Let's kick this off

Here's to hoping this won't be the last email you get from me...

Nov 06, 2023

I started a Patreon creator account a long time back when I was building OliverDriverGenerator in 2020 (or maybe when I was getting "more serious" about the (now defunct) ComicPulls site1 in 2018...). Basically, I wanted to have a place to talk about what I was working on and if I did something bigger I could reward the handful of folks following along.

And then I lost a lot of passion for coding. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but all of the energy of building cool little things leapt from my body. I can definitely point to the the soul-sucking nature of my job at the time. And it's not even like the job was all that bad so much as I simply had so many negative attachments to writing code all day I simply did not want to look at anything resembling code unless someone was absolutely giving me a paycheck for it.

When I was in college, I loved to just make stuff. I would buy stupid domains and put a basic HTML page full with a one bit joke on it, put together an epic D&D 3.5 Edition Spell Calculator, or I would give up on a whole semester's worth of classes and build a whole intermediary social media site because a friend said it sounded cool2. I built dozens of little blogs, helper pages, and whatever I could convert from thought to PHP/JavaScript just because it sounded fun.

This page runs on a hope and a dream, right now. It’s beautiful.

Eventually I graduated and moved out to New York to work at (the now defunct) comiXology within Amazon, and I focused all of that energy for creating cool shit because it was basically the perfect job. Comic books + web development + all the comic data. I did build some cool shit there and I put in way too many hours both getting myself up to snuff with things3 in order to make some amazing stuff for comic fans.

When I felt like I was getting squeezed out of that job because I wanted to continue to build cool stuff for comic fans (this is a whole other story), I moved over to working within the greater Kindle world, and my experience there was a mix up severe ups and downs. Again, I built some cool stuff4, but I had a really rough time of it and it burned me out. By the end of my time at Amazon, writing code was paired with this overwhelming sense of "do it right or else" which meant that going into my next job after Amazon, the spark to be excited about building things was tainted by this overwhelming feeling of dread.

Some time has passed since then, I was laid off, I got a new gig, and during all of that, something switched in my brain. The passion is back. Maybe it was the hundreds of hours of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I played or the planets aligning but the passion is back.

All of this is to say: I'm here now and I'm working on something new. It's a project that I would use pretty regularly (as a lazy comic fan), which is pretty much enough for me to say I should see it through. And despite the limited scope I'm forcing upon myself, the Trello board I've put together of items to do is pretty stacked.

I'm not really ready to announce this project beyond saying I'm working on something, but follow along as I post screenshots, solution ideations, photos of my chicken scratch handwriting, updates of things as I hit walls, problems dealing with what I'll call "other entities," and so on. My hope is that by doing semi-regular updates, I'll keep things going through the tougher bits of the project--of which I'm at right now 😬.

Finally: For those curious, I'm building this whole thing on Express+NodeJs, React, and Mongo. A classic. It's a cool little project.

So yeah, let's kick this off here on Substack.

If you have it in your heart to upgrade to a paid account, you can expect some more in-depth posts with nitty gritty details about this next Project5, interactive previews, as well as me taking your input on how this whole project should work. Unless it’s a really revealing post, my aim is post everything for free and paid folks together with an upgrade cut off for the more outlandish reveals.

I'll probably have a few posts coming in quick succession as I dig into a problem I recently (sort of) solved. After that, maybe once a week? We’ll see. Plan on less frequent than more frequent.

Catch you soon.

Let's kick this off

Here's to hoping this won't be the last email you get from me...

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