articles
- 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/
- Read to get ideas.
- Books
- Articles
- Give yourself plenty of time to write.
- Make an outline to start.
- Shoot for 10ish bullets. Any bigger and it is hard to see the flow of the argument.
- Write a bad draft - remember producing and editing are different activities.
- Produce, produce, produce.
- Write more than you think you need, then chop it down.
- Edit it.
- Rewrite every sentence.
- Reorder until it makes sense.
- Reread the whole thing.
- Refine, refine, refine.
- Create a new outline - Try reconstructing your argument from memory. What you remember is the good stuff. The rest might be crap. Ponder that.
- Cut and paste from your old outline into the new one.
- Make sure you have hyperlinks in the text for citations.
LinkedIn is cool sometimes
LinkedIn can be so cool sometimes. I connected with Mural’s VP of Product, Matt Crawford, and we got to talking about my experience.
I told him I LOVE using Mural for user story maps, but I’m having trouble integrating with Jira because of how our instance is set up at NASA.
Lo and behold, the current problem I’m having integrating Mural with Jira Data Center is a priority for him right now and they’re running a pilot program. I’m going to get him connected with the right people at NASA to see if we can get in on their pilot to get things working.
Mutually beneficial for everyone. Product people helping product people.
Love it.
Now 2024-10-05
What I am up to now. Check my /now page for the latest update.
Dad Stuff
My daughter is walking! She is almost 15 months old now, and it feels like overnight she transformed from baby to toddler. Crawling to walking took a couple of months, but I think she went from walking to running in an hour. We’re chasing her all over the place now. This is such a fun age.
In addition to walking/running, she’s getting pretty good at sign language and a few words. Her favorite words right now are dada, mama, baby, blueberries (besbes), bees, go (doe), bottle (baba), wheels on the bus (wuhbuh), book (buhbuh), dog (wohwoh, because our dog’s name is Lolo), bye bye, thank you and ball. She’s also gotten very good at shaking her head “no”, and is not afraid to use it. This girl has some sass. It can be challenging, but I am proud that we are encouraging her sense of self and being assertive about her needs even at this young age.
I’m having a lot of fun spending time with my daughter and playing with her. She is sweet and pure in a way that starkly contrasts the messiness and hustle of the world. She loves giving kisses and hugs. I love watching her walk around kissing her stuffed animals, and then offering them up to me or my wife to kiss them too. I want to soak in every moment I can with her.
And yet… if I’m being completely honest, I find myself having a desire to check out sometimes. My wife and I are working to keep each other accountable to not turning to our phones when we’re tired. I know I will be so much happier if I stay present in the moment, but the siren call of distraction can be really strong. I can easily fall into binging articles or videos and justifying it as “learning”, but it’s just my way of turning off to the hard things in front of me.
Creating
I continue to blog infrequently but love it when I do it. It seems li ke my creative energy comes in waves, and it has been on the upswing recently. I went the whole month of July without posting any articles, but wrote a handful last month. Recently, I redesigned the homepage of my blog and am pretty happy with how it turned out. I like just seeing a listing of all the things I’ve written about, and I imagine that’s what others would be interested in too.
A while ago I liked the idea of writing think piece articles where I do a bunch of research to from a novel opinion on a topic of interest, but that hasn’t materialized yet. I think maybe it’s just not my style? So far, my process is that I get super obsessed with an idea of something I want to write, and I need to get it out of my system within 24 hours. Then I publish it with little to no editing. I’m not sure that there’s a right or wrong way, but I’d still like to at least experiment with a more patient approach to writing.
I’ve also been working on Fed Meetup more. I had to update it with the FY25 rates that got posted by GSA recently, and while I was in there I cleaned up the interface. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, but it’s getting better. The worst part about the app right now is the initial load time. It’s atrocious, but I’m still figuring out how to get things to render correctly and lazy load in SvelteKit. That’s the next thing I plan to tackle.
I have ideas for all sorts of other things I’d like to create and put together an ideas page to keep track of them.
Work
My big focuses right now are the NASA Cause Analysis Tool (NCAT) and the NASA Mishap Information System (NMIS). NCAT was the first app that managed from idea all the way to release, and it was released earlier this year. It has been successful so far, and is getting good feedback from the mishap investigator community at NASA. These are the main people using the tool currently, it helps them brainstorm and organize data to determine findings and recommendations as part of their investigations.
NMIS is one of the NASA Safety Center’s oldest applications and I recently to over as the product manager for it. It is the source of truth for all NASA mishap data. It is a big legacy app and has a very different feel from NCAT, which is our newest application. NMIS is going through major changes right now since the mishap policy at NASA is changing, and the software needs to change with the policy. It has been fun getting up to speed on NMIS quickly and thinking about how we will implement major changes that touch most parts of the application.
Faith and Friends
The church group my wife and I are a part of has become completely overrun with babies… When we joined a couple of years ago, there were 0, and now we are well into double digits. We’ve all started going in on childcare together, and that has improved the dynamic of the group a lot. It’s a lot easier to have deep, meaningful conversation when there aren’t a bunch of kids toddling around and screaming.
I feel like my attitude toward my faith has been apathetic for a while, and I’m not sure what to do about it. I believe in Christ as my savior, and I believe God is active in my life and with me, but that doesn’t impact my heart as much as it used to. This concerns me. I feel a dissonance between my mind and my heart. It makes me wonder if I have allowed myself to get too comfortable? Am I settling for a typical American middle class life, concerned more with status and self-satisfaction than with the grand question of why I am even here? How could I not be moved by my belief that the reason I am here is to honor God and share love with others? I am praying for God to reignite my passion and excitement, but I am still waiting. That is okay, it does not shake the foundation of my faith, but I do feel like I am in a dry valley.
