What is work?

two white rabbits

Down one rabbit hole after the other

I spent most of yesterday really digging into WordPress in a way that I really haven’t before: theme files. My current project has a customized version of the Twenty Seventeen theme, with lots of custom templates, fields, and functions that I need to move over to a new template. It’s taken me weeks to finally understand what the previous developer was doing, and there’s a fatal bug in the system somewhere that is deleting post data that I’m trying to uncover so I can clean things up. I figure my best course of action is to migrate everything to a staging site, start with a new theme, and start going through the plugins one by one to rebuild the content on the site. There are multiple pages and types of posts with custom fields that need to be displayed properly. I’m not really looking forward to having to debug someone else’s stylesheets, though.

Doing this kind of development isn’t ideal even on a staging site, given that the WordPress native code editor isn’t really suited to real work. I haven’t done PHP work in over ten years, but I downloaded PHPStorm and got started setting up a development environment. I was hoping to setup some sort of Git workflow for the site, but I didn’t find any options that were production ready, so I grabbed the files via FTP and quickly set to work.

WordPress has an official Docker image, so I set about configuring a Compse file for my local environment. There I ran into problems. I was trying to map my theme directory to the container’s, but I ran into issues with file permissions. I haven’t quite figured it out. I can change the permissions within the container to allow the container to use the files, but then they’re locked on my development host. So that’s my challenge for today, and one that will no doubt lead down many more rabbit holes.

This is just an example of the kind of stuff I do, that most people call work. Now this doesn’t have anything to do with my regular day job responsibilities, it’s for a client. And even if it wasn’t, it’s still the same type of activity that I would be doing for fun anyways. Although if you asked my wife if she thought I was having fun last night, she would have said that all the cursing and muttering I was doing under my breath would indicate otherwise. This particular project is a challenge for me because it involved a level of technical expertise that I don’t have, that I am forced to pick up in order to understand the issue — and hopefully solve it! It’s this area, right outside my current capabilities, that puts me in the zone and makes time fly.

It’s a drive that has gotten me where I am today, and has served me very well. Unfortunatley, it’s not something I find in my current day job, and is one of the main reasons why I’m looking else where these days. Part of the problem is the fact that the company constantly hovers on the edge of sustainabily and closure, but I have trouble reconciling that situation with my responsibility for it. Perhaps it’s that I don’t have any stake in the company, other than my current minimum viable salary. It’s allowed me to pursue other projects, including school and political activities, but has not offered anything for me in the way of growth in several years. I am not in sync with my boss in the way of the direction of the company or even the type of customers that we take on. The challenges are rote, and therefore not interesting to me. And they haven ‘t changed in years. Neither has my salary.

I’ve started reading Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, and one of the first exercises that they ask readers to write a workfview reflection, defining how work relates to their life, money and others. This is my response to that, of course. Work has such a broad meaning to me. It’s not just your job, it’s also the things you do for your family and friends, chores around the house or the yard, spending time with family, and yes, helping your dad or whoever with their laptop from time to time. And one thing my dad taught me, that I’m trying to impress upon my girls, is that when there’s work to be done you just have to suck it up and do it.

Work is rewarding also, and can be fun. That’s not to say it can’t be repetitive or stressful,, the most panic-inducing heart attack moments I’ve had have been related to failures at work. But I’ve helped a lot of people, and it’s often fulfilling. That’s not to say that I haven’t had horrible, dirty jobs that I had to take because I was unemployed and living on couches, but most of them have been knowledge work, and pretty chill. These days it pays the bills, but it’s the work I do outside of work that is where I continue to learn and grow.

Hopefully my girls will be as lucky as I am, and be able to make a living doing what they love. Actually, it’s not luck, it’s by design. Obviously I am not where I want to be right now. Sure, my work life is probably better than ninety percent of the world’s population right now, and I have no room to complain about anything, but it’s it the human condition to want more, to want to be more? And to me, that’s what work is, the drive to improve, to become better. Constant improvement. Refine, iterate, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Leave it better than you found it

blue plastic trash bins on forest during daytime

Taking over abandoned or mismanaged projects

Taking over a project is a much different beast than starting from scratch. I think everyone knows that it’s easier starting from a blank slate most of the time. What separates the amateurs from the professionals though is the documentation that they leave for those that come after. Most of my recent work I’ve been the solo technical resource on a small team, and coming into a new project is often a mess, and trying to decipher someone else’s work without any form of documentation is a challenge. I make sure not to leave it that way.

I’ve been doing small business networks for well over a decade, and taking on a new client almost always starts with a network assessment, inventorying the equipment, and running some kind of network or system scanning tool to catch what else we might have caught and put it into a report. Internally, we’ve been using ITGlue to keep track of all our documentation, and it really comes in handy when handing off a client. In the past, taking over an account from another IT management firm has involved sitting down for an interview with the technical resources on the other team, making lots of notes, and then rebuilding the documentation in our system. And it usually involves some sort of roughly drawn up document with passwords and other critical information.

Lately, it seems we’ve been sending off runbooks left and right, containing all the documentation, checklists and SOPs that we’ve developed for a client. I remember the first time we handed off one to another firm, seeing the surprise in their eyes when we handed over a professional, looking document. It made a real good impression, and I almost considered jumping ship with them. That was over a year again, and here I am, finding myself going through the same situation again.

