eye made this for you.

Eye have no idea how to do this

I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing. I will try to avoid re-stating that.

This is the first step of a (re)new(ed) journey.

I'm going to make stuff.
After I make the stuff, I'm going to share it.
That will require me to write words.
And then publish those words.

I've made a lot of stuff.
Some of the stuff I shared with people.

But I'm REALLY bad about writing words that go along with the stuff.

Sometimes, I get overwhelmed by all the stuff I want to make.
Sometimes I let that overwhelm become a blocker for getting anything done.
Sometimes I come up with elaborate strategies for organizing, capturing, and maintaining a heirarchy of all the ideas.

None of these are particularly helpful. Spoiler. But I doubt I've seen the last of them. For now, I have a dead simple gameplan. I drew a picture of it.

This is how much complexity I can handle right now.

It's perfect.

And I'm sure I will learn all the ways I'm wrong in due time. Hopefully I'll have a revised gameplan to share with you, but for now, this is what we are going with.

Whats next

Withg that said, what IS the next most important thing?

Glad you asked. I've been doing a lot of thinking and brainstomring the past weeks/months. Way more organizng my thoughts than making things. Here is what I came up with:

I need to (re)make my homebase on the internet.

I make stuff on the internet.
I want to help others make stuff on the internet. I want to be able to convince people who need stuff made on the internet that I can help them do that.

So far, I have cobbled together enoguh of a patchwork representation of my skills and output that along with my overlong storytelling and jovial demenour, people have offered me opportunites. But I'd be lying to tell you I'm proud of my public internet face or that I would want to go to war with this face (what? 🤷‍♂️)

I did a brainstorm of all the pieces of my homebase that I would like to see in an ideal world.

It's cosmically funny, I was basically at this same point almost one year ago. What I tried to do that time was EVERYTHING at once. I told myself, the next thing are of focus, is to FIX ALL THE THINGS at once.

So, past Nathan, good on you for picking a SINGLE focus. But dumb, very dumb of you to pick a single focus that wouldn't fit on one plate. Or even two really.

I tried to rewrite my bio and resume, redesign said resume, desing my new portfolio, clean up all work in said portfolio, capture all the new work for a portfolio since the last time I put it together, stand up a blog, rewrite the blog engine from scratc, ditto the portfolio, design a marketing campaign to go with the relaunch... You get the idea. Eyes bigger than my stomach. or something.

This time, I will be smarter. or lazier. More focused? Some adjective that correctly describes the desired change.

The plan

Here is the next, and ONLY the next thing that I need to do.

And here, are the steps I'm taking to get there.

If you are reading this, it means I succeeded. The fact that you ARE reading this is thanks to the fact that I didn't skip the WRITING part of all this. I'm not sure how I tricked myself into doing it, but hopefully I can find a way to keep that up. I literally unboxed a new keyboard moments before I started the first draft. I'm not sure if that's a habit I can afford to indulge at the rate I want to publis new articles, but we'll see.

I think thats probably enough for now. First one's in the books, and I can get on to the next page and new mistakes. I thought this was going to be about Next JS and which starter I picked. But turns out it was about just doing a thing. That's okay. I made a thing. And then I wrote it down. Now, I'm sharing it with you.

Hope you like it.
— x