Yet, like a white dot in the eye of the black 'Jang' snake (or a back swan if you prefer) - there must be at least something good to remember about this year.
What is your own story of luck, discovery or serendipity?
-- Spent more time with family; went out on daily walks with spouse.
-- Got better sleep due to freed time from commute.
-- Participated in a COVID-19 related research and got an award at work.
-- Dabbled into financial markets and made little profit. More than profit, learned a lot about markets.
-- Setup a 4-node Raspberry pi cluster at home and played with it.
-- Taught my 15-yo python programming and Linux.
I briefed my results internally, someone from media affairs got excited about it, and the culmination was that I ended up on the front page of the wsj.
Everyone gets their fifteen minutes, I guess. But it was really a bright point for me in 2020.
Now to the good parts.
- This was the best year financially. This is also the year I made 0 income but financial assets and trades made me over six-figures in profit. Despite lots of unexpected expenses and losses; I'm wealthier than ever even adjusting for real inflation.
- I setup my own custom-built desktop and got to learn a lot about Linux. I have a fully customizable OS now, and albeit I do miss a few things about OS X; productivity wise, I'm way more productive. (now planning to buy the new Zen 3 and setting a new powerful desktop).
- There is lots of nature around you to discover. When travel was open, you are tempted to try new countries. But my guess is that any country of medium size has lots of places where you can find mind-blowing views. I did lots of biking/discovering this year (100-200km near me).
- I did significant progress in Rust. I finally got around to modern web development: Github action, CI/CD, Terraform/Consul, React, Static Sites, etc... I also made significant progress in some projects I'm working on despite the multiple breakdowns I had this year. Somehow some stuff got done.
- I did some writing to my blog, and lots of writing that is yet to get published. I relatively succeeded in having a routine for health, learning and work.
Looking for 2021.
And after that point we were just in the habit of cooking most of the time and thinking of takeout as a treat, and also not eating restaurant portions (which it turns out are huge)
0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.
Keen to understand, in a market so laden with options, how do you plan to stand out? Monday and Assana seem to be spending a fortune on ads.
A demo video or something that would show the functionality would be helpful. ATM, it feels similar to github project.
We have a slightly different take on things we think (even though there's a certain amount of table stakes features you need to build to get people to use it at all, we've found).
First off, unlike most of our competitors, we don't push people to break down initiatives into little bit sized tasks, giving each one an assignee. Instead we take a more collaborative attitude. We think work items should be the "right size" [0] which is much bigger than a single task - instead it's some value delivered end to end to your users. As a result, our work items are rich documents and they'll only get richer and more collaborative. We see that our users write a lot, hash out things together, upload designs, etc. And they're only getting more rich and more collaborative.
Secondly, we have a lot of exciting things coming with our integrations. Our focus is really on cutting down the noise coming from a lot of the tools teams use and to link assets/activities in those tools directly to work items in Kitemaker, so you can get the info you need when you need it. Our users like to complain about tools like Figma being awful for discussions and tools like GitHub producing too many noisy emails. We want to fix that. The Slack, Discord, GitHub and Slack integrations are already pretty powerful.
Thirdly, it's fast. Super super fast with hot keys for everything. We're really inspired by Superhuman and our goal is to match their 100ms response times.
Lastly is who we're making it for. We want to enable product teams to succeed. Not in the generic sense of the term, but more in the Marty Cagan [1] sense. Teams that are autonomous, self-organizing, cross functional and totally focused on delivering value for their users. Teams that run top down, with managers doling out tasks to engineers and product managers deciding exactly what will be built in isolation probably won't find a home in Kitemaker.
We'd love to chat with any teams struggling to find the tool that works best for them. My email is in my profile.
0: https://medium.com/kitemaker-blog/right-sizing-elements-of-w...
Love the integrations stuff, but so far we've not been putting tasks into github because we figured we'd just be moving them, but this is great for onboarding.
As far as point #1, I get what you're saying, and love that you have that vision. I think it fits the way I like to work (potentially), but is opposed to how my co-founder likes to work. But let's give him a go and see.
I'll be in touch. Best of luck.
I also grew three avocado plants from seed. I gave them names: Hope, Courage, and Strength. I hope both of these will last for many years after.