My recent consultation work has mostly involved taking over a stable of WordPress sites. I’ve been using WordPress for years for this blog and others, but I’ve usually kept things very simple. Just download a nice theme, and start writing. The sites I’ve been taking on recently are much more complicated. There’s usually two or three dozen plugins deployed, and some sort of complicated theme system in place that has some particular arcane way of adding a page or making changes to a header or footer.

Since my focus here is just about writing, I intentionally decided not to spend any time on presentation. I’m literally still using the default Twenty Seventeen theme that came with WordPress out of the box. I’ve looked at some premium themes for it to give it some zazz, but ultimately decided that the effort wasn’t a priority for me. Not so with the other projects. I’ve been using an Envato Elements subscription to source my themes and templates, but each one seems to carry it’s own set of required plugins and design methodology. Figuring out how to tweak them is its own challenge.

I recently took over a site for a client. It was mostly in good shape, but had been neglected for several years. I wanted to make some changes to it, but without understanding how everything was put together, it’s proven difficult. On top of that the original designer used a modified version of one of the default WordPress templates, so the choice was to start delving into the source code or start building from scratch. And again, there were about forty plugins being used, and I’m yet unaware of a simple way to trace an elment in a rendered WordPress site to its source. Plugins will often add elements to the Dashboard UI, or the document editor, and figuring out what goes with what is a slog.

So far, the choice for me has usually been to tear it all down and start from scratch. Cloning production to a staging site and deactivating all the plugins, to see what we’ve got, content wise, is usually the first step. Then I can all the pages and posts to see which elements are missing from the original site. “There’s a shortcode for a slideshow plugin, so let’s note that and re-enable that.” “Why is half of our content missing?” It’s because they used some post taxonomy plugin to put certain content in a separate blog. And so on and so on.

There’s one thing I picked up in the last year or so, called Architectural Design Records, or ADRs. It’s basically a decision making artifact that details the reasoning behind taking a particular design approach to something. They’re closely tied to user stories, and can be placed right in a Git repo with the rest of the source code. I’ve been trying to carry some of the ideas behind ADRs into my own projects, and not just software ones. It’s a good practice for any sort of system design, whether that is technical, business, or personal. Leaving these little artifacts behind for future you or for others seems that it can be a valuable practice, and will come in handy when the time come to tweak something months or years down the line. “Why on Earth did we decide to do x again? Oh yeah, here’s the ADR…”

I am defintely not a WordPress ninja. As the old saw goes, “the more you learn, the more you realize that you don’t know anything.” Give or take. Managing a web host reseller account and using a dedicated tool to keep WordPress installations and their related plugins up to date is simple enough, but taking over these sites and trying to redesign them with an eye toward user design, ecommerce and SEO is a completely different set of skills than I had hoped to working on. And I don’t know how far I want to develop it. Most likely I’ll be doing what I can to salvage the projects I’m working on and get them to the state where it can start generating some revenue, then I’ll start bringing in other resources to hand off tasks to. And when I do, I’ll have supporting documentation to hand off to them so that they can quickly get up to speed, a history of how things operate and why they were setup the way they are.

The clock ticks

And another row on my life calendar begins

My birthday was good. My dad came over, and my mom and brother were able to join us over Zoom to celebrate. I got a craft beer kit and a board game that I’ve been wanting to get my hands on for years, Dune. The kids played outside most of the day with their friends, and I set up the slip and slide for them to play on. The day was wonderful, but was marred by my neighbor knocking on my door to literally tell me to keep the kids off his grass. Its an ongoing cold war that unfortunatley has taken up too much space in my head for the past two years.

Today begins the first day of what should have been summer vacation. In an alternate dimension, I would have just dropped them off at daycare, and my wife would have gone into work. I would be returning to an empty house, to myself for eight wonderful hours. That was another life. In a sense, having the kids home has exposed how little of my day was productive before. I don’t even remember what I spent my time on, I usually aimed for two hours of billable time a day, the rest was just administrative or non-productive. A year ago I was on the last week of a tense campaign which I would lose by thirty points, before sequestering myself away for several months.

Last night, we managed to get the girls to bed on their regular schedule, and Missus and I were able to get to bed on time as well, despite all the revelry. I already told the girls that even though school was out for the summer, Dad School was not and that we would still be continuing their studies. They protested, but we’ll see what happens. We’re also relaxing our self-isolation, which has been broken in all but name anyways, so that they’re free to play with any of the neighborhood kids.

As far as COVID goes, our state has moved into Phase 2, which means larger gatherings. I’m still avoiding public places as much as possible and wearing a mask whenever I go out. I’m still not going anywhere that isn’t necessary, only grocery stores, drug stores, and takeout. There was some good news out of Italy that the virus may be weakening, but this has been disputed. So it looks like we’ll continue to live with the thread of coronavirus for now.

Today looks like it’s shaping up to be another day, another Monday, back to work. Here’s to another week. I’ve been using a life calendar for the home screen of my web browser, so every morning when I open Chrome I’m met with a picture like this:

That’s my life, up to now. Almost halfway through an expected lifespan of eighty-five years. Of course, no male in my family has lived that long. My grandmother is eighty-seven, and she’s doing ok. But there are no illusions about my father’s current health, or mine, given the way I drink. This life calendar is just my way of reminding myself that the clock is ticking, and a way to stay focused. My wife saw it the other day and thought it was some morbid sign of mental illness. She also thinks that that I get morose when my birthday rolls around, as I contemplate my mortaility.

