Welcome To the Yak Barbershop!

Just a little off the top.

I've struggled a bit with side projects since writing my missive about priorities in early October.  This is due to a few contributing factors:

• I was skeptical about the business opportunities Gemini laid out for me.  The research for the small niche businesses indicated the niches were fairly well covered.  It doesn't mean that there aren't business opportunities to be had, but I have to be excited about doing something that isn't reasonably certain to earn me some cash if I'm going to contribute significant time to it.
• Readership for the blog and LinkedIn has dropped off significantly.  As such, I'm less likely to block off time for activities that I hope will drive readership if I am, in fact, not driving readership.  This blog will always be a mainstay, because I like to write.  And, I'll post my thoughts on LinkedIn for the foreseeable future, because, even amidst sluggish activity, it's proven to be a decent networking tool.  Should I ever decide/need to seek full-time employment again, I can point to my activity on this blog and that site as indicators of the type of employee I'll be (for better or worse).
• When given the choice to code up a potential business opportunity or spend time practicing drawing (pixel art or freehand), I've lately chosen the latter.  Sure, it's mostly a diversion, but if I am going to throw a business justification at it, I now have tools that allow me to market my unique brand.  And there's something thrilling about being able to sketch a concept in my head to match the content of the post rather than just praying I find an image that's good-enough and not licensed out the wazoo.
• I'm not good at asking for help.  I'm a stereotypical Gen-X male who's prone to abide by the sage medical advice of "rub some dirt on it" when faced with a compound fracture.  More to the point, I'm not willing to ask for paid help when I have neither a business plan, nor the desire to pay someone potentially exorbitant amounts of money to move said non-existent business plan nowhere.  I remain convinced that all of us have the ability to start a business of some sort, even if it isn't a billion-dollar unicorn sparkle horse.  But the hardest part for many of us is discovering what we're good enough at that will generate income.  For the rest of us, it's adjusting our expectations to meet our capabilities, but I don't think this post (or this blog in general) is for that audience.  They're probably off writing their own self-help books relying on dubious sourcing.
• My consulting work is going well enough that it fends off any existential concerns around, say, feeding myself or deriving artificial self-worth through achieving the capitalist's dream of being able to buy a solid gold toilet or three.
• I've worked to remind myself that if I don't happen to spend a certain number of hours coding, writing a post about art history, or even drawing for pleasure, the world's not going to end.  I'm meeting life's obligations, trying new things, and not disappointing an audience en masse, so why worry so much about sticking to an artificial schedule for the schedule's sake if it's just going to stress me out?
• But what about achieving the next level of business success?  I guess some of us just aren't cut out to born hustlers in the exciting 996 culture of today.  Why live a life when you make a billion dollars and pay someone else to live it for you?  In the end, it's the amount of capital you accumulate that counts most, right?

Despite all of that, I always crave a side project to work on.  I've been enamored with programming and software engineering long enough, that I still fear losing the basics of the craft if I don't work on something, because it's tied to my identity.  My biggest problem is that I always want that something to be practical, however small its application in life.  But then I remind myself that my first project when quitting my job was writing a fake travel site that was never going to serve actual traffic, so I guess my need for practicality is relatively small (plus, most of the drek that passes for business ideas these days is just really more of a rehash - usually now with more AI! - of an existing concept, so I may stumble on to an idea by simply writing something over the nth time anyway).

With that in mind, I've decided to invest my time in yak shaving.  Within the realm of programming (though it appears the term originated on an episode of Ren and Stimpy in the 90s), yak shaving refers to indulging in a useless activity.  Maybe it's something as trivial as making sure all of your code is formatted just so, or something as large as rewriting an app in a different language or framework because you can and because it's new.  

As all of my activities at this point qualify as useless, I've decided to focus on a few ideas for now to keep my coding skills sharp enough:

• At one interview a decade back, someone asked me to architect Twitter.  I asked whether they wanted the functional architecture (how the app actually works) or the operational architecture (how it works at scale).  I received a most helpful response in a curlingly snide undertone of "It's Twitter!"  So a decade later, maybe I'll write up a mock version.
• I recently read in the NY Times that volunteer fire departments, which make up the vast majority of fire departments in the US, are struggling with budgets in general and with the cost of incident tracking software due to industry consolidation in particular.  As much as I'd like to turn this into a viable application, I don't think I have the expertise in the field.  But it'd still be interesting to emulate and see what I can learn/create.
• Since the death of the financial tracking app, Mint, I've decided that I don't want to spend $35 a year for someone to pull my data from my most confidential sources and mismanage its presentation for me.  So, I went back to tracking my finances via a spreadsheet.  I've decided that it'd be interesting to challenge myself to create a relatively robust timesheet using Google Sheets as the backing data store in under 100 hours.  There are a million other financial apps, and the spreadsheet itself works just fine, but, hey, yack shaving

Ok, for me, there's actually a bit of a practical need for the financial app.  Google Sheets is great, except when you need to do something on your phone.  It has an app, but writing to the spreadsheet is a pain.  It's not intuitive if you need to switch between alpha and numeric characters, and it requires an additional step to save that the website doesn't.  At the very least, I want a better interface to enter data on the fly.

I must admit that I've indulged in a bit of misdirection up to this point in the blog.  I actually did create a financial app recently (so, it's more than just a what if) and gained a lot of insight about future tooling and deployment.  I also - at least for the first step - decided to pare down my requirements to a minimum viable product, but I'll relay the details of my journey over the next several blog posts (with the occasional ranting aside, I'm sure).

Until next time, my human and robot friends.