A Quick Programming Note
A Quick Programming Note
Back from summer hiatus with a new publication, and a new focus for N30T.
Hello friends!
I told myself I wouldn’t, but I ended up taking the summer off again. I said that I’d write a few posts and auto-schedule them to go out, or failing that I’d post book-chapters-in-progress, or failing that I would at least highlight some of my favorite past posts written before I had a real subscriber count.
But then I just went ahead and forgot entirely about that plan. Instead, I enjoyed the hell out of family time for eight glorious weeks. It’s important to me — summer is the longest period of time each year that my whole family gets to spend together. Over the last few years, it has become nearly sacred as we get away from work and go on adventures together. And what adventures this summer held!
My son turned three in New Orleans with my wife’s family, and we all enjoyed the city for a week. Then we went on to Legoland for roller coasters and general sensory overload. After that, we came home to Alaska where my oldest did her first singletrack rides through the woods, both kids went crazy building tools together with our new 3D printer, we went camping along a creek near an old gold claim, and where we capped off the summer with a week at my childhood home on the Kenai stocking our freezer with wild salmon for the winter (my wife Jennie even went dip netting while I played with the kids on the beach!).
A Few Fun Pictures from Summer
Alaska summer is one of those magical things you enjoy so much and so damn hard that by the end of it you welcome the slowness of autumn with open arms.
Starting Something New in Hardware
During the time off, thoughts of hardware development started to percolate up through the cracks. Longtime members of this pub know that I have been on sabbatical for just over a year and have another year to go. You may also know that the company I sold which funded this sabbatical built space hardware. What you may not know is that I have been dabbling in hardware consulting and advising during my sabbatical time. I know, I know — impure! But dammit I absolutely love building hardware!
To that end, today I launched a new Substack called
. The first post is live now for your reading pleasure:
The Next 30 Trips
But all of that is to say: this newsletter right here isn’t going anywhere. In fact, Anti-Hype relieves an enormous amount of pressure from this pub because every time I look at my list of potential post ideas, I find that I want to explore deeper themes of grief, letting go, and how we expect too much from our careers as a substitute for the Real Work we are actually here to do.
But I also have a ton of posts in the hopper about building hardware companies, finding customers, using Excel to rough design your dream product over a one-hour lunch break, and reacting to the absolute pile of cynical vaporware I see flooding the world. Now that all those have a home, Next 30 Trips is free to be slower, introspective, and weirder.
I still don’t know what my “Next Big Thing” might be, or if I’ll even pursue such a thing at all, but I am fairly certain that if I do, it’ll revolve around steel, aluminum, copper, thermofluids analysis, and flashing lights :-). I hope you’ll check Anti-Hype out and choose to follow along!
And I hope you’ll stick around here, as well, as we interrogate the why of our work in our ongoing effort to understand ourselves.