6 Things I want to try in 2023
I’m glad to see that my 12-item list of 2022 turned into a 6-item list in just about 6 months. It means I’m figuring things out.
So here we go, the 6 things I’d like to try in 2023.
TL;DR: I’m moving away from the whole “selling stuff online” that grew on me from following the wrong people online, and focusing more on building cool stuff, open sourcing it, and sharing/promoting it through blogging and livestreaming.
1. Grow a newsletter
I’ve been following a lot of big names in the newsletter space: Nathan Barry, Sam Parr, Nathan Baschez, Jakob Greenfeld, and more. I learned so many things about how to run and grow them, how to monetize them and all that stuff. Now, i feel like it would be a waste of time to not actually do it —or maybe it’s just sunk cost fallacy…
Anyway, i’m working on ScrambledTech and plan to start Daily Muslim some time this year as well.
2. Coding Livestream
I’ve started livestreaming early this year as i was loving watching code livestreams myself. I didn’t took it seriously even though it was a lot of fun to sometimes hang out with the chat while building something.
I’ll be taking it more seriously this year, livestreaming almost every day on Twitch and listing the VODs on YouTube.
3. Open Source
I’ve been fascinated by open source lately.
If you look at my 2022 list, it was rather centered around selling stuff —online businesses, info products, services. But let’s face it, that stuff isn’t for me. Making money is just not a motivation driver for me. I was probably being (excessively) influenced by every thread boi on Twitter and the business podcasts.
In 2023, I want to recenter around what I truly love: building cool stuff. And I want to do it with point #2 (building open source tools live on stream) and point #4…
4. Blogging
I’ve been blogging on and off for the past 3 years. I always loved it, but it was representative of my life and work: all over the place.
I kept stopping because every time I tried to make it a consistent thing, I’d slowly fall into the self-help/insight-porn category and I hated it!
This time, I have a few ideas in mind of what I want to write about:
- Sharing the journey of building Open source projects (previous point)
- Writing technical tutorials and things I’m figuring out (databases, design patterns, best practices, etc)
- Essays on topics I’m interested in: Wellness, ML Research, Islamic Philosophy, Theory of Knowledge.
The other mistake I made was treating writing as a habit but not as a project. Writing something I’m proud of takes time and effort. But simply forcing myself to write and publish something every week without a thoughtful workflow (ideation, research, editing) can only lead to poor quality content, and ultimately quitting.
This time, I’m treating each piece as a project — I have a Kanban board in Notion — and the habit is around daily input, not weekly output.
5. Dev Conf
I’ve been wanting to meet like-minded people IRL for a while now. In fact, every time people ask me if i know other devs i kinda feel dumb. It’s weird to be a dev and have no dev friends. It feels lonely anyway.
Since I started working on Me3x, I realized how much i was missing out always building alone. Since then, I’ve been day dreaming of building something with a team of hacker friends.
Hosting a Dev Conf would be a great way to meet a ton of other devs near me while geeking about the latest tech stuff.
6. Slow Hacking
This is a tough one. I keep having it on my list but at the same time, I feel weird about it. I’m afraid it’s just a “the grass is always greener” type thing.
What I really want is a project I’ll be working on ad vitam aeternam, where I can do everything I love (building cool stuff and writing) and that isn’t too hard, ie. I can open up VS Code, write a few lines of code and push to production whenever I feel like it.
But the truth is that it never goes that way. As the project grows, speed of execution slows down. And honestly, I’m not even sure I’d want to spend 4 to 10 hours a week working on something like this. It might just be a discusting recipe made of good ingredients…
So I’m putting this idea on the back burner for now, but not throwing it away just yet.