Weekly Recaps to Reach Writing Goals

In the spirit of pushing to achieve my year-end goals mentioned previously, I'm going to commit myself to writing weekly recaps. These should be fairly short, just briefly going over what's happened, issues I've run in to, successes I've had and so on. Maybe it'll help keep me on track with schedules a bit more, while also pushing myself to write more frequently.

Week of June 14th, 2021

We'll work out the format of this as we go. It'll probably be a bit messy to begin with, but that's okay! As in my previous post, I have a course playing in the background to listen to while I write. The weather is a bit ugly, cloudy and not quite that nice relaxing rain that calms the nerves. We have a tropical storm rolling through, so the night was filled with tornado warnings going off and flash floods.

This week I have reconnected with a couple old friends and colleagues. I did some work on the leaderboard app for this startup previously mentioned, though I've taken a step back until there is guarantee of pay. I attended their daily standup yesterday to get caught up on what I've missed the past couple days. The CEO was excited for me to be back. That's something I appreciate with him. He goes out of his way to hype everyone up and show appreciation for them. I can't say I've achieved much in my short time with them, but he makes what I have done seem over-the-top and it definitely boosts one's moral. On that note, one of the others was a little bit upset I haven't got much done with one of their sites. With that said, I had previously requested design docs, task lists or trello boards for it. I was given a Google Doc where they were ideating the progress of the site, which was only slightly helpful, but didn't give context to much of what needed to be finished up. I shrugged it off because again, there's no signed contract currently and no guarantee of pay, so I can't continue to commit my full attention to things they need help with.

I took some time to reflect on my current status in life, things I have done and things I've fallen short on, which we covered in the Mid June Update. It was insightful and guiding in what I need to do. I've started to branch out and apply to good old customer service facing roles just to have some sort of income while in-between work. That's been a bit of a frustration as well, as I've received responses of "Sorry, you don't fit what we're looking for" or "Sorry, you're a bit over qualified." What even is that? Particularly coming from companies that are, in this economy, complaining that people don't want to go back to work. Hello. Companies. I want to work. Pick me please.

A reconnection with one of my friends and colleagues from Lambda School has opened up an opportunity to help him with his business. I will be their "Technical Marketing Director" which is an interesting combination of words, but really just means I'm overseeing sales and growth and can also do some coding if necessary. He's setting my paperwork and accounts up as I write this. It's commission based unfortunately, but I am however grateful for the opportunity. I have a few ideas of where to pull in more clients and help lessen the load he's had in managing the business/administration side of things. We'll see where it goes. I hope to be able to streamline the process so this will in time become residual income while I focus my efforts in other areas.

I've taken more time to reflect on things and have come to realize that, as stressful as it is, I thoroughly enjoy these environments that require a lot of up-front work, but tend to offer large payoff later on. I just need to perfect my method of obtaining these situations so there is consistent income. Then the stress will be quite lower!

I'll go ahead and cap off this recap here. It's been a short week, particularly because it's been only 2 days since my previous post.

Cheers to the weekend friends.