🗓️ cycle 2 begins?! learnings & changes!!
apparently I'm working in 6-week cycles!!
Hello my friends!! 💖
I’m about a month and a half into job-free living, and I’m making a few changes on how I’m structuring my time off!
I dunno if you saw on my website, but my original plan was essentially:
“Make something every month & post about it.”
Hence, Mini Printer Pal!!
But, last week I held a retro with myself for Mini Printer Pal, which was really enlightening! The retro inspired me to make a few changes for how I’m approaching the next month and a half.
I thought it’d be fun if I shared a summary of my retro with you all today!
I’m also going to ✨ unveil my plans ✨ for “Cycle 2,” i.e. my next 6 weeks of work.
Hope you enjoy this planning-centric edition of the newsletter!!
♡ vrk
🌷 Mini Printer Pal: What went well?
I LOVED making something entirely on my own —
To the point that I’m questioning how all software is made today 😂
I can’t emphasize enough how soul-enriching it felt to create Mini Printer Pal, a project that was fully mine end-to-end. I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun building software.
It felt strikingly different from software engineering at a tech company. At a tech company, I get handed a product spec that someone else wrote, and then I implement that product spec. There’s some negotiation period in between, but I’m ultimately the hands to execute someone else’s vision.
It’s such a difference in feeling! When I think of the first scenario, I’m like, crying with happiness 🥹 and when I think of the other one, I am consumed with ennui lol
I understand why companies are so spec-driven — I mean, Mini Printer Pal needn’t retain a single user 😆 You don’t have that luxury when running a business!
But still… gosh it’s not surprising to me why so many software engineers burn out of this field entirely.
Counterpoint 1: Doing “just engineering” for 10+ years does help you become really good at engineering 😂 so this model is great for gaining expertise!
Counterpoint 2: I am mostly doing “just engineering” for my fortune-telling project with Aaron & Ryan, but I’m loving it!! No ennui here!! 😂 I think it’s because a) Fortune Telling Machine been a true collaboration, not “here’s the spec,” and b) I have other outlets for making things that I fully own.
➡️ Takeaway: I thought that because I truly love software engineering, that I didn’t need to have much of a say in what I was creating. That’s apparently not true for me! Not every project of mine needs to be mine, but I realized I need projects that feel like mine — and I think that needs to be a significant percentage of how I’m spend my work time, including after this “year off.”
Having a narrow focus was awesome!
I usually take on WAY too many projects at once, because I want to do so much, but when I try to do 8 things simultaneously I… end up doing 0 of them! So this time around, I really wanted to challenge myself to pick one thing and do it.
It was very scary for me to focus on “just 1 thing” for a month. I doubted myself a lot, like, Is Mini Printer Pal worthy enough to be my ‘one thing’ this month?
But now I realize there is no way I would have finished Mini Printer Pal if I was trying to juggle a ton of other projects simultaneously. Also, since I created all of Mini Printer Pal (not just the engineering sliver) there was actually so much to it that I didn’t feel like I was just doing one thing, if that makes sense! And I got sooo much out of the experience despite its imperfections!! ✨
➡️ Takeaway: Let’s continue limiting the amount of things I’m attempting to do each 6-week cycle!
I’m like, a world-class engineer 😌
I mean, we all knew that LOLLL 😂 But I just wanna brag and celebrate this! I feel so good about my technical skills and my ability to deliver on a short time-frame. I feel like I can make anything, ANYTHING!!!
OK but — at the same time, coding is also my comfort zone. If I want to focus my year off on learning, then coding is not where I should be spending my time.
➡️ Takeaway: Right now I want to reduce the amount of time I’m spending coding and instead spend more time learning things I’m a lot less confident in.
It is so freeing to have 0 users!!!
Don’t let Silicon Valley lie to you: Having zero users for a product you’ve made isn’t a failure; it’s freaking great!!!
I’ve got no bugs to fix, no code to maintain, nobody’s mad at me that something’s broken… I got to do the fun part of building a thing and telling people about it, with none of the baggage of keeping that system running 😎 what a concept!
Counterpoint: OK I do also love building useful software 😂 I get a lot of fulfillment from being able to help someone through my software! Right now honestly Mini Printer Pal isn’t even useful to me, which feels like a missed opportunity 😂
➡️ Takeaway: No users = no problems!!! 😆 More seriously: I realize I don’t want to be in a rush to make a “successful” product, because building, maintaining, and growing a “successful” product trades off against freedom. Right now I want to be as free to learn and explore as possible, which means product/market fit might be something of an anti-goal at this point.
🐣 What could be improved?
I’m S-tier at coding but D-tier at design 😂
I loved making a product end-to-end, but my end-to-end product skills feel super lopsided. I feel really strong at coding & execution, but reaaaally weak at design in particular.
(Aside: Surprisingly, I don’t think I’m nearly as weak at “product” as I thought I was, even though MPP is not a useful product lol. That’s a story for another time though!)
