What I'm Up To Now

My journey of finding myself continues... A lot has happened since the last "Now" update. I anticipate a lot will happen before the next one.

Full-time Data Analyst

A couple of weeks ago, I was offered a full-time position as a Data Analyst @ Guy Carpenter. This is my first full-time gig, I am very excited to do good work. I am working for a new Data Strategy department that was assembled to build the whole data infrastructure for Guy Carpenter. This is no easy task, which makes it so interesting and exciting.

Side Hustle Projects

Earning more money is still a goal of mine. With my new full-time gig, the income is higher, but still not enough (God that makes me sound greedy). Not only that, I would love to make my income a little more diverse. Most importantly, earning from something I built would feel fantastic, I assume. Indiehackers community is a huge inspiration for this! These are some of my projects that are focused on making an alternative income source:

The Shop for Dev

This is currently a store of developer-oriented merchandise. In the future, I hope to turn it into a more diverse shop. I got the idea for this product when I was looking for a Django sweatshirt, but couldn't find a good one. This idea is excellent, even if it doesn't pan out. Here are a couple of reasons for that:

• Learning to build a Shopify store
• Learning Marketing
• Spreading the community love
• Donating a percentage of profits to open-source communities
• Talking to founders of some tech (DHH replied to my question of using Ruby on Rails logo)

Due to other projects, this is moving along slowly. I need to put more time into this. Can't for my first real order! 🤞

Built with Django

I have been running this project for a little while now. This is my attempt to collect/curate cool projects that were built with Django. We already have a good number of projects on the website. I have a lot of ideas on how to make it better.

One idea I had is to interview makers who submitted their projects for a podcast (Built with Django Podcast). I already talked to Alexander Isora, the maker of The "Unicorn Platform." I am struggling with audio editing.

I also want to improve the UI a little and make a separate page highlighting Django makers.

DocPhoto

This idea was born when I was making a photo for my USCIS application. I went to CVS to make a photo and, despite four different tries, got the shittiest picture. I'm sure some people have the same experience of making document photos.

DocPhoto is a simple website I built as an MVP to see if this will work. For $15, you get both a printout and a digital version of your photo. Since you are the one taking it, you can make it perfect. I built the MVP with Carrd, Airtable, and Stripe.

Learning Projects

The main goal of the projects below is to learn and have some fun.

D3.js chart

I recently bought the "Fullstack D3" book written by Amelia Wattenberger. The book is pure gold, in my opinion. Amelia is doing a great job, explaining the concepts of D3 and showing them on real-world examples. I am working through examples in the book (that's easy).

My current project is to build a small chart showing me how many words I publish on my blog each month.

Gridsome Personal Website

I am trying to rebuild this website with Gridsome to get more Vue.js exposure and to finally wrap my head around JAMstack. Javascript makes my head hurt a little. This time I am very determined, though. I will also get exposure to GraphQL, which is something that got me interested for a while now.

Kushim - Vue Rebuild

I dropped the pursuit of making Kushim earning money for now. I want to make it more robust using Vue. I still use Kushim for my personal diaries, but I totally understand why others don't. I will rethink the whole concept, leaving the journaling part for sure, the Digital Garden, and CRM I will probably drop.

With this project, I hope to increase significantly my API building skills as well as general frontend skills.

Tolstoy Wisdom Calendar

With this project, I want to wrap my head around email. When building Django projects, email setup was one of the scariest things (as well as stripe setup, more on that later).

Tolstoy had complied a calendar with thoughts and quotes from various philosophers and intellectuals. This was recently published as an online doc. I was able to scrape all the quotes and created an SQLite database out of it. Now I want to set up an automated email system that will send me a quote each morning.

Dj-stripe

Since setting up Stripe in Django was a pain, I decided to do this small project. Essentially I am creating "product" on one of my sub-domains. The cool thing that there is no product. I need to only focus on the Stripe part.

The goal is to create a full workflow of Signup -> Pay -> Get access to something.

I already built the skeleton, and run into a roadblock with Stripe. Hopefully will solve soon 🤞

Personal

Note-taking

I am building a note-taking system based on Tiago Forte's system - Building a Second Brain. He has a paid course that I would be interested in taking, but since it is a little out of my pocket range, I will have to use the public information. Thankfully, he shared a lot of content with the world, and that was enough to get me started.

I am using Joplin as my second brain. The collection of notes seems to be growing every day. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. For starters, migrate all my Pocket and Kindle notes.

Writing

Tiago has a cool friend, David Perell, who is known as the "Writing Guy." He has a similar course but focused on making high-quality content. It leverages Tiago's work on note-taking quite a bit. I've read a lot of David's posts and have to say he is quite convincing and motivating. It didn't take long to persuade me on why writing is great. More than that, it didn't take long to motivate me to write more.

I'm still far from perfect. For example, I do write more, but I don't publish. I am to scattered in my writing. I have roughly 6-7 posts that I've put on pause. Need to improve on that.

Luckily, this brings my joy.

Working from Home

I wanted to try working from home for a long while now. Due to the recent COVID-19 outbreak, my company decided to make everyone work from home, which should be interesting. It will be useful to test myself in a remote environment before making the decision to jump into it.

The amount of time saved on the commute make me very happy already. However, I have to admit that some times during the day, I am not productive. However, can't say that I am productive 100% in the office, either.

Stay safe.