Post
by Augustus » Thu Jun 27, 2019 12:58 pm
In a few days I'll be starting my second time off period as my current contract ends. This one feels different than the first period of time off, the first one was all planning and anticipation, most of which came to naught. All those things I had thought I would want to do while working, I did not actually want to do when I was free.
I've gone the opposite route this time, the only ambitious and set planning revolves around a road trip to visit my parents. I'm going to bring my 4 year old along while my wife visits family overseas. There will be camping. I'll be looping through Bryce and Zion canyon on the way. As with all things involving young children it will probably be one part tedious agony and one part thrilling adventure and added excitement since it's kids first exposure to a road tripping, camping, beautiful scenery, etc. I have only one real project on the trip, and that is to view the milky way with my own eyes, which I am sad to say I've never done before. So during my stop over in Bryce Canyon I'll plan to wake up in the middle of the night and sit outside for a bit and ponder the cosmos and my place in it.
I find that I don't really care about my finances all that much anymore, as long as the general trends stay solid. I've been spending a little too much lately, I'll definitely need to curb that while I'm not getting any income. But I'm ahead of my projections for the year, like way ahead. I'm hoping I'll have a burn rate of about 2000/mo while I'm not working, with wife and rentals each contributing 1/3 of the expenses.
I've been surfing A LOT. I bought some surf racks and am going to nix the van idea for now. The surf racks solved the major problem of transporting a surfboard on a freeway safely, I was using tie downs before and it felt like the board was going to fly off which would have been a total fiasco. Surfboards are really good at catching wind, it's like strapping a wing to a car, and doing that with tiny little fabric straps was a harrowing experience, despite manufacturer assurances to the contrary. The new ones have steel straps with a fabric layer around them and are secured to the car with metal mounting brackets and metal bars.
The last time off period I achieved the most enjoyment while reading books, devoting whole days to contemplation. I don't know how long this time off period will last, I've already had to pass on two potential gigs citing vacation and a mismatch of project start dates. Ideally I'd get 3 months off, if it goes past the 2-3 month mark I'll probably go into "oh shit" mode and start aggressively seeking projects. I have a feeling this one will be a short one though, so I need to be careful not to fill it up. I did buy a waterpark pass though, one of my lamentations in my youth was not being able to go on enough waterslides, so there will be several days devoted to a grown ass man riding down waterslides and sitting in a lazy river all day all by his lonesome.
Apps are proving to be annoying right now. Launching the first one was cool, getting some paying customers was cooler, but now I have to support it, which I HATE. Even worse, I'm supporting people who are using it for free. It's good, because it's taught me a lot and highlighted several major bugs in the app and the app foundation that I built. It's bad because it's soul sucking to work for free for people who don't value your time at all. I have one more major stability bug to fix, and after that I'm shutting off the free version. From here on out it's paid only. Overall it was good to do the free version, I'd have felt a lot worse if I had all paying users and then the service went down. When something is free, you get what you pay for, and I don't really care if it went down for free users. What's really funny is that the unpaid users are the most disrespectful. I did lose a paying customer already though, which sucks. Some free version asshat brought down the entire backend API by abusing the crap out of it, and one paying customer cancelled over that. Oh well, it's a good learning experience. I've got to rearchitect the way the backend system works and place more limits on what users can do, which is going to be a lot of work, but when it's done I'll have a really solid foundation from which to build all future apps, and wont have to worry about outages as much. So in a few months, it should just be forward progress again. Going backwards/being stuck in a rut fixing existing functionality is really disheartening, but it has to be done. Eyes on the prize: in a year or two I'll have another solid income stream and even more freedom. If I can get that final 1/3 of expenses taken care of, I'll never have to take another client project again unless I want to.