Today is going under LifeBlog instead of DevBlog because there wasn't that much code today.

I decided to start recording everything in my life. After I saw a video of a guy spending a month building a geodesic dome for his desk it really got me thinking. I'm sure that's not all he did with his time, but assuming he did (because he could have), that sort of thing would never be considered productive if he wasn't filming.

There is a certain amount of meta work that needs to be done. Setting up and making an office more organized. Building tooling for your software. Developing your skills so you can execute on a product later. All of this is not making an actual product. You can't spend all of your time doing meta work. At the same time you can't spend none of your time doing meta work. Someone who makes no preparations or improvements to his environment will be at a disadvantage to someone who has.

This puts everyone in a thread the needle situation where there is a subjective call of what is your meta work budget? Get it right or fail. Hope you picked right. If you don't you starve or go into financial ruin, and your business and what you've sunk your time into is more of a liability than a boon. Isn't this a fun game we play? Give a man a subjective decision and if he gets it wrong doom.

Here is the great life hack that I want to get in on, that the geodesic desk pod builder figured out. You alleviate a lot of demand to get that right if everything you do is automatically a product.

And here is the thing. I'm likely to get that ratio wrong naturally, because I really want to do what I want to do. I've learned to stop apologizing for that some time ago, but it doesn't mean it's automatically viable.

So I might be becoming somewhat of a youtuber. We'll see if I drop these videos. I'm not doing my hobbies sprint attempt at a business for the sake of video content. I don't have to come up with ideas for videos and then figure out how to execute on them. I'm executing for the sake of what I'm working on but also recording it.

The way I look at is if I don't want to share something it can always not make the edit. I may end up not sharing anything but I'm going to just record by default now.

So what did I actually do today? Because I might post about this a second time I'm not going to go into a ton of detail. I made a massive improvement to my sauna today. I made improvements to my task management software. I wrote some tests to further validate my edge request chain system.

Speaking of that. Let's look at this long test I'm running to see if I can reproduce a bug that could exist outside of the edge system entirely.

Nope. Not a single instance of the bug I was worried about. It looks like the services somehow did end up in a state where they are using polling instead of websockets. That's interesting.

One more thought on the concept of video. I'm realizing I hate the idea of editing everything. So I have a few options. One is just take the most interesting 5 minute clip of the day. Another is to add items to my todo system to pull specific things from archive footage and edit/present them. The other is to just do minimal edits and just have everything raw and then optionally cut things down. I wish there was a way to measure what parts of a long video people like more or find more interesting. It would be cool if there could be a 6 hour version of a video, a 1 hour version, a 20 minute version, a 5 minute version, and a 1 minute version. I wish there was some semi-automated way to do that. I think what some youtubers do is they use patreon as there full video dump and those people get a video early. Then ironically while they are paying you you use them as employees to consult what parts of the video should be kept for the public edit. I wish it could all drop publicly without a long or short version cannibalizing the other. The other idea is to make it easy for people to watch random cuts, and they can indicate if the video was good or bad. That wouldn't be hard for me to set up on gvid.

Also I watched basically all of the first season of The Expanse yesterday and the day before that. In theory if I start recording everything I'll become a reaction tuber because I'll end up recording me watching my target one episode a day of TV.

The sauna video is going to be half cool. It's also going to make the stuff I've done with 2D to 3D video conversion more productive so I'll be able to justify doing more of it.

I've done a half decent job of not doxxing myself but the reality is if I don't want to sign up for another 5 years of working in the wrong industry and want this thing to take off of doing my own thing with the limited runway I have I need the marketing advantage that comes with actually talking about what you're doing instead of trying to market it after the fact the hard way. But do I do it as x0x7, or do I do it as my real name. It's a little hard if I'm showing everything to not be obvious I'm working on goatmatrix at least some of the time.

But yeah, I've put off filming for a long time or found that when I intentionally record a video for youtube it comes out like shit. But today's filming went well. I think the key is not making a youtube video but genuinely having an interesting agenda you just happen to be filming. I want to have an interesting and fun agenda anyway. Doing lame shit is the bane of life. So maybe if one just doubles down on doing the things they want to do that are meaningful and unique and records it they can stop doing lame shit. Then you don't have to worry that recording your life will be uninteresting.