And we're live....

So for a year now, I’ve been working on a secret project, a behavior chart app for people in discipline based relationships. It’s not a secret anymore.

It’s called WeMinder. And I released it today.

I’m very proud of it. WeMinder is the culmination of multiple decades of experience as a kinky person, and a year of very hard work.

The application consists of two big features.

There’s the chart, used by the top and the bottom to track the bottom’s good behaviors and misbehaviors. It’s also where the top records rewards and punishments.

Then there’s the mood thermometer, used by both partners to make sure that their feelings are known.

You can see more about that in a video over at the WeMinder blog.

I can’t wait for you to try it.

#gratitudeNow: The Whirlwind

So yesterday, I did something amazing. After a pretty productive workday, I turned from the work computer to the personal one, and started tinkering with a pretty significant feature of my secret side project, Project Longbottom. It involved adding SMS based notifications to the app I’m building.

I started work around 3:30pm, and about maybe an hour in, I felt myself slip solidly into the zone. That’s this thing where my brain just flips all the way on and I’m able to see ahead of myself several steps, my thoughts feel fluid and easy, and it’s like I’m suddenly tapping into extra capability. It’s a profoundly powerful and somewhat painful feeling.

I feel like this urge has slipped over me, and this thing I’m trying to do, I have to do. It’s honestly sort of manic. My breath comes easier, my skin tingles, and I just feel this sense of urgent need to keep going. I’ve decided to call this phenomenon The Whirlwind.

I worked almost non-stop from 3:30 to 10:30 that night. And along the way did the following:

• Designed a UI on paper for an SMS number verification system.

• Implemented it in the system.

• Refactored it to make it better.

• Got it to actually generate verification codes and send them.

• Got it to change backend records after the code is sent.

• Got the page to live update based on these statuses.

• Got a core feature of the system to send out SMS messages when a particular kind of user does a particular thing, to another user only if they opt in to receive the message.

• Got the message to format based on user input.

• Figured out how to send a carriage return in an SMS.

Around 10:30 I finally felt the Whirlwind somewhat let go of me, and I was able to get up to bed. Until I lay in bed and checked my repo just to look at the many commits I had made that day. I didn’t see them because although I had committed, I hadn’t pushed. No big deal. I headed BACK downstairs, pushed the changes up to my repo, and then proceeded to chat animatedly with friends about my progress for another hour or so.

Today, I’m exhausted. But happily so. I love being a creative person, love that I can do this. And my wife Missy, she’s a huge cheerleader to me. When she saw I was mid-whirlwind, she told me I could stay up until midnight. As I made progress, I periodically stopped to demonstrate it to her. She very patiently indulged me each time. I would burst out of my office, to show her a demo video on my phone, or broadcast it onto the screen of our TV. Sometimes I’d excitedly call her in to peer over my shoulder at what I was doing. At a certain point, the sheer magnitude of what I was doing clicked for her, and her face split with this combined look of amazement and pride.

I could live off that expression on her face. It nourishes my soul.

I’m ever so grateful to have this profound joy as a part of my life, and to be able to share it with her.

Oh, and a side note. Sometime in the next few days, I’m going to stop calling it Project Longbottom and tell you what it’s really called, and what it is. I’m very, very close to being ready to do that.

Stay tuned.

#gratitudeNow: Recipease

So as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, one of the things I do is that I’m a programmer. I do this both in my day job and on the side. It can be very enjoyable work, but at times it’s also frustrating, often quite daunting. Recently I’ve been tinkering with adding some messaging capabilities to my side thing, Project Longbottom.

At first I wanted the project to use push notifications. I dug in hard, investigating what looked like a promising way to add them in, leveraging a big library that’s part of the tech stack I am using. Then I ran headlong into an insurmountable limitation. Well, crap.

A few days ago I found an alternate way to get where I wanted, using SMS notifications. I started putting it in place. Hit another speed bump, that my wonderful brother Spacey helped me get over last night.

Now I’ve got this plan, this recipe for how I’m going to build this thing. I can see the step I’m on, and see the ones coming up.

