Observe

It is October 31st which means 83% of the year has passed.

Adventure + Connection

I traveled ~30% of the year in the first half of 2022. We slowed down a bit in Q3 to focus a bit more on being local.

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• [Lisbon, Algarve], Portugal with Megna and McKenzie

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• Tech Roast Show! NY, NY

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• Annual pilgrimage to Storm King - Upstate, NY

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• Celebrating #love in Austin, Texas

This reduced speed of travel and adventure seems like a better fit for our lifestyles. It seems more sustainable and feels more fulfilling.

Research

I do a lot of research. Research is a core component of active, intentional Observation.

I've formalized this area into a Core Domain to recognize its importance in my process and to build systems to improve its efficiency and impact on my life.

So far this has proved useful - leading to more consistent, higher relevance, and larger impact learnings.

• Art inspo Domain Research (problems and market analysis) -> Creation of genspo.xyz
• F# Domain Research -> Informed my Shares roadmap for the next few months
• F# with Godot -> Unlocked CTECH with Godot and led to unique Shares opportunities

Create

Business

I shipped projects in October. It felt good and inspired me to do more.

Shipping - full iterations of creation - continues to bubble up as the best way to learn. Over the past few years I think I've had too much focus on theory / learning but not enough on actually doing. That was a mistake.

• CloudSeed -> Moved from C# / SvelteKit to F# / SvelteKit and significantly simplified the offerings.
  • This aligns it more closely with my favorite tech stack and also positions it in a market with much less competition (though also much less demand). Anecdotally this simplified stack has significantly reduced my time-to-ship and the smaller hassle has made the process much more enjoyable.
• Genspo -> A site that provides random art prompts.
  • I've rolled my own random word / phrase generators many times as part of my generative art projects to get unique names / inspiration. My research revealed that people search for this kind of thing so this is my attempt to build for them.
  • I was able to ship this in 3 days by using CloudSeed.
• hamy.xyz -> Migrated all sites to one codebase running SvelteKit
  • I like writing - I've done it online for nearly a decade. Over time my sites have sharded which made them technologically better but ergonomically worse. This move has significantly reduced my barrier to writing and anecdotally has led to much higher throughput on my end.
  • I shipped this migration in ~3 days by utilizing CloudSeed as a starting point.

CTECH

Every year I have a different answer for how to think about and execute on my love for technology and art. This year my answer is to take a generalized approach that encourages building and exploration but doesn't really care what the outputs are.

I've shifted my focus away from "Art" and towards "Creative Technology" because I think that's more aligned with what I actually like to do - build random shit with technology. This has been fun and freeing because it provides a loose framework for how to focus my energies but ultimately remains open and flexible to follow my curiosities.

Some outcomes of this Domain:

• SMASH_THE_BUTTON -> You click button, it increments counter
  • This was an experimental project to see what CloudSeed would look like if I moved to F#. I ended up loving the language ergonomics and migrating the entire boilerplate to it.
  • Project Page
• FSharp + Godot -> experimenting with tools to allow 3D creative coding with F#
  • This led to a few Shares like Godot: Script with F#

Shares

At some point this year I decided that Shares would return to a primary Creation Domain. I think this makes sense as building in a bubble doesn't work - you've got to market your creations for it to ever have a chance to create impact.

I've also decided to take it a bit less seriously and instead focus on producing things with value. This has sped up my creation cycle, led to much less cost on my side, and paradoxically seems to have led to creations of equivalent or better quality. Once again focus on small batch, full iterations seems to win over slow iterations.

Many of my recent Shares have been around F# and my recent Creations as this is what I've been building. My plan is to keep my Shares highly relevant / similar to my Creations to lower cost and improve their effectiveness as a marketing channel.

Reflect

Finance

The markets have been down the past few months which hasn't been great for my total networth. That said, as a slow, long-term investor this dip represents a great opportunity for long-term wealth by presenting many stocks at a large discount.

So while my net worth seems bad on paper right now, I expect that these months of consistently buying into the market will yield positive long-term results.

Fulfillment

I am feeling fulfilled. I've made a lot of decisions this year that seem to have lowered the "excitement" rating by going out less, drinking less, staying up late less, etc. But the tradeoff has been significant increases in my median contentment.

It's an interesting shift - one I don't think I would've intentionally made two years ago. But it seems like it's moving me in the right direction.

Next Steps

I've got big plans for the remainder of the year. Follow along on Twitter - SIRHAMY.