I don’t think there was much of that this time around, it was probably as much an artifact of approaching forty, it’s not that big of a deal at forty one. And anyways, I don’t need my birthday to remind me that time is passing. I see it tick by with every week now, a momento mori on my home screen, a reminder that this day is a gift.

Now it’s time to get to work.

Looking forward

cupcake with candle

A review of the past year and goals for the next one.

Yesterday was a mess. The kids stayed up too late the night before and were fussy all day. I probably wasn’t in the best mood myself, and wound up losing my temper several times at them. In and out, in and out of the house they went. Made a huge mess in the garage with a mudpile, and even had the gall to take a delivery off the porch to use as part of their games in the back yard. I spent the morning working in the yard. I repurposed one of our unused flowerbeds as for some pepper plants, and what I assume are pumpkin plants that I salvaged when I dug up a tree stump in the back yard. Then I cut the grass.

The girls spent much of the day doing decorations for my birthday today. The dining room is off limits, and I’ve managed not to peek. Something tells me that they chose a Star Wars theme. We’ll see.

I managed to keep to a regular schedule last night. I quit playing Factorio at ten and spent another forty minutes or so reading in bed before I turned off the lights. I got up at seven, and feel pretty well rested right now, Elder has been up, and I hear the rest of the girls rousing. I hope everyone is in a good mood today. My father is coming over, for the first time since the Lockdown, and Missus has arranged a Zoom part with my mom and who knows who else.

Last week was ok. I give it a ‘C’. I can’t really think of any accomplishments that stand out, although I did manage to write every day, including another two thousand word article that went up on LinkedIn and Substack. Building that will take time. I didn’t spend as much time as I should have working on my consulting gigs, but I ran into some technical issues that set me back. And I didn’t apply to many jobs, other than the long-shot for Invest Like The Best.

Looking back at what I accomplished this past year, it’s hard to imagine that a year ago this time I was still involved in a tense political campaign. I wasn’t writing about it then, and it’s probably a good thing, because I still haven’t talked to my campaign manager since. It was that toxic. Finishing school is no doubt my biggest accomplishment, but I’m not quite sure what I would consider my number two. I’ve learned a lot, and completing classes were their own projects considering, but I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished that much.

I’m in the middle of listening to a podcast interview with a serial entrepreneur who spent several years building a successful company and now runs a firm based on Berkshire’s model. He said he doesn’t have the drive to start a new company these days, but that it happens “accidently” from time to time. He much prefers to leave the day to day operations to others, and prefers to swoop in to which ever firm is having problems and fix them. This allows him to shift his focus every two weeks or so.

At one point he mentioned someone he knows who had an idea and was able to execute it in two or three days, and now makes some fifty thousand a month in revenue. It’s sort of mind boggling. I’ve been toiling away at my day job at Zombie and Boss still hasn’t been able to make it sustainable. I’m still working on my consulting business, but neither of my clients are at the point where they are bringing in any money. We’ll have to change that this year.

Right now I have two goals that I’ve set. FIRE by 2024, and Sixty Days to Six Figures. So far, all we’ve managed to do with the first goal is lose our mortgage insurance, which we’re rolling back into the mortgage. This should shave about four years off the life of our mortgage, which should put us somewhere around 2036. My consulting business has about six months run, but I’ve got to finish the project before I can take on more business. Or, more importantly, before I start another one of my own.

The big question for me in the next year is whether I can build a business, a real business, that can bring in four thousand dollars a month in revenue? I’m not even talking profits, but just revenue. And do so in a way that requires minimal effort on my part? I’m thinking like an ecommerce store or something similar, like selling a book on Amazon. There are lots of questions about how to go about this. Do I build it all myself, or do I use some capital to hire assistants or outsource it on Fiverr or somthing? Do I code it, or do I use a service like Shopify or some of these other no-code platform?

I should correct that. The question is not whether I can, but how fast can I?. There’s no doubt in my mind that I can make it happen, but the real question is how to make it happen amidst everything else happening in my life, at the speed I want. Two hours a week isn’t going to cut it. I have to find a way to work on it every day, to keep pushing things forward faster. To balance being a dad, and a husband, all while working a day job and everything else I got going on.

I feel up to the challenge, so it’s time to work. Here’s to the next trip around the sun.

Life is a game

white and blue wallpaper

Reflections as another round begins

It’s my birthday weekend, a fact which I exploited last night to tie one on. The girls and I watched half of the The Phantom Menace last night before we tried to put them to bed at their normal time before giving up. We’ve got them trained on melatonin gummies, and I don’t give them any on the weekends, so they wind up staying up an hour or more past their bedtime. So we wound up having a little party afterward. I put a song on the piano and Younger banged around on it, singing some silly song she was making up. It was too cute. We took the girls outside to see if we could watch the moon, but it was cloudy so we just sat out there for a while until Missus took Younger to bed.

