How I spent December and January

(rough transcript)

Link to the doodle for timeslot voting for the next Patron's Calling.

Welcome back, everyone! I hope you had a good start into 2018. Now, I'm sure you might be wondering: where has Anselm been? Did he take Christmas holidays?

Well... not exactly. You know, holidays are for reasonable people. The rest of us, we have to get a little more creative.

So, looking back, last October and November were pretty amazing if you ask me. I successfully presented Citybound to a technical audience for the first time, I really enjoyed the rhythm of roughly-monthly releases, loved the Patrons Calling streams and I got the closest to doing 100% Citybound I ever have. It was really cool. The generous, ongoing support of my Patrons was an important part of what made this possible and I am forever grateful for that.

Unfortunately, this mode isn't entirely sustainable for me just yet, so I had to come up with a quick fix. At the end of November, I created an opportunity as a consultant out of my old day-job — for a short-term but high-value project, with a payoff that would allow me to not worry about money for at least a couple months after completion. So I nose-dived into what would be two months of really intense webshit programming. Today, I am here to tell you that I’m done, I survived and everything worked out, even though the Christmas season passed by me almost unnoticed. And I think I opened up possibilities for similar one-off consultancy gigs in the future.

Of course, this caused a temporary set-back for Citybound. I only managed to complete roughly 1/3 of what I originally planned for December, not enough to constitute a new prototype. My plan is to take February a little easier (to not burn myself out completely) and to just finish the remaining 2/3s, so I will release the Zoning prototype at the end of February. March will then be about housing demand, and we take it from there. If everything turns out to go smooth, I will pepper in a couple extra features and improvements that I’ve been wanting to do.

Such delays of course always make me a little sad, but in the bigger picture I realised that I may have found a model to sustain Citybound during its prototype stage without having to constantly trade off focus between that and a main job. It’s an intricate juggle to work on a project bordering on open-ended research, where you first need to figure out what exactly even needs to be done, while at the same time also trying to build and entertain a community around that and also trying to just lead a normal life. Each of these areas have suffered at times, and I’m sure that I could have done better everywhere in hindsight - but I’m still here, I’m not going anywhere and I’m still trying my best to make this happen.

See, the moment I went back to work on Citybound code, I felt again just how much I love programming Citybound. Both in the sense that I love the result of what I’m creating, but also the process itself. It is very different from any professional project that I’ve worked on. You know, for me, working on Citybound is therapeutic. The fulfilment of every little step towards my vision. The feeling of doing things the right way, not cutting corners. I need that in my life. And the fact that I have you makes me extremely happy. You not only share and shape this vision with me, but you support me, with words and with money - which is really just a token representing available time. Thank you for believing in me, you're an amazing community.

Wrapping up, it’s time for me to join our conversation again, and I will quite literally do that in our next Patron’s Calling. Please check the link below the video or in the blog post to vote for your timeslot preferences. Hope to see you there!

Until then, take care everyone.