That’s actually a pretty standard behavior for me, in almost everything I do. I make a plan, a recipe, but I only hold onto it loosely. To really lean into this particular food metaphor, let’s take that a bit further. Maybe I start out wanting to make a caprese sandwich, but realize that I’m out of mozzarella, so then I take the sliced tomato and capers, and mix them with some sautéed mushrooms over a salad.

It’s a Taoist thing, a form of intentional mindful practice. In Ron Hogan’s awesome gritty, modern translation of the Tao te Ching, Getting Right with Tao he describes this as “forgetting what you know, and understanding what’s real.”

“Can you hold on to your ego and still stay focused on Tao?

Can you relax your mind and body and brace yourself for a new life?

Can you check yourself
and see past
what’s in front of your eyes?

Can you be a leader
and not try to prove you’re in charge?

Can you deal with what’s happening and let it happen?

Can you forget what you know and understand what’s real?

Start a job and see it through. Have things
without holding on to them. Do the job
without expectation of reward. Lead people
without giving orders.
That’s the way you do it”

— Getting Right With Tao, 10

This behavior is a huge thing for me. I fall out of it daily, and then find it again. When I let go of how I think things should work, and refine my recipe based on how things actually work I become calm, relaxed, and profoundly more capable.

I’m grateful for it.

#gratitudeNow: Code Green

So, it’s about 4:30 this morning. I’m lying in bed, drowsing, about ready to get up.

The past several days I’ve been really hard at work on Project Drummond, my side software gig.

There’s this thing I have to do in the software, come up with cumulative durations for time spent working various tasks.

Let’s use the example of taking care of an adult baby. Let’s say from 10:00am to 10:45 you spend time reading them a story, then put them down for a nap, only to find out they’ve horribly misbehaved earlier that day, so when you wake them up at 1pm, you spend a good forty five minutes scolding and spanking them.

I want to add up that time doing both activities, and lots more.

I realized that in the groovy programming language I use, there is already some awesome functionality almost baked into the language to do this.

import groovy.time.*; 
dateStoryStarted = new Date().parse('hh:mm a', '10:15 am')
dateStoryEnded = new Date().parse('hh:mm a', '10:45 am')
 
TimeDuration durationStory = TimeCategory.minus(dateStoryEnded,dateStoryStarted)
 
datePunishmentStarted = new Date().parse('HH:mm a', '01:00 pm')
datePunishmentEnded = new Date().parse('HH:mm a', '01:45 pm')
 
TimeDuration durationPunishment = TimeCategory.minus(datePunishmentEnded, datePunishmentStarted)
 
TimeDuration CareTotal = durationStory + durationPunishment

All told, that’s 75 minutes of care, by the way.

So, I realize I can do this, while I’m laying in bed, and when the alarm goes off, I just pop right up out of bed, excited. Time duration and time category are the total boss.

I run some initial experiments with it, and it looks like it’s going to be just what I need.

Now I feel energized to go to work, rocket through my whole day, then come home and finish this thing in my own project.

Awesome. That my friends, is a code green moment.

#gratitudeNow: Hup two three four

There’s this thing that gives me great comfort, that comes with a degree of irony. I’m a fan of clarity. I intensely dislike vagueness in certain contexts.

I love it when in my writing, my personal coding projects, my work-at-work I have a strong sense for what I’m doing next. I often refer to this as having “marching orders.” That is, I know what the task is, and I have definite, discrete points by which to measure success over the task. I often say to my boss that I dislike uncertainty.

Which is ridiculous. Because certainty is an illusion except in certain very specific instances. Yes, π is 3.14. Yes, a day is 86,400 seconds long. But when I really turn and look at it, I know that here is the only place, and now the only time. I know that success is measured in travel, not destination.

But it doesn’t stop me from enjoying the creature comfort of some “fabricated certainty.”

Just this morning, I was looking at the work I’ve been doing in Project Drummond, my software side-project. I scoped out 8 next actions I need to do on this feature I’m coding. There’s javascript functions to write, a GSP to modify, possibly some service methods to write, and I have to teach myself how to use a certain javascript charting library, something I’m very excited about.

I’m excited to have this set of marching orders to follow to get to a place I want to go. It doesn’t really matter that the orders came from me.