I bought Factorio, on Tobi Lutke’s recommendation, and it is right up my alley. Building little systems to harvest resources, transport them, and build more and more things. I am going to spend too much time on that game if I’m not careful. It’s addictive.

Systems thinking is affecting my brain. Everything is a process now, threads of the machine we call life. I only have control over my attention, and I need to guard it carefully. I’ve spent most of my life with it scattered in dozens of different directions, focused on one project or another for a few months, then onto the next. Of course there have been themes around them, music and computers, mainly, but the threads within them have run deep in various directions. Mostly broad, rarely deep. Jack of all trades, master of none.

There has always been so much to do, that it’s been hard to focus on what I ought to do. Every decision made, another choice abandoned, and so paralysis ensued. Attentioned wandered to what was easy, not to what was complex. These days I’m forcing myself to delve into things, tracking them and holding myself to account to work on them.

I still make music these days, but I don’t write songs. My coding is getting better. My designs are still huge messes that I wouldn’t share with anyone, so I’ve started building test coverage around them so that I can make the changes I need without fear of breaking things, or of getting overwhelmed by my own construction and forgetting where I am in some abstraction. There’s always a purity about starting from scratch that is addictive also, new and promising, that threatens to pull me away. Burn it down and start from scratch. The grass is always greener.

It’s much harder to fix what’s broken when you’re flying by the seat of your pants. After an hour in Factorio, running my little toon from one resource pile to the other, I realized I could have the the coal extractor feed itself, and I could run extend the conveyor here to feed this other machine. I woke up this morning thinking about it. Instead of maintaining two separate lines of conveyors for different goods, why don’t I just create a loop with everything on it, so that the machines can just pull what they need? The game has already infected my mind.

There are tons of games on Steam that gamify things things that some people pay to learn at college or tech schools. Learn networking through HackNet or computer science through 7 Billion Humans. Then there’s Zachtronics, who makes games that teach you how to code assembly language. Truly insane.

Last night I stayed up too late, drank too much, and woke up this morning hungover. As I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling fan spinning round, I was thinking what I wanted to do with the day. I couldn’t decide, and I didn’t need to. I got up and did what I always do, (after popping an ibuprofen): put water in the microwave, do pushups, make tea, meditate. Write. The day will come to me, I just need to go along with it. Watch out for the traps, optimize this, tweak that.

My designs may look like much of my house, a mess, things strewn haphazardly in this room or that, piles of clutter here and there. As the days weeks and years go by, I’m becoming more aware of the way everything is threaded together, of how the cycles are repeating. Change this, move that. Optimize, optimize, optimize.

Another trip around the sun almost complete.

School’s out, forever?

girl wearing VR headset

COVID at Home: Day 81

My kids are constantly running around the house while I’m on the phone with clients, I usually wind up making apologies to whomever I’m speaking with. Everyone’s been understanding, usually with a sympathetic “I know”. So it’s clear I’m not the only one struggling to work from home while trying to run a daycare and elementary school. I want to get a sense of how other families have been coping the last three months, and share my thoughts on where we go from here.

There are two things that have been made perfectly clear to any parent who has been forced to pull their kids out of day care. One, teachers and day care providers are not paid anywhere near enough what they should, and two, the education system as we know it is completely ill-suited for today’s day and age. I’m limited about what I can do about the first problem, but I do have some thoughts about how we’re going to deal with the second one.

Our daily life

I’ve got two kids, a second grader, Elder, and a rising pre-schooler, Younger. Elder has been finishing out her public school classes via Zoom meetings, which usually run from an hour to ninety minutes in the afternoon. She’s also involved in the gifted program, which is one day a week in the morning. Based on what I’ve seen, the conferences are a mix of the teacher and students chatting, a math lesson, maybe a physical activity, followed up by a reading lesson. I don’t get much of a sense that the focus is on academics, which is fine. The kids need the interaction. Elder’s attention on the lesson varies from day to day. Sometimes I’ll see her sewing, or working on a typing lesson while the class is going on, and I’ve caught her playing video games on several occasions. I usually make her start on the computer a half hour early to do whatever assignment the teacher has, and let her have some free time to play a game after class is over.

The teachers use Class Dojo to communicate with the parents, and Google Classroom for assignments and archived Zoom videos. When the Great Lockdown started, the schools here sent out work packets for all kids. We were originally told that the kids were supposed to bring them back when school reopened, so Elder actually did a lot of them at first. After the second order came out closing schools for the rest of the year, more packets went out, but they’ve mostly languished on a shelf with the rest of the scrap paper. Especially since we figured out how to use DocHub to edit the math PDFs and turn them into the teacher via Classroom.

Younger requires more of a hands on approach. We’ve got flashcards and printable worksheets for letters, although I rely primarily on Khans Academy Kids on the iPad to keep her busy. It has a ton of interactive lessons on letters and words, numbers, stories and such, with rewards for completing them. She likes it, when she gets to browse through the library to pick what she wants, but I prefer that she follow the pre-selected lessons for the day. I presume there’s some sort of algorithm that’s tracking her progress, but she’ll often complain that it’s ‘too hard’ and fall back to picking and choosing stories and songs. I try to keep it balanced, and let her switch over to PBS Kids videos after she’s done twenty or thirty minutes of Khans.

