Today is my 38th birthday and I decided earlier this week to start a new campaign on my life I call "Just fucking do it."

The meaning of this campaign dates back to 2000 when I was moving from my old town of Seneca Wisconsin to Viroqua Wisconsin and starting my sophomore year of high school. I had always had issues with my temper and a short fuse growing up. I remember one time in like 3rd grade I glanced across the school's playground and noticed a girl looking in my direction and I didn't like it, so I went up to her and kneed her in the crotch. Why? I don't know, but that's a defining moment to explain how bad my temper and anger was as a child.

But when I moved, I had this chance to completely reinvent myself. Be who I wanted to be. And the who I wanted to be was not the kid known for fighting or having a short fuse to easily trigger for their own amusement.

So I took to this campaign of changing myself, which at the time had no name. But I told myself "Nobody can make fun of you if you already make fun of yourself. Now they're laughing WITH you and not AT you." So I became the funny kid. Everything was a joke to me, I was roasting myself harder than anyone else could.

That absolutely changed my whole life. Two weeks after starting at my new school I got pulled into the office and my principal said he was calling my old school as they think they got the wrong transcripts because the kid I was and the kid they prepared for were two seperate people.

But I seem to have lost that train of mentality over the years and had an epiphany earlier this week while over thinking a lot of stuff with my personal relationships and my work. I've written a few times over the past few years about struggles I have, such as struggling to complete projects or with imposter syndrome.

That changed this week. No more being the person I don't want to be. Time to just fucking do it and be who I want to be. This mentality has been doing great for me so far and if you think it'll help you, do it too.

Want to stop over thinking? Just fucking do it.

Want to be that person who gets up early and goes to the gym? Just fucking do it.

Just Fucking Do It.

I put a draft for this post in November 2021 to write about this in January to release on the 25th anniversary of when I learned to code (January 27th, 1997, btw) but things got in the way and I forgot all about it.

But then over the past couple months I've been revealing a bit more history about myself online including the decade plus of experience I have working in the adult industry and how my curiosity coupled with the budding internet marketing industry fueled my passion for the web and my career on it. So today, although very late, I will give the full history of my career online and how I got to where I am today, but first we must go back...

Christmas '96

It all started Christmas morning in 1996, I was 11 years old and like every other kid my age at that time I was excited to open the Nintendo 64, but like many kids of that time, I opened all my gifts and there was no Nintendo 64.

But do you know what there was? A big box my mother explained was a gift for the whole family as she opened it. A Compaq computer running Windows 95 and was Internet ready and I was completely lackluster about the whole ordeal. I didn't care about computers, I wanted a video game system.

January '97 & Yahoo Chat

Christmas came and went and then the new year hit us, I was exploring Yahoo's services and see what they offered when I came across this link "Chat" with the text "New!" next to it and decided to see what it was all about.

I was dropped into my first ever internet chatroom and I became hooked... I was able to find people like me from all over the world to interact with and I found myself drawn to it more and more until I remembered my mom yelling at me at 5:30AM one day for still being on the computer when she woke up.

It wasn't long before I came across this one user, he went by the name of "Daz." Yes, it even included the period. I was perplexed, how did he get the period, no special characters!

One thing Daz taught me was that you didn't have to be a major company to own a website, anyone can build one and put it up. So he started to teach me the basics of HTML CSS wasn't really hot yet, it had just came out.

My First Website

After having all the possibilities of the web at my fingertips, I took my new found skillset and started making my first website. I don't remember much about what it was about, I just know I was edgy as hell back then and my site's name was "Poster Child 4 Abortion".

I published it on some free hosting sites back then. Never really got into Angelfire but was a fan of Homestead.com, so I put it there and started sharing it.

I treated that first website almost like a blog, before blogging became popular.

Soon after putting my own website up I started running into more like-minded people in Yahoo! Chat who also ran websites, that's when I found this genre called "E/N" or "Everything / Nothing". People blogged, shared jokes, put up funny pictures and anything else we could find on the net.

The Possibilities of the Web

There comes a point when everything in your life changes... This is that moment in my story. The moment I realized the possibilities of the web and what you can do. I was introduced to internet marketing, more specifically selling porn online.

