After almost 3 and a half years I finally made my first dollar selling a product. 🙏 Read about the process for creating the first product!

Long overdue update to bootstrapping a business by building an audience first. Here's the latest as of August 2020.

TypeScript added optional chaining in version 3.7 that should just work but I managed to have a project configuration where it didn't. The problem was with the transpile target.

I'm back! My writing going forward is going to be more conversational and less preachy because nobody likes that. Especially me. I hate people telling me what to do. So what have I been doing since 2018?

I read quite a bit. There’s never a time when I don’t have a book that I’m reading. My list of books to read is so long it might as well be infinite. I will probably never get to all of them. There’s always new books being published. New ideas being developed. The goal is not to read every book ever published. That will never happen. Just as we won’t ever watch every show ever created.

I was in a conversation about how parents influence their children through parenting. Stories were shared. I realized during this conversation that my parents had critical roles in shaping my life. It seems obvious to say it. Of course our parents shape who we are! But I never took the time to think about it.

There used to be mail order book clubs. They probably don’t exist anymore given the rise of Amazon and digital e-readers. I loved books so deciding to join a mail order book club was easy. One of the books I got was _Crucial Conversations_. I only read it once because I lent it to a friend and never got it back. But the ideas in the book resonated and core ideas stuck with me.

If you don’t want the life everyone else has then don’t do what everyone else is doing. I read or heard that somewhere. A long time ago. And it has stuck with me because of its obvious simplicity. If you do what everyone else is doing then odds are you will get the same results. The only way to get a different result is to do something different. And usually that is not the path of least resistance.

There has never been a time where I wished I had not learned more about a skill or topic. Yet, I often feel I’m wasting time or not being productive when I take the time to learn instead of producing obvious and visible outcomes. I’m starting work on a new project. I can get it done quite quickly with the same tools and systems I’ve used before. But there’s also new ideas and tools out there now. Ones that I don’t know much about and don't immediately understand on first glance. Learning something new is hard. I know this and know that persisting through is the right thing to do.

I started 2018 with a few new goals and habits. One goal was to do a single-arm pull-up. The year is half over and I can perhaps do a quarter single-arm pull-up. We’ll see where I end up at the end of the year. One habit was to donate money each month. I selected a bunch of charities that I believed in and rotated who gets a donation each month. Usually it is just the suggested donation amount on each charity’s website. It isn’t a lot but it is a lot more than I normally give in any given year.