I've been spending a lot of time working on ottomon. What is ottomon you say? Well, it is a side project I had for many years, and that I have neglected.
In 2017, when I saw that my previous startup wasn't going anywhere, I started building a service to help people contact the owner of a car. I was also a runner at the time, and I would see a whole bunch of cars with the windows down, the lights left on, or even some that were accidentally hit. There was no way to contact the owner. Some people leave a handwritten note on the car with whatever scrap paper they can find. Which always reaches the owner a bit too late.
So I thought, why not find a solution for that. An easy way to contact the owner. And the owners don’t have to compromise their privacy to enable this communication by leaving their number on the car. That's where ottomon comes in.
Since April, I've been spending more time analyzing the problem. I've relaunched the website, and I should have something to brag about by the end of the year.
I'm redesigning the website!
Over the years, the design has become bloated, and I have so many files.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
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PHP 358 6042 12912 46364
CSS 68 416 235 9002
JavaScript 58 722 437 6463
HTML 7 74 4 968
SQL 2 49 75 344
XSLT 2 8 0 144
XML 10 0 5 132
Markdown 2 57 0 115
JSON 2 0 0 62
SVG 1 0 0 31
Bourne Shell 1 8 1 16
Text 2 4 0 14
make 1 3 0 13
YAML 1 1 7 8
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 515 7384 13676 63676
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------There is so much that I can do without.
I'm following what I call the 100 Principle.
I don't claim to have coined the idea, but the practice is simple: if you're not good at something, do it 100 times. You'll either get better, or you'll learn that it's not for you. Either outcome is progress.
Right now, I'm recording 100 podcast episodes. In the past, I challenged myself to write 100 articles. I enjoyed the process so much that I ended up writing 177.
I'm a lead software engineer, spending a lot of time learning what good leadership actually looks like in practice. Recently, I took an online course to help me better structure my work and clarify my decision-making process.
I run a small app on a Raspberry Pi connected to my kids' TV. It tracks their daily schedule and acts as a motivator for chores at home. I'm currently rewriting the system to make it easier to extend. Adding a new tile or feature is more painful than it should be. The app is entirely client-side and stores its data in the browser, which has been both freeing and limiting in interesting ways.