Tagged "projects"

I travel for work regularly and spend far too much time in airports. So, of course, I spend most of that time in airport lounges. I’m always in new airports and need to find out where the lounges are.

Weather Embed is one of my favorite side projects over the last few years—a simple micro-SaaS for displaying the current weather in an image.

In the dark early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, I set out to build a little side project: A way to generate an image containing a weather forecast. This was born out of a complaint I had heard from my friend Colin, who previously worked in hospitality marketing. Hotels send out emails to visitors before they check-in, and they wanted to include the weather forecast in those emails. Seems simple enough!

There were many times throughout the last year I thought I wouldn’t make it, but here we are; it’s done! Fifteen months later, with 12 projects completed. A little overdue, but I made it in the end. Having it off my chest and out in the world feels fantastic.

15 months ago, I set out to create a project every month in 2022 and blog about it. You’re not reading that wrong. I didn’t typo the number of months in the year. I’m just slow!

This year, I decided I wanted to send out Christmas cards to all my family and friends. Something simple with a nice note in each of them. I’ve been travelling a lot this year and want to show that I still value people in my life, even when I don’t get to spend time with them in person.

This year I’ve started playing a lot more disc golf — something I am sure is evident from some of my projects this year. As part of that, I’ve been participating in some tournaments and pop-up events around the Greater Vancouver Area. They’ve been a ton of fun! I even won my first tournament — although I only had 1 opponent in my division.

This is a follow-up to a previous post: Prototyping a Disc Golf Pannier Bag.

All my favorite projects start off as problems I run into in my life. GrowlerFill started when I wanted to find somewhere to fill up beer growlers. Ferries App for BC Ferries was scheduled when I lived on Vancouver Island and took the ferry every week or two. 

I started off July with a very different project in mind for the month, but COVID-19 had other plans for me! I got the project to the 80% mark with time set aside to finish it off - then spent a week barely leaving bed with COVID-19. So here we are with something a bit different this month - playing with DALL-E 2 to create featured images for my blog!

I consume tons of content: books, articles, podcasts, films, TV, and YouTube videos. I like to keep everything film and TV related in an application called Plex. It’s a fantastic piece of software that lets you keep all your content in one place and track what you’ve watched (and haven’t watched). I pay for most of the streaming services available in Canada, but I still download all my TV and Movies to Plex. It lets me keep track of what I watch in one cohesive place.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I love films. So I have a soft spot in my heart for going to film festivals. I’ve enjoyed multiple years of both the Vancouver International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival.

I drank far too much Coca-Cola from my teenage years and into my early 20s. A disgusting amount that makes me cringe when I think back to it. It was a habit that was hard to kick; I believe, on some level, I had tied my developer/nerd identity with my Coca-Cola habit.

I’ve been an avid disc golf player for most of my adult life. Last year in 2021, I played 105 rounds — almost once every 3 days!

Yes, yes, it’s now March. Almost the end of March at that! The last month and a half have been very hectic — I moved, went to Spain for MWC, and then got sick! I created Ski API at the start of February before I moved, but this blog post got stuck on the back burner. So I’m choosing to go with a loophole. Even if the blog post wasn’t done in February, the project was!

I started and ended my crypto career very early. It started back in 2011, during the early days of Bitcoin. I was running a startup that offered Minecraft Server Hosting, called Tree Puncher. This was back when BTC was worth around $1 USD each. I accepted BTC for fun and kept it all in a “hot wallet”, an amateur move even in 2011. This foray into crypto didn’t last long, in 2012 my hot wallet was part of a theft from a virtual server provider. I try not to think about the fact that there were hundreds of BTC in that wallet. Today it would be worth millions of dollars. I imagine I would be a crypto hype man today if I hadn’t lost that hot wallet!

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions, but I’m always trying to improve myself. I’ve been trying to find the motivation to write regular blog posts for 2+ years now without much luck. This year I am going to try doing something new, building a new project every month as a motivation to blog about them!

I’ve been building businesses online since I was 16 years old, and during that entire time, I had a terrible history of keeping my projects online and working properly. Whenever I had a new and exciting idea for my previous projects – and more importantly their users – it was forgotten and left behind. From GrowlerFill to Ferries App, I’ve left many unhappy users in my wake.