And despite all of these existential questions, I don’t want things to change. I really like my comfortable American life. I may be holding onto it too tightly. If I was asked to give it up, I would have a really hard time with that. It puts me in a weird place. I don’t really want change, but I am hoping and praying for it.
Leisure
I finished the Foundation Series by Isaac Aasimov, and now I am reading a couple different books: Ghost Soldiers, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.
I’ve been disc golfing occasionally when I can and have been playing really well. I played my highest rated round ever couple of days ago.
Exercise
I’ve been doing a couple sets a day of push-ups to failure, and that has been excellent for me. I’ve struggled with making time to go to the gym or even do a full workout at time, and this is so stupid easy that I’ve actually been able to keep up with it. I focus on going slow so that I use not just my arms but also my core.
My wife and I also recently got memberships to our local YMCA. We’ve gone a couple of times, but I’m not sure if we’ll stick with it. The place just has a weird feel. I don’t know if it’s too dark, or has a weird smell, but something is just off. I really want to do CrossFit or some sort of other group class like Jiu Jitsu, but those are so expensive that they’re tough to justify. They also feel like a little more of a time commitment, but I think that would be good for me. I think commitment is what I need.
Home
We’ve been rearranging the house quite a bit. It ended up in a weird setup, so I think we’re going to rearrange it all again soon. We’re trying to figure out how to have a nice adult space that is also kid-friendly.
Also, we had 5 different contractors come out recently to give us quotes for a back patio. We’re looking forward to making our backyard a nice space to entertain friends and let all the kids roam around.
This Started With A Title
Let the writing inform the title, or let the title inform the writing?
This started with a title, but it wasn’t this one.
Advice To A Demotivated Job Seeker
I received the following question in my LinkedIn DMs:
What is some advice you can give me, I am having motivation issues. I have a decent job but it’s not my dream job, trying to join the aerospace industry. Also doing my masters to specialize in AI and eventually get a leadership role. Not seeing the clear path yet and it’s hard to stay motivated.
Here was my response:
There’s never a clear path! My path has been all over the place, and I never would have guessed I would be where I am now.
I think the key is to do the best you can where you are and always be on the lookout for new opportunities. Reach higher than you think you can go and ignore the requirements in job postings, they’re just wish lists.
I didn’t expect to get the job I have now. I was terribly underqualified on paper, and just wanted to apply to see what the interview process might be like for the kind of position I might apply for in a few years. And then I got the job!
Also, have fun along the way. If you’re early on in your career, look for fun ways that you can boost your visibility and increase your surface area for lucky opportunities. For me, that looks like posting on LinkedIn, starting a blog, working on web apps on the side, etc. Just find stuff you love related to where you want to go, and start now. Find little aerospace projects to work on, or AI projects, or local leadership opportunities.
You got this!
I want to capture this in a post so I can share it with anyone else struggling with the same things. Demotivation like this is really common and I’ve dealt with it too.
To anyone else out there struggling with the same thing, you really do got this! Keep moving, keep having fun, and tell people about what you’re doing. The right opportunity will come along!
I would be happy to chat over email about it!
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.
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.
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.
My Meeting Philosophy
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:
How to Write a Kickass Article
I would like to note that as I write this, I am not following the advice contained within whatsoever.
I want to write better articles. I want to use them to reason and think. I would like to do some research and link to sources, so that my articles have some ground to stand on and they provide real value.
To this end, I’ve been doing some research on writing a good article and I made the cheat sheet below for myself. I don’t plan to follow this dogmatically, but it will help me remember what to focus on in different stages of my writing. The following is primarily a reframing of the essay app’s writing guide, because its advice resonated with me the most of what I found online.
How to Write a Kickass Article
Experimentation Is Where the Fun Is At!
My new shipment from The Goulet Pen Company makes it feel like Christmas!
I ordered their notebook sampler and got a random ink sample set for free.
An Analog Blog Post
The following was transcribed from the pictured journal entry. I used Google Lens and a LOT of editing.
It has been easy to not make time to write recently. “Busyness” is the main culprit, but I’ve also been spending time with its less boisterous sibling, distraction. And so here I find myself, back at the roots of my writing practice. The journal. I’ve missed the empty page. The empty screen is nice too, in my writing software of choice, but I can’t help feeling the weight of the myriad windows/apps/messages vying for my attention. So I’ve returned to my empty page. It welcomes my attention and thought, but does not compete for them. It is an escape in plain sight.
Check the Categorization of Your Domain in Cloudflare Radar to Make Sure Federal Employees Can Visit Your Site
Is this a blog or a node in a botnet?
I finally found out why my blog was blocked on the NASA network! Cloudflare had it categorized as a DGA Domain, so they thought it was an autogenerated domain that was part of an evil botnet 🤦♂️ I’ve submitted a request for Cloudflare to recategorize it under “Personal Blogs” so it doesn’t show up as a security threat any more. I guess my last name does look a little suspect and not quite like a real word someone would use for a domain…
Compound and Leverage
Compound and leverage are powerful forces to move us toward our desired outcomes.
I’ve been thinking about these two forces and how they can be used not only to improve finances, but they also apply to other areas of life.
NASA's First Agile Technical Interchange Meeting
Yesterday was NASA’s very first Agile Technical Interchange Meeting! NASA is becoming agile 🚀🏃♂️💨
I learned how Agile is applied outside of my discipline, web software, to improve how we build hardware and integrated systems, particularly in the systems engineering discipline.