Daz was instrumental in teaching me how to build on the web, but a new guy comes into the scene named com3, don't remember his real name but we'll call him Dave in this story.

Dave told me to throw up some photos of naked women on my website it'll make more people want to visit, so I did and I was amazed at what was happening. More people were coming to my site! I was ecstatic.

Dave then told me to sign up for all these "webmaster" programs. They would give you free content to put on your site and a special link which would make you money when they clicked it.

I was instantly hooked on the idea that I could make money online.

I dove head first in....

Come back again for part 2, where I talk about my decade long stint in the porn industry!

Just about 6 years ago, I wrote about never completing any of my projects. I mentioned that the reason was because of being worried about putting all that effort in and the project fails. 6 years later and I am still struggling with this, but I understand the reason why more.

I have severe imposter syndrome and right now I am at peak struggle with it.

As I sit here, paralyzed to complete the final two features needed to launch Primcloud public beta, the thoughts running through my head which fuel this imposter syndrome...

Sure I have the skills and expertise to build and launch the product, but do I have what it takes to keep the business afloat, support the customers that we get, and especially handle anything that could go sideways?

The stuff that could go sideways is the hardest for me, what if I just don't know how to fix what is wrong, and a customer's whole business is affected by this? It is very hard for me to accept the fact that I, my work, could be the reason a friend or someone elses business is affected in a negative way.

My thoughts are if I don't finish these two features, then we don't launch, and nobody can give us money. Because once they give us money, there's no going back. We cannot put the cat back into the bag.

That scares the crap out of me.

Imposter syndrome is real, and it sucks.

Unless you've been living under a rock, everyone in tech is aware of and constantly talking about Apple's App Store 30% commission requirement for all in-app purchases, including requiring all purchasing in your app to through the in-app purchasing system for them to get their 30% cut.

Epic Games has taken them to court over it, which I think is in bad faith personally. Epic Games wants to put an app store of their own on Apple AND Google devices so they can be a middleman and take a cut of other peoples pie too.

But that doesn't mean I side 100% with Apple in this situation. Yes I do believe their requirements are too strict, heavy handed and greedy. 30% is the "standard" across the board, but they are the ones who set that standard, all other app stores barely existed before Apple.

Most companies have expressed how it's harming them and I empathize with them, for example Twitter just announced their new Spaces Ticket system and a majority of the cost of a ticket is going directly to Apple. But some have started to show gratitude towards Apple, such as CEO of Snap, Inc, Evan Spiegel, says they are happy to pay Apple 30% as without Apple they wouldn't exist.

I think there's a middle ground we can have here, Apple should lower the rate a bit, 30% is a bit high, but they can also not be so anti-competitive and offer app makers the ability to use their own payment methods along side of in-app purchasing API's, then charge the fee for using those API's.

Some people would find that a good tradeoff as using your own payment methods would require extra work for the infrastructure to make it happen when some apps just exist solely on the app store and not on the web at all.

And by using their own payment methods and systems I don't mean Stripe coming in and offering Swift API's for making payments directly in your app, but allow you to call out to your own API's to charge people, whether you use Stripe, Braintree or your own processing behind THOSE API's.

I've worked for a lot of different people in the almost 25 years of being a developer, and in that time I learned a lot of different things from them. Some good, some bad. But mostly I learned exactly the type of company culture I want to cultivate and the type of CEO I want to be.

Customers First

By putting customers first we will be building a company that doesn't recognize "competition." Sure there's technically going to be competition. We're not the first and definitely won't be the last cloud hosting platform on the internet, but that's ok. Our main goal is to be the best we can for our customers. One thing I plan to do as CEO and founder of the company is to always pledge to be easily accessible and responsive to any customer who reaches out to me.

Employee Happiness

I always want whoever works with us to feel their mental health and happiness matters. This means a healthy work life balance, and under absolutely no circumstances will we have over time or chaotic work environments.

I want to be the CEO of a company where the people building the company are happy and the people buying from the company are happy. That is my goal.

Today, in the first time since I registered this domain in 2008, I am running my personal site on a CMS I did not write.

Today, I switched from a static site generated by Next.js to Ghost 4.0. You may be asking why I decided to do this, and it's a simple reason really; I wanted a better writing experience.

