Since starting my engineering career, I’ve consistently had the vague idea that gaining tech skills is a Part One of something to come. That it’s good to be an engineer but that the real fun would start when i could combine the heady art of making things with bits with what the industry calls ‘soft skills’, as well as my artistic/expressive sensibilities. Many in my scene are pondering how to become Professionally Spiritual, which doesn’t hold any appeal to me, but I continue to feel the sense that there are opportunities out there for the right person at the right time to create a niche creative profession for themselves on their own terms and make, like, 1.5 gobs of money, and that continuing daily practices centered around increasing my awareness of and investment in the world around me may help with the ‘preparation’ part of the Luck Equation. So I have a background process constantly running trying to game out what getting to a place like that might look like

Last week was a Season Finale week, a vortex of climaxes that threw me around like rough surf and then tossed me on a luxurious beach to put myself back together. In rough order, I got to watch Apple unveil their new spatial computing platform, which, unlike LLMs, feels like the future in a carefully considered, holistic way. They also announced their first device in this category, which I simulataneously desperately want and Can Not Afford. I then got to discuss it on my podcast, which remains a self-sustaining creative victory, and moreover got to bring on fellow internet tiger Taalumot to join the conversation, which was a rollicking Worlds Collide moment. Wednesday I hosted my buddy who works there for dinner while she was in town, and spoke out loud my desire to work very hard for like 3 hours a day on my actual job and spend the rest of the time building out the next step of my career, which is definitely not being a DevOps Guy. Then we were off for 3 days of cabin-dwelling with family and friends deep in the woods, with just the right amount of internet connection: barely 1 bar. I left all devices at home, and while no vacation with a 2-year-old is truly Relaxing, I was left with plenty of time with my thoughts. I was able to read a few chapters of a book called Developer Hegemony, which I have called the Das Kapital of email jobs. Nothing I’ve read has come close to revealing the matrix code behind the act of working an information job, and I’m on my first reread since I originally applied its secrets to double my salary.

The raw materials were all there, and they clicked together of their own accord while I was taking some trash to the dumpster on the final day of camping. An extremely pleasant side effect of becoming a valuable contributor to bottom lines is that I regularly have very powerful MacBooks thrown at me, and I was able to subsidize a large part of my extremely sweet desktop setup with other people’s money as well. One way to get my hands on this new headset would be to make a bunch more money, which is an extremely vague goal. A much more focused and tangible one is “do the sort of work that might encourage someone to give you a headset for free.”

I have a proven record of being able to create online media, in both written and auditory form. I have a proven ability to learn new technical skills. I have surplus time during my workday and the tacit approval of my team to fuck off and do something else. I have an almost completely unused public internet presence, waiting for a focus. I have an occult network of Technology Wizards/Sages who I can bounce ideas off of and whose work I can share with new audiences. So hey what if I became an Apple Developer in public and Friendly Ambitious Nerded my way into a new job?

So that’s what I’m going to try. The first step is bringing my professional site into the pantheon of phil’s web sites and getting it set up to rip through markdown with speed. Then I can establish a daily routine for absorbing a nutritious chunk of the Apple Developer Ecosystem, turning that into a scrumptious pellet of content, and building out some of the numerous and growing App Ideas that I have. This could fizzle in the same manner that my other tech site did, and I have bounced off the Apple developer experience before due to it being weird and overwhelming, but maybe I have the right carrot dangling in front of my face for it to work. Only one way to find out, right?