The rest of the day is mostly free time, although I do have a number of chores the kids do, and I try to limit their free time with the television to two hours a day. We live on a quiet street with a big back yard, and plenty of things for them to play with both inside and outside the house. So long as they’re not fighting or destroying things I pretty much leave them be. I try to fit in a bike ride every day, or spend time playing football or soccer, wrestling or other horseplay. If it’s raining I pull up GoNoodle, for some dancing activity, or Cosmic Kids for some yoga. My wife, fills in when she can, and usually does some sort of craft activity with them, while I tend to focus more on their meals and making sure that they’re doing their chores.

Public and private education options

It seems a lifetime ago that Missus and I were looking over summer camps and dreaming about sending Elder off for a week of fun with the Girl Scouts, and plotting which of the grandparents we thought were most likely to take Younger for a few days so that we could have a break of our own. Alas, it is not to be. Since the kids have only been spending a couple of hours a day during the week on “academic” work, my wife and I don’t see any reason why we should change things up and are going to continue their education over the summer.

man using silver iPad

Tobi Lukte, the CEO of Spotify, made a really good point on a recent podcast appearance about the velocity of learning that struck me. He said there’s no limit to how quickly people can learn if they just have the teachers to help them. It is a factory model system, designed to produce workers, not citizens, and to “educate” children as a group, making sure they have the basic skills that they’ll need to perform their factory assembly line jobs.

I’m generalizing, of course. Today’s schools have lots of steps to provide resources and opportunities for both “the gifted” and those with special needs. And there seems to be a trend spreading around the country for academy-type schools with a focus on industry-specific skills. Still, we are still a long ways from wholescale self-paced learning in schools, and there’s plenty of evidence that students perform best when they are able to proceed at their own pace, at their own direction. The public education system is still locked into this factory farming style of learning. They’re trying to change, of course, however the pace of political change at the local, state, and national level, makes this a slow process.

I’ve been reluctant to break away from the public schools for several reasons. One, my wife and are both products of it, and “we turned out great”, as Missus like’s to say. Recently though, as I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize that is not quite the case, and now, as a parent and engaged adult, I’m more aware of the issues inherent in the system. And besides, the world is not the same as it was thirty years ago. Secondly, private school is expensive. We’ve been spending a large percentage of our annual income on day care for the kids at a “learning center”, and we’d been looking forward to Younger entering public schools so that we could save that money. The savings there during the lockdown have been immense, and are one of the prime factors driving me to home school. It’s for that reason that we’ve ruled out Montessori. Too expensive, and in our case there are too many logistical issues about getting the kids there and arranging care outside of their hours.

And also, there’s a political factor to choosing public school. In my hometown, and in many areas across the American South, many of the private schools are segregation academies, opened in response to Brown v. Board of Education so that white parents didn’t have to send their kids to school with black ones. And home schooling for me has long been associated with religious fundamentalists, who pulled their kids from school to prevent them from being taught evolution or sex-ed. Attending public schools taught my wife and I a working-class, dare I say liberal education, and sending our kids there has been an act of solidarity with the working class. Choosing public schools has been a political act.

COVID, current and future

Of course, COVID has changed how we think about these issues especially within the context of class economics. Not only are the poor being hit hardest by the lockdowns, but it also seems to be making more affluent families such as mine more well off. The disparities between economic class correlates directly to the types of people most affected by the pandemic: aside from front-line hospital staff, essential workers like those in grocery stores, shipping warehouses and meat processing plants are the ones most exposed to the disease and others, such low-wage workers in food service, have joined other furloughed employees on unemployment. Meanwhile, tech and other knowledge workers like my wife and I are mostly uneffected, working from home remotely. And since we’re not forced to go into work, as some are, we are literally saving hundreds of dollars per week in daycare costs. I imagine the same is true for others in higher income brackets.

Beyond the economic effects, I wonder about increasing academic inequality. There’s no shortage of broadband or computers in my house, so Elder has no problem accessing her online schooling, unlike some of her peers who may be limited to using their parent’s cell phone. Then there’s the technical support that I am able to offer to her, and assistance I can provide to her teacher when needed.

And yes, I realize how fortunate my family is.

I already expect that we will be dealing with COVID for another year, likely until a vaccine is available for mass production. A second wave is almost an certainty now that lockdowns are easing, and may force states back into shutdown as cases and deaths rise. Our blue-state Governor seems to be handling it rather well, but I fear others are not. And I am not optimistic about public schools reopening next year, either. There are too many logistical issues around how to maintain social distancing during busing, instruction and lunch times. As one commented remarked, whoever wrote the safety guidelines for the schools apparently doesn’t have kids.

Daycares are currently under capacity restrictions, one teacher per nine children; two for infants. I suspect that most of the spots are being taken by the children of essential workers, or WFH parents who just need a break from the kids. We’re maintaining, and I’m considering keeping the girls home, even if restrictions are eased up enough or we can figure out a way to deal with the logistical issues. If I had to guess, I would wager that the schools will offer parents the option to home school their children, keeping them home, but allowing them to participate in class time via teleconference.

