is best suited for my current skills. The current thinking is that I should work at a company in the climate space to build my network and learn more about it. I’m not fully sold on this yet but am looking at a mix of personal projects, development jobs, and design jobs as I transition into climate work.
Creations:
TinyGarden - A microblogging platform for Tiny Factories which will soon be open to the public. We have had a consistent interest in our growing discord community and wanted to make a more public space to engage with indie makers.
gndclouds.cc - It’s been a while since I actively maintained a site and portfolio of work. I did a small design update and started to include more recent work on my site. So it should be a reliable place to see all the new and old things I have worked on.
Futureland Tea Journal - A new Futureland journal documenting types of tea.
Futureland Health Journal - Another public journal for all of us to keep each other motivated in staying healthy.
Recommendations:
Epic Measures - Thinking about the scale of issues like the pandemic or the eradication of a disease is a complex systemic challenge. This autobiography talks about how the global health standards and metrics used by the World Health Organisation started.
The Easiest Person to Fool - As I was spending much of this month working on reshaping my workflow, this podcast helped me be more realistic with my expectations on work and life balance.
Sherlock - To relax more I rebooted the BBC production of Sherlock which has held up well and continues to be one of my favorite and most unpredictable narratives I have ever seen in a drama.
That’s it! Now off to get some tea.
Issue 2021 01
Hey, welcome to the newsletter. I tend to not write much at the moment and wanted to find 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 always feels 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 front of a website to the backend or server of a project. This 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 towards 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.