I've been absolutely slammed over the last few weeks, between moving to a new house, a large number of readers visiting Melbourne over the holidays and wanting coffee, and doing work for clients at the ol' consultancy. However, writing will pick up again in mid-January, more than ever before¹, and we'll embark on my consulting arc together, where I will try desperately to remain interesting without any horrifying new corporate stories².

In any case, it felt wrong to round out the year without taking a moment to reflect on 2024.

I. Quitting My Job

A few weeks ago, I quit my job after staring into the code-abyss for too long. This has been an absolutely fantastic decision. I wake up earlier than I did at my day job, work longer hours on substantially harder problems, and do not have steady income³, but nonetheless this is so much better than being a salaried employee that I can't imagine going back to work at a non-executive level unless I was really on the verge of being out of money entirely — even then, I'd probably just take a day-rate contract to top up my savings and try again.

The biggest change has been that a great deal of my brainpower has been freed up to focus on things that are actually interesting to me on a personal level. My original plan was that working three days a week was going to be enough for me to get my own business off the ground, but I was never able to fully engage my mind. Rich Hickey talks about this in his semi-philosophical talk Hammock Driven Development. On one hand, it's easy to dismiss the subconscious as too intangible for serious consideration. On the other hand, it is undeniable that there's some weird stuff going on in the human brain. Many nights, we shut our eyes and run through the bizarre experience of dreaming, ranging from disparate nonsense to clear symbolism. Mathematicians, musicians, and programmers around the world have experienced the strange phenomenon of explicitly stopping work on something, only to come back and realize that the solution is suddenly right there. There's something there.

While three days working my office job did leave the majority of my week for my own business, it consumed most of that subconscious capacity. I'm not sure exactly why this is the case, as opposed to my business absorbing all of that thinking time, but I suspect that the highly politicized nature of large organizations is very good at hijacking human brains, which are ultimately just sophisticated monkey brains. Plus I like creating high quality, so it was very hard for me to stop thinking about low-quality work, even if it was in my best interests to lie and say it was good. Jesse Alford assured me that my brain would free up after I quit, and it did.

There's plenty to write about on this, but it's for next year when I've had more time to mull it over. Suffice it to say that I hadn't realized how much my growth had been stunted by the culture of the typical company and from working with people who were checked out. Frankly, this is all somewhat perplexing to me. It's looking likely that I'll earn more money next year than I did this year, working fewer hours on my own schedule, with my closest friends, and doing high quality work. I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that being checked out may not even be a good way to be checked out if you're even halfway competent.

Having free time every day to study extensively, turn that study towards whatever is most useful given a set of objectives that I've designed rather than a manager's political goals, and to have lunch with someone interesting every day is amazing.

In summary, working at the typical job is way worse than I thought it was, and I'm someone who does rounds on the internet for aiming vitriol at typical jobs.

II. On Writing

My life has changed massively over the past two years, largely as a result of deciding to start writing. I have plenty to say about this, and much of it must wait for 2025, but you can get a comprehensive treatment of the topic from my friend Adolfo Ochagavía in the meanwhile.

Despite running a platform with no analytics, no work put into SEO spam or whatever it is you're "supposed" to do, and publishing massive essays about ancient browser video games that no one cares about, the blog has continued to grow much faster than I expected.

Over the past two years, I've received approximately 1,245 emails. Of those, I responded to about 700 before finally having to give up on keeping up with everything when the infamous AI rant went more viral than everything else combined — and the blog was already frontpaging Hackernews pretty regularly. I've also had something like 40 remote calls with readers and 40 in-person coffees. There may have been substantially more than that, but I don't have any tracking prior to June this year. A fair number of these were with students or people in their early career, as I try to pay all the support I've received forwards.

I was also offered a book deal, but the publisher insisted that swearing within a book wouldn't be permissible, and wouldn't guarantee a spot on bookshelves anywhere. I spoke to Ed Zitron about this⁴, he said it was a terrible deal, so I ended up rejecting them. The broad logic was that the main point in a publisher is marketing to help with circulation, but my posts already do more traffic than the publisher, so I had very little use for them if they couldn't get me a spot on a bookshelf. I don't think I even want to swear in a book, but why constrain myself for a pittance?

However, I do love writing, and there are two books that I want to write anyway. One is collection of essays on technical and corporate topics, and the other is a fantasy novel. I've started work on the former, and at the advice of Arden Baker of Meridian Australis, I'll kick off the fantasy attempt by putting out ten short stories to develop my style. Most of them will make their way to this blog, though I may attempt to publish one or two in recognized venues to see if I learn anything about writing over that process.

If anyone reading has experience publishing fantasy novels, I'd love it if you got in touch. I'm looking for advice on the actual writing, as well as some advice on navigating the landscape more generally or writing for specific settings (I'm very interested in writing for Paizo's Pathfinder setting, in particular).

