2024
- https://levels.io/startups/ - how to take an idea from 0 to 100
- https://levels.io/copywriting/ - dead simple advice for writing good copy
- https://levels.io/hoodmaps/ - a crazy long post documenting how Pieter built an app from the first line of code to being complete
- I want to make an app for prayer that combines the best elements of Duolingo and Readwise. I often tell people I will pray for them and then forget, so I want to build something that solves that. A place I can store the things I want to be praying for, that also reminds me to pray and maybe even has some gamification to encourage me to keep engaging with my prayers.
- I also want to make a quick capture app. What I really want to make is a widget for an android or iPhone, that makes it dead simple to capture quick notes and have a running log of these quick notes. I haven’t found a satisfying solution for this yet.
- I’ve also considered writing a weekly email newsletter that either has a paid subscription option or a donate option. It would have to be something that provides value… I was thinking either “hacks” for the average office user to use their computer better, or a weekly interview with someone who works at NASA, highlighting the person and their work.
- Make sure Tiny Theme is installed on the Plug-ins page
- create a custom theme (or edit your existing custom theme if you already have one)
- add the following page to your theme: layouts/partials/microhook-post-list.html
- in that page, add the code below:
- save the template
- ChatGPT, from Open AI: https://chatgpt.com/
- Gemini, from Google: https://gemini.google.com/
- Claude, from Anthropic: https://claude.ai/
Mikenna and Josh's Wedding
It’s the beautiful easing into dawn as I write. I’m sitting in a rocking chair on the chapel deck, overlooking one of New York’s finger lakes. In the middle of the quiet and solitude, a speedboat just ripped across the lake as I finished that last sentence. It’s 6:50 a.m. I was up at 5:00, woken by my daughter crying. My back hurts and my neck aches from sleeping on the hard wooden bunk bed of the camp cabin we’re staying in.
Despite the aches, pains, and upset baby, I am at peace. My soul is at ease in the morning light over the lake. Now that my wife and daughter have gone back to bed, the seagulls are my only companions.
I had started reading Nietzsche but had to put it down. It’s just too… depressing. Too depressing for the goodness of this moment. Which is ironic, because he was talking about the need for solitude and nature. But he was discussing that need as it relates to all the “blood-sucking poison-flies” that we encounter in our interactions with other people. Sure, the “blood-sucking poison-flies” are out there, but I don’t think they’re as pervasive as Nietzsche thinks. And even if they were, that’s not what I want on my mind right now.
I’m excited for Mikenna and Josh getting married this afternoon. Though it can be stressful, I enjoy the excited energy of being around the wedding party in the days leading up to the wedding.
I used to think weddings were silly. A flashy “look at me” beginning to a lifelong commitment. I still think they are overemphasized in our culture, but I see the value in them now. Bringing people together and having grand celebrations helps everyone process and incorporate big life changes. This is true also for funerals, grad parties, and other traditional celebration/events for big life changes.
While a wedding is about the bride and groom, it is for everyone. As the attendees at a wedding, we get a shared experience of the start of the couple’s journey. We show our support for the couple, and we strengthen bonds with each other, further strengthening the couple’s support network. We are reminded of love. We are reminded that love is worth celebrating. We get to be part of a sacred covenant. Hopefully, we put aside our selfish aims for a day and allow the spotlight to be on the couple.
Maybe most importantly, we pause. We recognize that there are things in life worth pausing for. And the greatest of these is love.
A moment of silence for the people on low-carb diets…
So cool… Saving this to try out on my blog later. Matt Webb has “collaborative cursors” on his blog, so you can see other visitors' cursors and chat with people who are currently on the same page. I love that he hangs out on his home page and says “hi” to people sometimes.
Is it better to be a cowardly lion or a brave chicken?
My favorite doctor appointments are the ones where I wait forever, then the doctor comes in and says “After looking at your file, we can’t do anything until we run some tests. Schedule those and come back later”. /sigh
Indie Hacking
I have a tendency to be consumed by a niche interest or hobby every now and then. In the past it’s been disc golf, counter strike, yo-yoing, hot sauces, coffee, apologetics, and even card magic. Now I’m introducing the latest interest that my free-time has fallen victim to: indie hacking.
What is Indie Hacking?
Despite having “hacking” in the name, indie hacking is not nearly as nefarious as it seems. It does not involve late night attempts to crack the access code to a terminal while 80s synth wave music surges in the background.