And if not, then I suppose that I’ll be sending Elder off to school, and her sister back to day care as well. Or perhaps not. This summer will tell how well the kids handle themselves. My wife is skeptical that I’ll be able to keep it up permanently, especially if she has to return to work, but to be honest, I’m enjoying keeping the kids at home. I understand the appeal of the home school crowd to have more direct control over their children’d upbringing, and watching them play every day is magical. It’s not all roses though, it is hard. I lose my temper at them and we fight about how much screen time they can have, what they eat, and their chores, but nothing beats spending more time with my kids and watching them grow up. As I’ve remarked often, it doesn’t make sense to work so hard, to spend so much money to pay others to raise my children.


With resources like Khan’s Academy, Code.org, and others providing math and knowledge resources, work from home parents have tons of tools available for homeschooling. How many parents like me, forcibly exposed to homeschooling by the pandemic, are going to choose to opt out of the traditional public school system, even after things return to “normal”? Will we once again count on public workers to watch and teach our kids, or we we instead choose to maintain this more direct role in our children’s education and upbringing? For me it’s exposed us to the joys of what some might call unschooling, and we will be reassessing things as the summer goes on, before the kids are called back to school.

Tweaking the system

person using macbook pro on white table

Sixty Days to Six Figures, Day 27

Yesterday, the host of one of my favorite podcasts put out the call for a position, someone to take over managing some of the operations of one of the top business and finance podcasts in the country.

I literally stopped everything I was doing and wrote him an email as fast as I could, giving a few details and promising to follow up with him later after I caught up on one of his more recent episodes and could provide some additional input. I was literally giddy when my read receipts pinged back.

I picked an episode with Tobi Lutke, the CEO of Spotify, on Building a Modern Business, listened to it while I took notes, then wrote a five hundred word email to Oshag. I wound working over two hours altogether on it, and wound up getting to bed an hour late. Before I turned off the lights, I spent a few minutes reading Design Your Life, the next book on my reading list. I was somewhat amused by the fact that here I was, reading a book about applying design systems to one’s personal and career path, when I had just inadvertently picked a podcast with a similar subject.

The interview with Lutke, like most Invest Like The Best pods, cover a lot of ground in an hour, and much of the conversation focused on systems design, specifically with the context of business. Lutke is a “card carrying” video game enthusiast, and they talked about the skills that he learned from games like Warcraft and Starcraft, specifically the value of attention, which is rpeople learneally the primary resource in these types of games — and in business. I was quite surprised to hear that Lutke spends so much of his time at Spotify focused on teaching philosophy within the organization, and I found his approach fascinating. They also touched on the idea of a personal blueprint, a document which Lutke wrote that he sends to his new hires and collaborators listing his quirks which incorporates personality typing.

I took my own inneogram. My top matches were challenger, achiever, and investigator. My top personality superpower was futurism. I don’t think it’s as much a reflection of who am so much as who I want to be, but it might be something to incorporate into my business relationships. Lutke seems to think that it speeds up the process of getting to know someone and eliminates some of the awkwardness that a team may encounter on their first project. We shall see.

A lot of what he said mirrored what I had read in Ray Dalio’s Principles, most notably designing systems, and his concept around baseball cards. “You have a system by design, or by defaut”, to paraphrase one of his principles. And the baseball cards are analogous to Lutke’s blueprint. What I find most interesting is how this theme has been stuck in my head lately. I had recently been thinking of what I was going to write about for the next installment of my Substack, and it looks like my subconscious has been working on it for me.

One line from Designing Your Life that made me chuckle last night was a line about how as one begins to put their plan into action, it will almost feel like people are conspiring to help you. You will start to attract opportunities. The whole thing will start to feel like a game, and that you will come to take immense joy in the process. Now, I am the last one to preach any prosperity gospel or quotes from The Secret, but I did feel that it described the day perfectly. I knew as soon as I saw Oshag’s tweet that I wanted it, that it was the exact opportunity that I had been waiting for. And I jumped for it.

Alas, Patrick emailed me earlier this morning that he didn’t feel it was a good fit but thanks anyways, so that’s that. I’m actually pleased with myself that there wasn’t any disappointment on my part. Perhaps I knew it was a long shot, or perhaps it was because I enjoyed the process anyways. I actually took a lot away from it, considering. Just applying and thinking through the possibility of it, the anticipation of waiting for a reply was exhilarating.

So another turn of the wheel, a small adjustment here, a refinement for next time, and we’ll try again tomorrow to bring things into fruition.

Groundhog days

white ceramic mug with coffee on top of a planner

The importance of routine

I finished reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits a couple nights ago, and I knew as soon as I read the first couple pages that it was going to have a profound effect on my family and I. Before I do a full review on it, I wanted to detail the current schedule that we’re trying to stick to around the house.

Morning

4-7AM: Wake up. I don’t use an alarm, and my body’s yet to settle into a consistent schedule. Six seems to be the sweet spot, but five would probably be ideal. I get out of bed, use the bathroom and take my pills and supplements. Currently niacin, magnesium, lysine, plus my statin and a baby asprin. I go downstairs, set two cups of water in the microwave for my tea, and do a set of squats and pushups while I wait. The tea goes in my thermal insulated mug, to cool down while I meditate for twenty minutes. Then I sit down to write.