Yes, markdown is a good writing experience, but Ghost's editor is amazing. Not to mention all the added bells and whistles that come with Ghost 4.0.

My intentions with this switch is to write more often. The point of this site is to be my thoughts, stories and ideas... Why am I not writing my thoughts, stories and ideas more often?

Currently you can also subscribe for free, or monthly for $1 or yearly for $10. But I don't expect anyone to pay, currently. I just want to build a user base of people interested in my writings, and get my skills in writing better so that I can then at some point maybe charge for my posts.

I'm not exactly sure I am set on this theme.. I may translate it into my own doings still, but for now I'll leave this as is.

Seems a lot of people want to get into the maker world but they often find themselves having problems coming up with an idea. This is what I do to figure out what I am going to work on.

First off, I'm not a big fan of trying to find a unicorn idea, one that will get massive funding and catapult me into startup stardom.

I'm a fan of finding low-touch SaaS products that have already proven the market for me. It's so much easier to get going when someone else has done validation for your idea.

If your goal is to build a product that can sustain the lifestyle you want, you're building a lifestyle business and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. So seek out something that interests you and you can build something solo or with a co-founder.

My only biggest advice is to be passionate or at mimimum interested in the market. I had spent a few years building projects in different markets that I found myself not really having an interest in. This caused me to spend my time diddle daddling around and procrastinating until finally I just lost complete interest in the project.

You also don't have to be revolutionary in the market either, you don't have to absolutely shake it up and make your competitors clammer in fear of what you're doing. Just sliding into the market and getting a slice of that pie can be a damn good living for indie people. Hell some markets even the crumbs are pretty lucrative.

Your main advantage could be just that you are open to suggestions from your customers or that you just have damn good customer support.

Don't underestimate how much customer support can be for your product in itself. I switched from one service to another after 8 years purely because the customer support was superior.

So find that pie you want to get a slice of and start building. Be sure to ignore the big startup guys advice because they're in a different world than you, they are preaching what they only know, and that is getting funding. You want to build a business. One that is sustainable.

There's a lot of talk around the maker and indie hacker communities about what tech stack should they use for their next project, and there's two possible scenarios I think one should consider when starting their next projects.

Scenario A: Do you want to learn new tech?

In this scenario you would use a real world project as learning grounds for a new tech you're interested whether it is React, Elixir, or anything else, then it doesn't matter.

If your intent is to learn new tech then I would say go ahead and use this project to learn that tech. You may be slower but your goal isn't just to ship a product, but also learn new tech while building it. Don't use how fast you ship as your metric on success here.

Scenario B: Do you want to ship a product fast?

In this scenario, then the tech you use does matter a lot. You should be using the most efficient tech that you know. It may not be the latest and greatest hotness, but the end user, your customers don't care about that. They care that the service they are paying for does what it advertises.

So if you move faster with PHP/Laravel and jQuery than there is absolutely nothing wrong with continuing using that to ship.

Today marks the end of an era, I no longer identify as a full snack developer.

Over the last 5 years after transitioning from being a primarily PHP backend developer to a Node.js developer, naturally my JavaScript skills improved immensely which resulted in becoming a "full stack developer" due to the ability to also do frontend JavaScript too.

Because of that, I tried to stand out from the crowd and began billing myself not as a Full STACK Developer, but as a Full SNACK Developer. This has done great for catching peoples attentions. I even own the domain full.snack.dev which I used to talk about my skills, experience and somewhat a makeshift resume. Even helped immensely in getting new clients.

But I quit consulting last week. I am now focusing fully on being an entrepreneur and indie maker building my own products.

So with that said, adios my good snack friend.

Another decade gone, where has all the time went?

A lot of stuff happened in the last decade. In the first quarter, I went full time web development as my primary job. That was a big thing for me, as I've been doing web development since 1997 (23 years to this day) and had always been doing it part time on the side. In August 2011 I got a contracting role that brought me completely into the industry full time, and since then have bounced around contracting and full time employment.

Not only that but I also went from being a strictly backend PHP developer to a full stack JavaScript developer after switching to Node.js, which coincidentally also improved my JavaScript skills so much that I do frontend too.