Indie hacking is building software products without a large team and without investments from venture capitalists. Many indie hackers set up their businesses as “lifestyle businesses”, which means that they optimize for time freedom instead of financial growth. So instead of hiring a bigger team to grow the business to infinity and beyond, an indie hacker might set up process automations to make their business run on autopilot so that they can have more time in their day.
My Introduction to Indie Hacking
I started down this rabbit hole after listening to Lex Fridman’s podcast with guest Pieter Levels. Pieter is notorious in the indie hacker community, and has set up several lifestyle businesses for himself, such as nomads.com. After being inspired by his journey, I took a look at his blog and a couple of his posts gave me more to look into:
Looking at these posts then led me to Show Hacker News, Indie Hackers, and Product Hunt. Show Hacker News is a great place to see what other people are building and to see how the “hacker community” responds. Indie Hackers has all sorts of articles and resources with info on getting started. They also have a podcast I just stumbled on today! I had never heard of Product Hunt before, but it’s a place where each day new apps get launched and then voted on. The most popular apps rise to the top, so for the early-adopter community it is a way to see what hot new apps are available, and for makers it is a great way to get visibility and users for a new product.
What Indie Hacking Means To Me
I’ve been inspired by all the stories I’ve read and the products I’ve seen. My day job is fun and rewarding, but it has become removed from coding. I miss the tight feedback loop of having a small feature in my head to build and then bringing it to life. To reconcile that, I’m moonlighting as an indie hacker. I have no grand monetization scheme, no clearly laid out plan, and little free time as a new dad working a full-time job. But I’m building nonetheless. My latest creation is fedmeetup.com, and I just pushed some new updates to it over the last week.
I’m still a bit embarrassed by how wonky the interface looks (need to work on my design skills) but I’m trying to embrace the indie hacker mantra of “ship early, ship often”. Fed Meetup solves a problem (Where should I host a federal in-person event to maximize savings of taxpayer dollars?) in its current form, so I’ve released it into the wild and will build it alongside those using it. I know of at least a couple of people at NASA who have started using it and I plan to broadcast it more widely through NASA. Once it has had success at NASA, I’ll start outreach to other agencies.
On top of Fed Meetup, I have other ideas that I’m itching to build:
This is just the beginning of my ideas, so I’m going to create an /ideas page on this blog to store all of them. I want to share these publicly partly for accountability and partly because I think they need to be built, so I welcome others to build them too! If you have any interesting ideas you think we could work on together, I would love to hear them.
The Piece I’m Missing
The main way I differ from other indie hackers is that I don’t have an intense focus on monetization. I’m more of an indie hobbyist, who may one day metamorphose from hobbyist to hacker. Indie hackers are usually very focused on their Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) which is the key measure for a subscription based business. After reviewing my financial situation, my MRR between my blog and Fed Meetup is -$7. I pay $5/mo for blog hosting, and about $1/mo each for my domain names. And none of this is pulling in any money.
For now, I am content with that. I’m enjoying the craft of both writing and building software products. It brings me immense joy to write these blog posts and to build things like Fed Meetup. However, I do dream of a day when the side projects I’ve built over time could support my family financially. I am quite happy supporting my family through my W-2 job, but I am attracted to the romanticized freedom that having my own business(es) would afford. I know it won’t be all sunshine and rainbows, but I think it would fit my personality well.
In my mind, the key to all of this is experimentation. This is not a big announcement of a shift in focus or career for me. Rather, this is me sharing a potential future path that I plan to experiment with. I plan to start small with my hobbyist projects, giving some more thought to how I can monetize them. Actually, I’m quite excited about experimenting with monetization and value. Stories like the Zappos founder, Nick Swinmurn, fuel my imagination. He set up an online shoe store before having any inventory. While he was validating the company’s value proposition (would people buy shoes online without trying them on?), he would receive orders and then go out himself to local shoe stores to buy shoes and ship them out. Finding opportunities for this kind of “Wizard of Oz” testing to validate business viability is exciting and fun to me.
So why am I sharing all of this? Because you can expect to hear more from me about what I’m building. Building in public is about authentically sharing the journey from idea to product. I hope to do just that and I invite you to join me and follow along.
Using Tiny Theme Microhooks to make your homepage display a reverse chronological list of long-form articles, grouped by year
I’ve been feeling like my home page wasn’t what I really wanted people’s first experience with my blog to be. I want people to be able to get a high-level overview of what I write about and what my interests are. I admire other blogs that just have a list of long-form articles, so I decided to update my home page to work similarly.
