PJM - October '21

Happy November -

Hope your Techtober/Oktoberfest/Pumpkin-Spiced-Latte-Month...or whatever was a good one!

I had a couple of super productive weeks, and spent the last few weeks exploring Bali before it fully reopens and I come back to Aussies downing Binnies at every corner ;)

Welp, it was good while it lasted ;) Now let's get to the latest updates...

PROJECT UPDATES...

Wavetrotter is now... SwellPirate

I started Wavetrotter about 7-8 years ago - mainly to scratch my own itch of trying to find the best places in the world to surf. It never made enough money as a job replacement, but it was well worth updating while I lived the 'digital nomad' lifestyle (that was prior to everyone but McDonald's employees becoming remote workers). The site was named after my first home outside the US - a small hostel in Costa Rica. It's been a few slow years and the design has changed a bit, so I thought it was time for a rebrand... enter SwellPirate. Same data, same idea, more pirate.

Nana's Recipes

It had been a couple years since I made an iOS app and iOS 15 introduced some cool new features including concurrency with async/await. I decided it was time to brush up on some SwiftUI and limited myself to 1 week...

The goal: remake my grandma's recipe app (originally built with Flutter) native to iOS with SwiftUI.

I think the app turned out great and gave me confidence to quickly jump back into the iOS game at any time. I also integrated a new app, Rowy, to my Google Cloud database to make it easier for my mom / anyone else I give access - to upload recipes in a spreadsheet like table.

DeFacebookMe

I began creating a new mini-guide to rid yourself of everything Facebook. ...was hoping to finish it this month but the mountains of Bali caught me ;)

Stay tuned in November...

CURRENTLY LIVING IN...

BALI, INDONESIA

My last full month in Bali until the new year :(

I haven't lived in one place for 2 years straight for nearly a decade. Definitely got some weird vibes leaving as it's really become home at this point.

Looking forward to some family & hometown friends time though.

MY FAVORITE CONTENT FROM OCTOBER...

Business | Marketing

One of the most interesting pieces I've read in a long time. This is what happens when sex-worker meets data-analyst. No matter what you think of sex work - this is worth a read - super interesting on both the human dynamics element and sales & marketing.

A good reminder when Jack Dorsey and others shout from the rooftops how Bitcoin will help save the world. Between Satoshi and a few 1000 people owning most of the Bitcoin network - I can't help but feel it's already gone down a dark path.

Speaking of Bitcoin - I may not completely agree with this depiction, but it's a hell of a viewpoint for how Bitcoin and crypto is a Ponzi scheme.

I've always been rubbed the wrong way about TurboTax, Quickbooks, and any of the other Intuit 'products'. I just let them take my money because...well...you have to right? Usually there's a reason for that. This reporting makes a lot of sense - another monopolistic US tech corporation using money and influence to control Washington and fuck over people.

Worldcoin is a digital currency that launches by giving away a piece to every person in the world...all you have to do is scan your eyeball??? Hmm, so I LOOOOVE the premise. I've always thought...ok this blockchain stuff...tokens...cryptocurrency...well, duh, it's the future...sooo everyone should just start with 1 coin right? Ok how do you distribute? And how do you stop tyrants/thugs from stealing tokens? etc. Sam Altman's a lot smarter than me, but I just don't see this iris scanning technique working out worldwide. Interesting project to keep an 👁 on though ;)

Accounting and consulting firm PwC will allow all its 40,000 U.S. client services employees to work virtually and live anywhere they want in perpetuity, making it one of the biggest employers to embrace permanent remote work. Probably the largest non-tech company to offer the option. Fuckin' huge 🤯

Design | Development

The fact that you can now open your entire local code repository in your favorite code editor ON THE BROWSER is mind blowing 🤯. Coding simultaneously with teammates? Fuck that's powerful. Even more so than how Figma changed the game with realtime vector based design.

Nuxt 3 is finally in public beta. My favorite Javascript web framework. The world prefers React, but fuuuck Vue is so much nicer in my opinion. The documentation is better, you don't have to use ugly JSX, it's much easier to onboard junior devs, and it's just more intuitive and clean. Looking forward to the stable launch as it's still a bit buggy.

If you're an engineer - these ring true and enjoy the laugh. If you're not an engineer - read this as carefully as a philosophy book so when you need to hire an engineer you can read through their bullshit.

Catalogue of billions of phrases from 107 million papers could ease computerized searching of the literature. Homeboy just did what drove Aaron Swartz to kill himself. We'll see if he really did find a loophole to avoid prosecution.

If you haven't watched the interview - worth spending 15 minutes rather than reading the hundreds of articles about the interview.

Travel

The shakeup of the global workforce is going to take a decade before it really settles down. One thing is for sure - working from home is going to change suburban towns across the world.

For nearly 200 years, the Fugate family – "the blue people of Kentucky" – remained insulated from the outside world as they've passed their blue skin on through the generations. Epic tale.

The property is 3888 Acres in Cody, WY. Yeezy/Ye/whatever his name is had some big plans but the lyrical genius' plans didn't quite work out.

Books | Podcasts | Music

This should be required reading in every school so the world never needs to go through a debacle like this again.

"Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable" —Albert Camus