September was a good month, a month of rebirth. New projects, rebooting stalled projects, pool closing, kids in school; a rhythm. Walks, boats, ebooks, I even bought a new iPad Mini to support my YouTube and RSS habits. Today my daughter turns six and I’m particularly sensitive to the passage of time. Lots of sunshine, lots of roses, but this month did bring with it some bad news.
Some highlights…
The big news is that Shop Talk started a YouTube series. It’s thrice weekly’ish, 10~20 minute videos over on the CSS Tricks YouTube channel. I wrote a bit about it, but Chris and I are having a good time making videos. We’re up to 12 videos so far. That’s a helluva cadence so there’ll be some breaks, but so far feels pretty sustainable.
I attended Nuxt Nation and feel a bit energized about a project that I’m leveraging heavily in my day-to-day. I’m excited for the Nuxt 3 beta which comes out next week or so and may take a day or two to build a side app with Nuxt 3 and Supabase. Also I never got to rounding out my knowledge with the Mastering Nuxt course but I may take a day or two to poke at it soon.
Actual work wise, I spent the entire month working on our new Paravel app. No client project tangents pulling me away. The amount of progress you can make when you’re fully engaged on a project is incredible. Today we gave our first customer demo and will hopefully start onboarding beta customers soon to get valuable feedback. There’s endless work to do but this is an exciting inflection point for the product itself.
On a heavier note…
This month I found out I have skin cancer. Squamous cell carcinoma, it’s called.
It appears heredity has caught up to me, and as far as malignant cancers go this is about as mundane as it gets. 94% success rate with a special surgery called Mohs surgery. The dermatologists don’t seem too alarmed . Their lack of alarm makes me not too worried. The biggest concern is that this situation — and my general exposure to that great ball of fire in the sky — will be something to monitor for the rest of my life.
Don’t want to end this post on a bummer, but feels relevant to chronicle this on my life blog. Having a pathway forward —a diagnosis, prognosis, treatment plan— for health issues is a major differentiator in your quality of life. I feel lucky in that regard to have a pathway and weep for those who don’t (currently) have one, because I know the despair. The book of Proverbs says “Without vision, people perish” and I believe that applies on the micro and macro levels of life. It’s also worth noting I’m a post-processor, so while everything feels normal now, I’m sure some weeks after surgery and when the adrenaline washes away this will have a different impact.
As always, fuck cancer. Hug your loved ones. And don’t worry about little ol’ me, I should be fine.
Empirical Vibes
- 📖 Reading: Finished ~3 books this month and some comics.
- Essentialism: Another productivity life-hack book. I like it and it cited a lot of the other books I’ve read and liked. I would recommend this book though. I don’t know if I’m ready to join the Essentialist religion described here, but it’s compelling to apply some of its principles.
- Ask Your Developer: Enjoyed this book as it appeals to my own confirmation biases, but loved the centering around allowing your developers to interface with your customers as well as letting your developers inform your product line, becuase they’ll have a sense of how ideas work in the system.
- The Cult of We: The tragic story of We Work and the billions of dollars they burned thru and the wannabe-Jesus CEO suffering almost zero consequences.
- Cleared out ~3500 unreads in my RSS reader. 🙌
- 📝 Blogging: Published 3 blogs, noodling on some drafts.
- My Notion Blogging Kanban was kind of a hit. Lots of folks said it helped them. I’m glad to hear that.
- No one saw this post.
- An announcement about Shop Talk videos
- I made an opengraph image for my Surprise Chain post and nearly doubled my original traffic.
- 💪 Fitness: Could always be better.
- Still enjoying pickleball.
- Did some Apple Fitness.
- Walking at least a mile every day taking the kids to school.
- 🎙️ Podcasts and Video: ~6 podcasts and ~12 videos.
- ShopTalk and Aside Quest are cruising
- Recorded short videos for the new ShopTalk Video adventure
- ⌨️ Open Source: Garnered some Open UI wins.
- Dogfooding a
<spicy-sections>version of my bookshelf for Open UI that we’re using for bug testing and evaluation. - Made a short video demo of
<spicy-sections>for the W3C.
- Dogfooding a
- ⚖️ Budgeting: Categorized my work expenses and some personal ones, so I feel like that’s a win. But have fallen off of the budgeting. Going to get back on.
- 🎮 Gaming: Nothing of note.