If I’m lucky I can get a good deal of writing done before the girls wake up. They have a routine also. After waking up, they’re supposed to get dressed and brush their teeth. Breakfast, and then it’s their responsibility to empty and load the dishwasher. I do all the plates and cups that go up high, but I expect them to straighten up the breakfast dishes, and make sure their bathroom and bedrooms are tidy. I’ve been using the Rooster app to reinforce this with what I call DadPoints.

8AM: Work starts. Coffee. My wife has to sign on to her WFH at eight, and I’ve got a scrum call with the Zombie team at nine. To keep the kids out of my hair during this call I give them their first of two hours or television from eight thirty to nine thirty, when the markets open. I check my value average targets, and then (try) to keep working through till lunch. The kids have a snack at ten, then a half hour of outside play, or some sort of activity video if it’s raining. They like the GoNoodle app, and Younger likes the Cosmic Kids yoga videos. They have free time the rest of the morning.

Lunch

11AM-Noon: I intermittent fast, and usually have the same lunch every day: some sort of chicken sandwich wrap with a cup of nuts. I do a set of pushups before I eat. Usually I make lunch for the kids at the same time, PB&J or grilled cheese with ramen or whatever leftover vegetables we’ve got in the fridge. Missus take a break at noon, and I usually take some time to get away from the kids for a few minutes while she takes over for a bit. I usually try to spend twenty minutes at the piano, running through whatever piece I’m working on at the time.

1-3PM: Everyone is back to work, including the girls. School begins. Elder does her homework before her one thirty Zoom call. I run through alphabet flash cards with Younger and help her with Khans Kids before turning her loose to watch PBS Kids. I’m usually done with whatever I’ve got to do for Zombie and turn my attention to whatever tasks I’ve got for my various consults. Or I check LinkedIn for whatever jobs I can find. Sometimes I’ll watch a show with the girls if they’ve been good and I’ll reward them with some extra TV time. They get their second hour of day at three.

Dinner

4-7:30PM: I do most of the cooking, and most times dinner is from scratch. I try to have things ready by five or five thirty, then cleanup takes us to six thirty, when we give the girls their melatonin. I normally do the pots and pans and rest of the hand wash, I’ve been training the girls to clear and wipe down the table and chairs, and how to sweep the floor. Missus usually supervises their bath and getting ready for bed. We spend an hour talking or reading in the bed, snuggling the girls, and they’re usually out by seven thirty.

Night shift

8-10PM: I spend the last part of the night working on whatever else I can do on the computer, whether it’s coding, doing tasks for a consult, or writing a cover letter for a job application. I might watch Last Week Tonight or a couple episodes of Silicon Valley with Missus if she’s up, but I usually avoid spending too much time watching the boob tube unless I’m really drained.

10-11PM: Screens are off. I make an exception for reading books on the iPad, but my phone is kept downstairs, out of the bedroom. I do a set of pushups, brush my teeth, take a melatonin, and read until I start to feel tired. Right now I’ve got Elegant Python, on the iPad which I read for about 20 minutes, then put the iPad away and finish up with whatever book I’m working through. The past two weeks I’ve read Freakanomics, Siddartha, and Atomic Habits. Next on my list is Designing Your Life.

Lights are out by eleven. Rinse, repeat.


So that’s the ideal that I try to stick to these days, the general template for it, anyways. There’s a lot left out, obviously, and a lot changes based on circumstances of scheduling and whatever else needs to be done out of the ordinary, like ordering groceries or whatever. I didn’t write about the weekend, but I’ll say that one major change that I’ve made has been to keep my sleep schedule the same. No more staying up till two AM drinking and playing video games. It throws the next morning off, which eventually bleeds into Monday. It’s just better if I maintain the same wake up time. As I said, my body is still struggling to adjust to waking up at a consistent time.

I also need to figure out when to fit in proper exercise time. Since I’ve already prioritized my mornings for writing, I’ll have to figure out how to fit it in. I was doing it at four in the afternoon, but that tends to run into dinner preparation. I just need to keep getting to bed on time and figure out where I can fit it in. The sets of push ups that I scatter through the day are the least I can do, and the kids usually wind up getting my heart rate up when they want me to horseplay or have a dance party with them.

The kids are obviously the biggest challenge, since so much of the day I’ve got them doing free play. They’re pretty good most times, but when the get bored, or start fighting, I’m the one that gets pulled away from whatever I’m doing to deal with it. That aside, I think I’ve got a pretty powerful routine that allows me to accomplish a lot, even if it’s not as much as I would like to. And helping the kids establish good habits is important also, not just for their future success, but also to help take some of the load off of my wife and I. Sure, sometimes it’s just easier to do a chore for them, but when Elder starts doing the things she’s supposed to without being prompted, it’s beautiful.

Morning in America

The White House at night, with the lights turned off.

After a dark, dark night.

I woke up this morning, following strange dreams where the roads were flooded and I wound up in some kind of speak easy. The clock said 4AM and I knew there was no point in trying to go back to sleep. I walked outside to meditate and the sky was clear, the stars bright in the sky. In the distance, I could hear someone on a crotch rocket, barreling down the avenue half a mile away. I’m slowly waking up, and the sun is starting to creep up over the treeline to the east.

