SIGAVDI #42: Ultimate Answer Edition

Hello friends,

I spent last week on the tropical island of Anguilla with a bunch of software luminaries. My life is sometimes surreal.

At the moment though, I’m looking out on a chilly, thick fog up here at Fair Pavilion. I can’t see the sun. This matches my internal climate pretty well. The world has sharp edges, and my journey seems to be one of exposing ever greater surface area to it.

This is fine.

“This is fine”. My friend Jessica says this a lot. It has been seeping into my personal vernacular lately. To me it represents a whole philosophy of life, strongly at odds with how I once lived.

“This is fine” is the choice to accept a situation exactly as it is, without panicking. Without judgment. Without amplifying the negatives. Without feeling compelled into instant corrective action. Without appealing to outside powers for intervention.

The kids colored on the wall. This is fine. They are kids. We will paint these walls before we sell the house.

The venue I was going to get all my friends together at is unexpectedly closed. This is fine. We will buy some beer, rearrange some furniture, and hold it at my house. Mess be damned.

I spent my afternoon crying in grocery stores and parking lots. This is fine. Longing means I am living.


I mentioned previously that I have been talking with my friends at Cohere about helping me out with aspects of my business that I suck at and/or just don’t enjoy very much. These discussions brought me face to face with the fact that I did pretty terribly, business-wise, last year. I dropped my revenue by $60k and increased operating expenses by the same amount.

Or to put it another way, I coped with the aftermath of an unexpected divorce and almost a year of solo parenthood by delegating as much as I could, and doing the bare minimum to keep the business afloat.

This is fine.


Let’s see how I did. There wasn’t a SIGAVDI last week, but that’s because I was traveling. Here are my goals from two weeks ago.

  • ✔ Make preparations for a week of travel. Yep.
  • ✔ Get this week’s RubyTapas out. Also yep. Check out this awesome episode on building a REPL with Ruby’s Binding class from guest Adam Fernung.
  • ✔ Make sure next week’s RubyTapas is on track.
  • ❌ Tie up loose ends from the Cohere meetings. Not quite there yet.
  • ✔ Finish at least one new RubyTapas script and record VO.
  • ✔ Catch up on my email.
  • ❌ Catch up on my snail mail. God I hate the mailbox.
  • ✔ Somehow leave the house to see other human beings during this crazy week. Amazingly, I managed to make this happen.

This week, like every post-travel week, is all catch-up. Sigh.

  • Tie up loose ends from the Cohere meetings.
  • Catch up on my snail mail.
  • Catch up on RubyTapas TODOs.
  • Catch up on email. Again. Sigh.
  • Finish unpacking and go over notes from AIT.

See you next week!