Of course, I don’t have to be good at design… but I realized I want to be!
There’s a corollary to this:
Because I’m so lopsided in my skillset, creating & releasing a full product is not the most targeted way to learn right now.
Basically:
If I LOVE making products end-to-end by myself,
And I don’t need to practice the engineering part at all,
And I actually have more confidence in my product skills than I thought,
But I know I am weak at design,
And I know I want to get better at design…
…I think I want to try directly focusing on getting better at design!! At least for a cycle!
➡️ Takeaway 1: Let’s focus the next cycle on learning about design and practicing my design skills
➡️ Takeaway 2: A more meta takeaway: Rather than committing to, “I’m gonna build a prototype a month,” I’d rather be more flexible. I like working in time-boxed segments, but instead of being committed to “making something” each time, I want to be open to using that time toward a different focus.
I didn’t fully take advantage of being job-free in NYC!
So: I quit my job a month and a half ago in order to pursue my passions. This has been an absolute dream. I am feeling energized, enriched, fulfilled… I’m lovin’ life!!!
Alternatively: I could have quit my job just to be on vacation for a year. If that’s what my soul was yearning for, I would have done that! But it’s not, and when I imagine this alternative reality for myself I actually get depressed lol. Right now my soul is yearning is to learn and make, and sitting on a beach eating lobster rolls all day — while also awesome — is not learning and making.
But all that said, I think I’ll regret it if I don’t take advantage my job-free era to just play and have fun in NYC a little bit 😂
➡️ Takeaway: Spend more weekday time just hanging out in NYC
🛠️ Changes I’m making
Instead of “Make something every month & post about it,” I’m gonna follow a more general purpose 6-week cycle. That’s two changes baked in one:
1) I’m extending the cycle length to 6 weeks (a month was a bit too tight) (I feel like there’s a reason why people sorta settled on 6 weeks)
2) I’m not committing myself to “make something” each cycle. I’m still going to pick some focus before each cycle: it might be making something, it might not be!
I’m going to challenge myself to code a lot less, and focus on areas outside of my comfort zone, with the intention to maximize my time spent learning.
Even though I’m not coding, I want to still make a lot of things - but these things might be like: sketches, zines, drawings, cards, etc rather than software!
I’ll take more days to just have fun in NYC!!
🪩 The Cycle 2 Reveal 🪩
Alrighty folks, that was my retro for Cycle 1: Mini Printer Pal!!
Enough of the past, let’s chat about the future! I’d love to explain to you what I’m doing next, and I’m doing so in the form of an mmm.page:
Introducing….. vrk is learning stuff
Check it out here!!!
✨ ➡️ https://vrk.mmm.page/fall2023curriculum ⬅️ ✨
I designed a curriculum slash schedule slash strategy for myself in order to improve my drawing & design skills for the next 6 weeks.
(…I actually sketched out more than 6 weeks!! I suspect I’ll want to spend more than just 6 weeks on this! but I’ll do a retro at ~week 5 and adjust if needed.)
Drawing?? Yes drawing!! This came out of an incredible coffee chat with Aaron!! We had our usual check-in for the fortune telling device project, and I was telling him how I wanted to improve my design skills… and Aaron, who does both illustration and design, suggested I learn the foundations of drawing!!
I’m ✨ so excited ✨ about this, I have long wanted to improve my drawing skills (exhibit a!!) but I felt like everything else was higher priority. So when Aaron explained* that drawing is one of the foundations of fine arts, and fine arts is the foundation of all forms of art… and therefore drawing is a foundational skill for design as well… I was like YES, SOLD 😆
*sorry Aaron I’m probably getting what you said wrong — readers, please know that Aaron said something smart and wise and if it sounds 🤨 to you it’s me misquoting and not Aaron saying something weird
Despite the curriculum hub of it all, my schedule is actually pretty darn simple:
Mondays & Wednesdays are my Fortune Telling Device days
Tuesdays & Thursdays are my design days
Fridays are free days
…And I start a drawing class in early October!
Anyway, I’m gonna try this out for the next 6 weeks, i.e. through Friday Sept 22.
I’ll be sending you all updates on how this goes…!
🦆 miscellaneous
Wow, SUPER long newsletter today!! If you got this far, THANK YOU! I hope it was a little interesting to see the behind-the-scenes of my process 😆
I’ll end with some fun links like usual:
😍 some excellent stamping going on here!!
🛍️ aaaaaaa this sticker release paper!!!! I need to hurry up and order it somewhere before it’s sold out everywhere
🎮 I forgot to link this last time - there’s a sticker game called Sticky Business now on Steam!!! it looks so cute, I need to try it!!!
🎮 …ok I saw another indie sticker game on Itch called The Sticker Game but the trailer looks scary LOL 😆 I don’t think I’m ready to “lose my sense of self” through stickers
what drawing class are you taking in NYC this October??
you are my inspiration!!!!!!!!! keep 'em coming :-)