Check out my new home page at weidok.al
For anyone else using the Micro.blog Tiny Theme that wants to do the same, here is how I did it:
Instructions
Warning: Keep in mind that this is one of the more power microhooks in the Tiny Theme, so it may override other microhooks you have already set up
<div class="home h-feed">
{{ $posts := where .Site.RegularPages "Type" "post" }}
{{ $articles := where $posts "Title" "!=" "" }}
{{ range $articles.GroupByDate "2006" }}
<h2>{{ .Key }}</h2>
<ul class="post-list">
{{ range .Pages }}
<li class="h-entry" style="padding: 0.5em 0;">
<div style="display: flex;">
<div class="post-meta" style="flex-shrink: 0; width: 60px; margin-right: 10px;">
<time class="dt-published" datetime="{{ .Date.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00" }}">
{{ .Date.Format "Jan 02" }}
</time>
</div>
<div style="flex-grow: 1; min-width: 0;">
<a href="{{ .Permalink }}" style="word-wrap: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word;">{{ .Title }}</a>
</div>
</div>
</li>
{{ end }}
</ul>
{{ end }}
</div>
And voila! Just like that, you’ve updated your homepage to show a list of reverse chronological posts, but only showing long-form articles grouped by the year.
This seemed like it really hit the nail on the head. An insightful look at how “therapy culture” is imitating religion, but falling short.
Currently eating Chick-fil-A on a picnic blanket in the parking lot of a Barnes & Noble. I love Saturdays.
Street Corner
Today I found myself in the downtown area of an old, little rural Ohio town. Surrounded by brick buildings, with a large, antiquated concrete community bank on the opposite corner. I stopped in at a local Chinese takeout place with my family for lunch. We ordered our food, and were told the customary “10 minutes”. While waiting for them to prepare our food, I stepped out onto the corner with my daughter.
It was… unremarkable. Another typical Ohio day in a quaint Ohio town.
But doing unremarkable things with a one year-old can suddenly make them remarkable.
I recently started a tradition of working from a different coffee shop each Friday. Today’s Pumpkin Pie Latte was a nice complement to deep work ☕
My Meeting Philosophy
Quests > Goals
This got me thinking about how I frame my objectives.
I replaced all the X-Large t-shirts in my closet with Large. I am surprised just how much better I’ve felt wearing clothes that fit right. I tried different options and ended up ordering 7 colors of the Next Level N6210. They’re cheap as dirt with an “athletic dad-bod” fit.
Moon, silent, alone.
“Arise, abyss!” she commands.
Dark depths stir to life.
I like when a bathroom has beautiful or insightful decor. I learned something new today about a train that debuted in 1936. Why did trains look so much cooler back then?
Our cucumbers are out of control. In one day we harvested six cucumbers, each bigger than my forearm. The situation is so dire that I’m having tajín-seasoned cukes with coffee for breakfast. 🥒☕
Sharing a gelato flight is a great way to cap off the evening.
26 Pieces Of Advice To My Past Self
A Recommendation for Trying AI
The following is a message I shared with my organization today.
In light of NASA’s push to train up the workforce on AI, I wanted to share a tool that I’ve been using in my day-to-day. This is a simple tool that would be a good introduction for folks who haven’t been using AI much.
Perplexity AI is a conversational AI assistant and search engine that provides citations for sources it is using. You can also specify whether you want it to only search through academic journals, Reddit, or other sources.
I’ve been using this about as much as I’ve been searching for links with Google. I’ve been using it for research, learning new things, troubleshooting other tools I use at work, etc. The cited sources help me to see where the answer is coming from, to judge whether I should trust it or not. And it’s really easy to use. Just type in a question you want an answer to, and it will give you cited responses.
A lot of the other big LLMs are good too, and each have there own strengths and weaknesses. Perplexity would be happy to tell you what they are!
Some others I’ve tried are:
Recent Microblogs
So far, I think I’m most proud to have passed on a love of pocket journals to my daughter ❤️ She loves scribbling on the pages and showing off what she drew.
After taking this picture, she disassembled the pen she was using, pulled out the refill, blew on it, and squealed “Blow bubbles!”. She has now been dipping the pen refill in and out of the pen body and blowing on it for the past few minutes pretending to blow bubbles. She is such a sweet soul. My heart is full.
I have much more important tasks to do, but it was nice to just sit on the couch for hours this morning with a coffee and put tabs on my Bible. It felt really good to accomplish something I want to do. The “have to dos” will have to wait.