She's been using it ever since, basing her entire classes on that tool. She prepares the classes, she makes exercises, and her students fill out the homework exercises.
Now I'm preparing real time document editing and proper user management so I can open it for more teachers.
I'm learning so much on a day to day basis. It has actually been great. In that sense. Only in that sense.
The luckiest thing that happened was finding a couple pounds of grifola fondosa. It's pretty common around here, so it's not even that lucky.
Of course I started this after Covid killed my plan to open a dog boarding business (but not before I spent a whole bunch of money that I'll never get back), so I guess we'll call it a wash.
Buying some cheap shares that went up.
Tenant got into arrears, sublet, they trashed it, so we got reno money and rent from the insurance. New floors and painting done.
Where I live is nicer than where I work (suburban with parks vs urban) so nice to do a lunchtime walk.
Less aircraft noise.
this is about Twitter, isn’t it?
- Wrote about 60,000 words in my journal/game design diary this year, although that's down from 123,000 last year, but at least it's better than nothing. Made sure to record observations about the pandemic periodically during it, for reflection on in later years.
- One of my game designs was selected as a finalist for a prestigious board game design contest (this is the third year I tried), and then the same game was selected as a finalist for a sellsheet contest later that year, which allowed me to do a virtual pitch of the game to 20+ publishers. One publisher offered to brainstorm ideas with me for ways in which to add more to the game that it might find a publisher.
- One of my earliest board game designs had been shelved for the past 3+ years and I suddenly realized how to add an interesting hook and make the game more thematic at the same time, which ended up fixing a major problem with the game. Had a productive playtest with other game designers a few weeks ago as well. Currently trying to get it polished up enough to enter into a game design contest in January.
- Finally got over my hesitation to make 3D video games (instead of just 2D) and self-taught myself just enough Blender to make some functional 3D models to include in a game I'm working on, and started again from scratch in 3D, and I think that was a smart move. Looks about the same but nice 3D animations that are easier to get working than 2D (i.e. I don't have to draw them), and handling multiple resolutions is easier.
- Got more into puzzle creation and design. Might have come up with a couple novel pen and paper logic puzzles. Still need to dig into it more.
- Started using monte carlo simulations to help design board games. In particular I used it for one abstract game design to discover what combination of variables I needed so the game wouldn't have a first player advantage and was guaranteed not to have ties, which I wouldn't have been able to tell without a ton of manual playtests otherwise. Didn't even occur to me how I could use code to help me design until this year.
- Came up with about 15 ideas for new game designs, as well as ideas on how to improve or fix the issues with four existing designs.
- Wrote a short story I'm pretty happy with that's getting published in an anthology for a local writer's group, about a broker who protects and manages secrets from corporations (secrets being things like credit card numbers and maiden names and the like).
- We explored a few State Parks we wouldn't have known existed in the area if it weren't for the pandemic. But we ended up cancelling our planned trip to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks this year, so it's a poor substitute.
Other than that, just about everything else was shitty this year. And most of this stuff would have probably happened without the pandemic anyway.
I'm particularly interested how you went about using Monte Carlo sims to help with your designs.
I only just got into game design a few months ago, and started maintaining a journal about it here: https://juanuys.com/masters/
I have started working on a proper personal site again, but it's not ready enough to release yet.
That being said, the game I'm referring to (I've simulated mechanisms for other games using simulations, but this is the whole game, because it's tiny), I submitted to a contest (in which it wasn't selected), which required a rules document. In that rules document I included a section for Analysis where I discuss the simulation I made, and I also included a link to the Repl script I made for the simulation.
I highly recommend checking the rules for how to play the game before checking out the script, but I'll include links to both here:
Rules: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ukL_uPt_NEzt_tLmWJw6y7-e...
Simulation: https://repl.it/@bacable/EvenTheOddsSim#main_for_manual.py
I'm also working on a web version for this game, made using Phaser, but it's also not ready for release yet. It's playable, but I'm still working out some bugs with the Minmax implementation and it needs more UI and polish. But I don't have that online yet either. Need to get on that.
But technically, if you have 7 colored wooden cubes in each of 6 different colors, you can play the game yourself. It's how I tested it :)