III. Cool People

Many of the changes in my own life have resulted from meeting a spectacular number of extremely talented, driven people, whose philosophy broadly aligns with my own. I couldn't begin to list all of them in a quick post, but by way of example, I've asked for and received mentorship from Jesse Alford, Nat Bennett, David Kellam, Daniel Sidhion, and a more informal brunch arrangement with Alan Perkins. Some readers may note that both Nat and Daniel have frontpaged Hackernews with some regularity, and Daniel on the grounds of pure technical writing. I previously picked my mentors from the most intelligent and principled people I met in corporate settings, but the sheer quality difference in the people I've met through the blog is insurmountable. "Smart person that manages corporate politics well" is simply not going to compete with people who can do international traffic through the strength of their insight.

IV. On Consulting

I wasn't planning to do much work through December, but earned enough this month while trying to minimize my earning that I haven't actually cut into my savings yet, while juggling a move to a new house, three Christmas parties, and a visit from my family in Malaysia.

I'll only be happy with our sales pipeline when we have enough leads that we can't possibly take all the incoming business. Currently, half of it comes through the blog despite barely linking to the business at all, and the other half comes through people who have no idea about the blog. So far, we've preferred the former clients because they're people that already closely align on what a great team should look like.

To the best of my knowledge we have beaten every competing consultancy after one call. We sometimes lose deals to a client deciding to do nothing (which is actually the number one issue for sales teams everywhere), but no one has ever picked another consultancy over us if they got as far as talking to us, and every client has expressed a strong intention to re-engage us. And we're more expensive than any consultancy I've ever worked with at a big company, so we must be doing something right.

V. Goals For 2025

I'm not big on New Years Resolutions, but I do think that the end of a year is a good default date to reflect on things that I want to do going forward.

The first thing is that I'd like to write much more frequently. I'll be carving a bit of time out every morning to work on a blog post, and aiming to produce another 500 words of writing per day towards one of the two books in progress. It has been surprisingly difficult to justify writing given that I set a large amount of the direction for the business, but it's something I really enjoy doing, and I love the people that it brings into my life. As none of my writing is paywalled, I currently earn A$3,000 a year through the blog, which I am extremely grateful for, but is also not even close to the amount I'd need to pay rent with. I think I could make my living off writing, but I don't think it would be fun if I was forced to produce even when I had no ideas that were really resonating. And it would definitely not feel great to have to write things that were optimized for audience growth.

Secondly, I'm aiming to be able to deliver a student performance at my music school⁵ at the end of 2025, which will require me to practice very frequently if I want to avoid embarrassing myself in front of a horde of ten year olds who are my clear musical superiors.

As far as the business goes, I just want to make sure that everyone on my team earns about as much money in 2025 as they did at their day jobs in 2024. I thought this was an unreasonably high target at first, but I've been advised that it's probably the lower end of what I should be aiming for.

I still attend a bunch of improvised theater classes, but I'm not expecting to make the jump to non-student performances next year. I think I'll be doing pretty well to keep up with my classes as they are.

And finally, I want to stay sharp technically. I'm in the midst of making up for years of relative neglect in my technical skills. While I was the strongest engineer at most places I worked, I'm amongst the weakest of the engineers I spend time with now, and only hang in there on the basis of other skills. I think it's important for my personal growth and for the business that I can continue to provide technical leadership, which means grinding out some serious hours. I'll likely never catch up with some of these people due to seriously starting at the age of thirty as opposed to twelve, but hopefully I can remain relevant.

VI.

And finally, I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time to read, giving me the support I need to seek work I find more fulfilling, and otherwise being great. I hope you all have a great start to the New Year, and if you're not so far, that things get better soon.

While most of this post is mostly concerned with trivial things like my music classes and a tiny consulting business, I also wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that things are looking scary out there, even in places like the U.S. Zitron's essay Never Forgive Them got me thinking about this, and I think it's important to always remind ourselves that even something as silly as an improv class can be aimed towards the betterment of society and helping the people around us.

There's only one thing to do once the grieving's over.

What's my name? What's my station?
Oh, just tell me what I should do
I don't need to be kind to the armies of night
That would do such injustice to you
Or bow down and be grateful
And say, "Sure, take all that you see"
To the men who move only in dimly lit halls
And determine my future for me
And I don't, I don't know who to believe
I'll get back to you someday soon, you will see
[...]
If I know only one thing, it's that everything that I see
Of the world outside is so inconceivable often I barely can speak
Yeah I'm tongue-tied and dizzy and I can't keep it to myself
What good is it to sing helplessness blues, why should I wait for anyone else?

Happy New Year, and I'll catch you on the other side.