The tranquility of the house seems false, like an illusion. The news and images of the outside world are two much for our brains to handle, just pixels on a screen that are screaming to be consumed, fingers always scrolling, liking, reposting. Different accounts, trying to choose which voice to use, which identity to be as I furiously post. The feeds start to blend together, encroach on each other as the unrest spreads like wildfire and consumes everything else. The chaos has subsumed everything, the brain is in distress, scrolling more, more, more: what is happening.

Missus said she did the same thing during 9/11, just watching the towers fall over and over and over. This time the images are different, protesters corralled and tear gassed, people pulled from cars, eyes lost to “nonleathal” rounds, “serve and obey” now forgotten as the country is engulfed in a police riot. There’s the posturing and strong words, there’s the green light to the militias. And then the photo op, split-screened for the world to see, Dear Leader, announcing Law and Order, walking to a church and posing with a Bible like he’s never seen a book before. And still, admirers, “a power move”, one said.

I want very hard to write about anything else right now, but how can there be anything else? Madness, madness, madness. Our President, so long enamored of dictators and strongmen the world over, has just declared martial law, war on his own citizens, and done it with a photo op that would make Kim Jong Un jealous. Declared a non-existent organization, Antifa, as a terrorist organization, as an excuse to crack down on political opponents. Sitting Congressmen, calling “no quarter” for those who take to the streets. It is all happening so fast, but so slowly.

The condemnation was swift. The outrage, immediate. Nearly as soon as he was done talking, the price of bitcoin shot up some seven percent, a vote to defund the State, as one put it. Pols and pundits expressing disbelief, shock and amazement. No, that’s not fair, many people expected this, knew this would happen the night he won. Still, “this is not the America we have known, this is something dangerous.” The President is mad.

The seven percent spike occurred right after the President stopped talking.

I have told my friends I see no way out of this. There are no leaders able to contain this fire. We are headed to civil war, revolution, or dictatorship. The Reichstag is burning. The Left will be blamed, even as police and alt-right provocateurs are exposed time and time again. We cannot escape this. There is too much technical debt in the system, a reboot in necessary.

I managed to put the phone down at the prescribed hour and made my way to bed, one habit still more powerful than the need to scroll, scroll, scroll. Missus stayed down another half hour while I read, then came back up to tell me that the world was turning their backs on us, pulling out of the G7. Good, or not? We talked about getting passports renewed, and some for the girls. Something on our to-do list for weeks now, but that seems more urgent now. The girls are too young to understand what’s going on, to know what we’re losing. We’ve been careful to keep our phones out of their view when we’re looking at what’s going on, leave the room to listen to anything. There’s no way to explain this to them.

Life goes on, for now. We stick to our routines. Make plans. Enjoy the silence and the stillness of the morning, like nothing has changed. Just the long, slow emergency that is America, burning like the sun that is now rising up over the horizon.

Building, day by day

toddler's playing building block toys

Yesterday was quite a day. I started the day by seasoning my new outdoor griddle that I got for my birthday, and then Missus and I had with mimosas for breakfast. We wound up tying one on later in the day. I still managed to weed eat the yard, and made several runs to the hardware store for mulch and some other projects around the house. So we were mostly productive before we started pigging out and watching TV. We watched Spirited Away with the kids. I wound up letting Elder stay up after Missus and Younger went to bed — for which I am paying for currently. And I managed to trip while walking up the stairs, hyper-extending my big toe and separating the nail from the bed.

So yes, it was a good day. So good, in fact, that Missus and I are both tempted to take a sick day from work. It’s not practical, though. I’ve already got client meetings scheduled and have a lot that I want to get done today. I’m running a bit late, so today’s post will have to be a short one. It’s important to keep up the habit.

I try not to look at analytics before I start a post, it’s a distraction that I can usually avoid. Today I was curious though, or maybe I should say pleased that traffic has slowly been ramping up. I’m hoping the trend continues. I’ve actually had not one, but two comments posted in as many days. It’s the post about the Moban WordPress hack, one of my most popular.

Most mornings, like today, I don’t know what I’m going to write when I sit down at my writing spot to begin. Sometimes I might have a flash of insight during meditation of something that I want to write about. I hardly ever plan things out in a concrete way. Most of the time when I do that I write under my real name. The Business as Operating Systems post was an anomaly in that regard, in that I knew I was writing something that I was going to post elsewhere, and I had a specific audience in mind when I wrote it. Most of the time, I’m just writing for myself.

It’s been a little over a year since I started writing regularly. I didn’t really make it a habit until July of last year, and fell off a bit in the winter. Now, it’s the first thing I do every morning after I meditate, and before I do anything else. Posts like these serve as my morning pages in a way. On the one hand, I hope to be able to look back in a year and be reminded of who I was and what my life was like. Hopefully I’ll be able to look back on these in ten or twenty years and see how far I’ve come. In a way, I suppose my main audience is my future self. In some way, I hope I’m writing for my daughters, and that when I’m gone they’ll be able to go back and read what was going through my mind as I was raising them. Perhaps having paper journals would be better for that, though.

I read somewhere recently from another author that the audience that they have in mind when they write is a younger version of themselves. They’re focused on helping people who are six months or maybe five years away from where he is now. It’s an admirable aim, and one that I hope to model. For now, I’ll keep writing, and keep building, word by word and brick by brick. Metaphorically, of course, since the things I’m building are web pages and software systems. I’m building a life also of course.

And that is the most important design project of all.