So long before onlydoing was a thing, I used to have a livejournal.
I haven’t written in it for about seven years. But it’s still around. Periodically I go back to it, go “dumpster-diving” through old entries, old memories.
The other day I stumbled across the very beginning of one of my oldest, dearest friendships.
Vanessa, also known as Shokolada and I did indeed become the very best of friends.
Going on almost 17 years now.
What a wonderful thing.
So WeMinder’s been live for 42 days, not that I’m counting. (Of course I am.)
It’s gone pretty well so far. The number of subscribers is growing. I’ve had a few departures, found a few bugs I’m working on, and had some truly great things happen because of it.
There’s this thing I’ve become very, very aware of, related to having my own software company. I have a yet further, deeper understanding of the concept of agency.
Agency is one of those tricky meta-concepts. It means both “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power” as well as “an establishment engaged in doing business for another“.
Put more plainly, in a very real way I am WeMinder. It does things because I coded it to do them. It has customers because of my efforts (or lack thereof). It improves because I improve it. Any issues or problems it has, it has because of me. Any solutions to said problem are squarely on my shoulders and no one else’s.
That is a huge deal. It’s good in many ways, but it is also a profoundly difficult thing in some ways I wasn’t expecting too.
I remember over two decades ago, building my own Windows PC with a friend. We bought all the components at a couple of different places, including the case, the hard drive, the logic board, the memory. Over a weekend, we put it together, installed the OS, all that jazz.
When it booted up for the first time, I was so damn proud of myself. I had a fairly powerful computer, and had it for a fairly reasonable cost.
A few months later the damn thing started to have issues. I lamented to my friend Nullmoniker, who helped me build it, that the huge downside of what I’d done was that when it was super flaky at 10pm on a Sunday, there was no one I could call to help me, that I was on my own.
There are aspects to owning, to being WeMinder that are like that.
But, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve said for a while now that part of the process behind WeMinder’s evolution was that I had to emotionally mature as a person. There are aspects to being in relationships I understand so much better in my late 40’s, than I ever did before.
Today as I’m sitting here fixing a WeMinder bug, I realize that maturity thing has to do with being a technologist and a businessperson too. I see that one of the ways I’ve matured is that I’ve embraced the concept of practice.
When you begin a practice, you commit yourself to well… practicing it. You embrace the concept that you’re doing a thing, but that there isn’t any done per se. There’s always going to be a bug to fix, a feature to add, a place to promote the app, someone to tell, something to improve. The joy isn’t in being done with the whole thing. There is no done.
There’s only doing.
Which makes me laugh, because I’ve been studying that particular truth for a very long time now. And there’s no end to that in sight, thank goodness.
Help is always a good thing, but especially now
If you want to learn more about Isolation Storytime, you can find them at https://isostorytime.com
So a big part of my mindful practice is a focus on growth. Every single day of my life I consider who I am as a person, what I do, why I do it, and how.
I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. Sometimes I can be self-centered, sometimes oblivious. But I’m compassionate about it. I recognize that I’m a frail, imperfect human creature. Like everyone.
And that fills me with love and compassion for myself, and for every other person, too.
Which brings me to tonight.
So, I’m coding away on WeMinder, working like a demon trying to get the last 3% or so of it done before release. And I make this HUGE breakthrough, hit a big milestone. I save the code, commit it, and have a moment of blissful relief.
And I’m exhausted, so very tired. But I’m also keyed up. So I go online, to a discord I like, and chat a bit.
One of the chatters, someone I’ve never talked to before, asks “Can someone talk please?”
To which I responded, “Sure, for a few minutes.”
Then we got into it. I won’t get into details, because privacy. But he was nervous about something big, and worried how it was going to go.
I dropped some mindful taoism on him. Showed him one of my favorite zen story videos ever, and gave him my favorite zen piece of music ever.
And he was, absolutely, 100% soothed, and had his despair judo-flipped to a place of calm, enlightened, peace.
He thanked me.
But I’m just as thankful.
Because it’s in these moments that I can see myself for who I am. I can be incredibly hard on myself. I have a terrible case of the “type a’s”. I always think I can do more, be better, do it faster, improve. I so rarely allow myself rest, or imperfection.
But it’s after these sorts of experiences I can cut myself a break. Who am I? I’m the sort of guy who always manages to eke out a few minutes for people in need, and who recognizes that we’re all in this together.
I love who I am.
So there’s a feature in WeMinder called the Mood Thermometer. It’s a way for the two partners in the chart to convey to one another how they feel, and to know that the other person is aware of it.
I’m getting very, very close to being done with, and releasing the app. In one of my more recent updates I added A TON of new moods and icons to the software.
(The one for curious is so ridiculously adorable, it fills me with joy.)
Anyhow, the technique I use to get custom icons in, I have mastered it.
I was showing Missy the update a few days ago (because much like that bald guy with the hair club for men, I’m not just the developer of WeMinder, I’m one of its users) and she commented that there was one mood still missing, “overwhelmed.”
We picked an icon from the icon provider I use, and this morning, in about 10 minutes, I had transformed it from a pile of path objects and gibberish, into the lovely icon you see before you.
I have high hopes for WeMinder. I think people are going to really get a lot out of it, and that it’s going to be a hit. But even if it doesn’t, I’ve already experienced one of the key benefits of the whole endeavor. When I started, I wanted to get better at being a developer, to teach myself a bunch of things which would come in handy in my career.
And I have absolutely done that, and done it well.