All in all it was a good decade for my work. I'm excited to see how the next decade goes as I transition from a developer to an entrepreneur.

Kinda.

Let me back track a bit. A week ago I made the decision to pivot from my project Merched to App Metrics as my primary project. After having a discussion with a few people, I have determined that Merched is too massive of a project to be able to launch solo in a timely manner.

So I decided to see how quickly I can build an MVP of App Metrics and launch that in under a week.

Let me tell you the grind is terrible. After about 3 days of pulling 16 hour days, going to bed about 3-4 hours past my normal time took a big toll not only on how I feel, but also my productivity.

While I did end up getting about 60-75% of the MVP done in that timeframe, it did slow me down considerably in the fact that I have spent the last 2 days trying to come up with a more informative landing page, with not so great results.

All in all I feel the attempt was beneficial. It lit a fire under me that I hadn't had in a while, and pushed me to skim off the fluff and only come up with the absolute minimal features to launch as soon as possible.

I will continue pressing on and hope to launch the project in the next week or two.

There’s currently a huge phenomenon going around the JavaScript community called JavaScript Fatigue. At first this phenomenon was centered around React and it’s community and is spreading like wild fire through the Javascript community.

What exactly is JavaScript fatigue and why do you get it? I believe that this is a result of being a bandwagon jumper. Too many people in the community feel the need to use the latest and greatest tool. Not because it’s the best tool for the job, and certainly not because it’s stable, but because everyone is talking about it. Heaven forbid you aren’t using the latest hotness. Shame on you if you can’t raise your hand and say, “Yeah I use React too!”

Another factor adding to this sense of fatigue is the significant upgrade Javascript recently underwent, something that doesn’t happen often. While most languages see incremental and regular updates, JavaScript’s iterations tend to be minor and more seldom, resulting in less motivation for developers to stay up-to-date. However, the slew of new features that arrived with the advent ECMAScript 2015 seems to have made developers feel a renewed pressure to learn cutting-edge techniques and apply them to their daily code.

Oh god, surely you don’t expect me to learn? I’m too busy building yet another Todo app as a service, I don’t have time to LEARN!

My advice to those who feel fatigued with JavaScript is to pick a toolset and stick with it. These major frameworks and tools aren’t going to suddenly disappear and lose all utility. Gulp didn’t kill Grunt; Grunt is very useful and still has its place, and neither tool is going away anytime soon. The same applies Browserify and Webpack, Angular and React, and most others you can name.

Perhaps the one exception, where I take a strong stance on choosing one over the other is Bower vs npm. Use npm. Virtually anything on Bower is already on npm, and npm has better conflict resolution regarding versions. Why use one package manager to install another package manager to use packages that the former can handle on its own? npm, Inc is doing a great job at being THE package manager for frontend too. npm quite simply is superior, in my opinion.

It’s okay to forego the latest and greatest. I still use Angular 1.x even for new projects. Why? Because it’s not EOL yet. It’s still getting updates regularly. When the Angular Team EOL’s it I’ll reassess, just as I’d do with anything else.

Examine new frameworks and libraries to learn just enough about the core concepts and paradigms they introduce or espouse. Doing so should take no more than an afternoon or two of your time. Then, while you’re still building your Angular 1.x app and a client says “I want a React app!” you can discuss the prospect with the confidence of your fundamental understanding of what React brings to the table, and how it builds upon or differs from Angular.

There, I said it.

Looking back at all the projects I’ve worked on for myself, I have never completed a single one of them. I realize why now. I was always so worried that either I’d put all my effort into it and it would fail. So I would work on something, be so into it, but halfway, or even 80% of the way there, I’d lose interest, or find something else to take my interest.

This stops now.

Looking at my idea sheet, I have 9 ideas I want to work on. Friday I sunset a project that has “been in the works” since 2012. The one I had been working on is now being put on indefinite hold. Everything else will stay on the idea sheet.

But what will I be working on? What will I do?

Three weeks ago I was hired by a local printing and embroidery shop here in Dubuque. I have decided that the projected I am working on for them is the ONLY project I will work on.

Working at the office, or even if I feel like working on a night or weekend, it will be for the project I was hired to build. That’s it.

I will not let anything creep in and disrupt that, no more side projects for a while.