Lifelog monthiversary

It’s a belated monthiversary, actually. First post to go on Lifelog was on 28 Dec 2020, and I soft launched it on 31 Dec 2020, aptly timed to sync with New Year’s Day and the resolutions that follow. I’d been so 10,000 leagues deep into development that I forgot all about the monthiversary.

Some reflections:

Time wrap

It’s crazy that it had just been a month. Developing Lifelog had put me into some sort of time wrap where time went fast yet also felt long. I felt like I had done so much, yet it had only been a month. And like any time traveler who travels on relativistic time (the only time travel possible to our limited scientific knowledge now), I feel like I stepped out a different person. Six month ago I didn’t know much programming. But now I run a SaaS. Most days I still feel like an imposter. Or like a child tasked with running a huge country. On crisis days (like when the streak broke), I’m completely overwhelmed and contemplating quitting. But here I am, still here. Taking one day at a time seems to help.

Parallel worlds

It’s normal to have competitors in the business world, but rare to have them start at about the same time as you. Even rarer that you help your competitor and your competitors help you! But such had been my experience with Lifelog, running alongside Adagia and Writestreak. Actually I don’t really see them as competition per se, more like collaborators, sibling platforms serving a slightly different niche of writing. On occasions, @abrahamKim and @Arcticloon even lent a hand in the development of Lifelog! And I continue to login to their sites to join in the fun and discussion. It’s been super educational for me at least, seeing the other two parallel platforms take off and come up with their own ways to solve similar problems. And just like how marathon runners have pacers to help them run faster, Abe and Janne being way more competent developers than I am, helped me keep pace on Lifelog. Their progress and dev notes continue to be a huge source of inspiration.

Collective ownership

I continue to feel humbled yet grateful at how Lifelog can even exist in the first place – by the grace of others. Many of the current Lifeloggers have lent a hand in the development of Lifelog – @keenen on the streak backend and more, @Yuyu on the Nuxt frontend, @abrahamKim @Arcticloon @knight on debugging the streak algorithm, @therealbrandonwilson on SQL querying, @brianball on good old Javascript help. There’s no Lifelog without these folks. I also find the idea of a collective sense of ownership compelling. The IKEA effect is about how people tend to feel more precious about stuff that they had a hand in making themselves, and that’s how I would love to continue doing it.

Joy, purpose, profit

Coding Lifelog first thing at 5am in the morning had given me and continues to give me a lot of joy. The sense of purpose I feel when coding had been completely unexpected. Mostly pleasantly surprising, occasionally character-building. There’s not much monetary profit yet from Lifelog that I can make a living off from, but the intangible returns are obvious. Writing daily on a platform I created, had brought an altogether different meaning to my writing and my coding. Both feed each other in a nice virtuous cycle. Using it daily as a tool gives me lots of inspiration to make it better, into a tool that really helps me. Coding it daily gives me lots of food for thought about my #decodingcoding journey, which also tangentially overlaps into other topics like entrepreneurship and indie hacking. All in all, a good trifecta of joy, purpose and profit.

It’s been just a month. I can’t wait to get to the next month and look back at what I might have built by then!